"I heard you when you told me to fight fair. Now I want you to listen to me about sharing fair." Ash reached for me again, his touch gentle yet steady. "Take yourself away from me if you need space. Don't do it because you're bracing yourself against my saying something terrible. I told you I could take this. I meant it."
I nodded. "Okay."
"Can I ask how—how that all happens?"
I stifled a bitter laugh. The leather-wrapped steering wheel protested, an impolite squeak of skin I wouldn't have noticed if not for the sudden silence between us. I followed his white-knuckled grip to the bulge and twitch of his forearm muscles up to the stiff set of his jaw. "Which part?"
Ash cut a hooded glance in my direction, his eyes burning dark and serious like a storm. "The part where anyone could ever look at you and see a mistake."
14
Ash
I didn't understand.
Not the part about the sister-mother. I had a decent idea how that one shook out. It was the piece where Zelda dipped out of her own family and they didn't care whether the door hit her in the ass.
The Zelda I knew gathered up asshole men and carted them off to urgent care clinics, she stayed with those assholes when they were drugged and punchy, and she accompanied them to Sunday dinner after fair warning about those gatherings.
The Zelda I knew was loyal to a fault. She was smart and caring and perfect.
"I mean it," I added. "I don't know how anyone could see a mistake in you, love. They must be deeply confused."
I lifted our joined hands to kiss her knuckles because, yeah, we did that now. Whatever that was, whatever the fuck was happening with us, I was here for it. Even when a sizable portion of my brain drew up lists and decision trees and indexed arguments as to why this was not a good idea, not at all, I was here for it.
"Actually, yes. They were confused," she replied. "They didn't know what to do when Deanna got pregnant. She was fifteen. I'm told she was an otherwise exemplary child without so much as a lunch detention to her name. But it all happened around the time Roseanne—that's my mother, or Deanna's mother—accepted a new job in Utah. She's a college administrator, and Kevin, the father figure in all this, is a research librarian. Apparently, it was a time of big change for everyone and they figured with the move it would be best for Deanna to have a fresh start at a new school. And that's how it went. They just raised me as little as possible. I spent a lot of time with babysitters." She shrugged in a stiff, defiant way that yelledI don't have to care about any of this, you can't make me. "They should've given me away. I don't think that dawned on them until it was too late and people knew about their later-in-life oops baby. I know it sounds harsh but I truly believe they would've offered me for adoption later on if it wouldn't have been socially complicated for them."
I wanted to pull over, stop right here on the shoulder of the highway and drag her into my arms. Zelda was alltryandcareandgiveand, according to this disclosure, no one tried or cared or gave for her. I wanted to drag her into my arms and I also wanted to hop on the next flight to Utah or wherever the hell her family lived now and tear into them for a solid hour.
More than any of that, I wanted to keep her. Carve out a space beside me and keep her right here, a world away from anything that could cause her pain.
Oblivious to my warring urges, Zelda continued, "I started working at summer camps when I was seventeen. I'd gone away to camp every year since, I don't know, forever, and I always loved my camp families. I always looked forward to going back. One year, after the end of the season, I didn't return to Roseanne and Kevin's house. I was in my last year of college—U of U, because it didn't cost them anything to send me there—and I decided to stay with friends instead." She tucked her hair over her ear as she sucked in a rough breath. "They didn't call to ask where I was for six weeks." She shifted, staring directly at me. "I can assure you, Ash, they're not concerned with my whereabouts."
I pressed our joined hands to my chest because—because I had to. "I know you don't want me to say I'm sorry you went through this because you don't want anyone feeling sorry for you but Iamsorry. So fucking sorry."
"It's okay."
"It really isn't, Zel. Not at all," I replied. "Do you see them around the holidays or—wait, I don't know if that's appropriate for me to ask."
"You sleep with your head between my boobs, you can ask me whatever you want. Doesn't mean I'll answer."
Her bright laughter filled the car and she rubbed her fingertips over my knuckles. Life was all right.
"As you know from your extensive review of my CV, I went to grad school in Colorado," she continued. "I didn't make it home for most holidays but there were a few years when they asked me to visit. Mostly for show. The year Deanna brought her boyfriend home and he proposed. The year they were first married. Times like that. I went. I played along."
"Have you always known? Or was it a secret? About your sister-mother, I mean."
"It was supposed to be a secret but Roseanne's a heavy drinker in the way many people are heavy drinkers but since they have good jobs and nice families and don't look like your stereotypical alcoholic, everyone lets it slide. Right on cue, you can count on her to bring it up between her third and fourth bottles of wine for the night. I didn't understand what she was talking about until I was at least eleven, maybe twelve. I'd known I was a mistake but that was when I realized I wasn'thermistake. It made a difference, somehow."
This time, I did pull over. I shot off the highway, down the ramp, and into a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot, stopping only long enough to engage the brake before flinging the door open and climbing out of the car. When I reached the passenger door, Zelda asked, "Do you need coffee? Iced tea? A strawberry glazed donut? What is it, boy?"
"Could you just come here? I'm gonna dislocate the other shoulder if I try to snatch you out of there."
"You're a lot of things, Ashville," she said as she disengaged the seat belt, "but I never took you for a guy who required an escort into a donut shop."
The moment she stepped out of my car, I scooped her into my arms as best I could. I didn't have any of the right words, any of the words she deserved, but I had this.
"Okay, so, you have really big feelings about coffee and donuts. I get it. I sympathize. Maybe not to the level of burning rubber off the highway but—"
