I’m surprised when my dad answers. He’s at the bar and it’s loud, but he says, “Hang on,” and walks outside.
“Elijah told me everything,” I say.
On the other end of the line, I hear a South Carolina silence, the kind that isn’t silent at all: the crickets and cicadas are a cacophony. I will miss it. “Oh,” he finally says.
I have no idea what to say because I’m not entirely sure why I’m calling. He did something for me, and I appreciate it, but that doesn’t make up for the past. Even if he wasn’t as bad as Kevin and Sean, he didn’t do a lot to stop them when we were growing up either.
“I guess,” I say, swallowing as my voice starts to crack, “I don’t understand. You threw a remote at my face two weeks ago. You’ve hit me more times than I can count. Why did you suddenly decide to intervene?”
I half expect him to yell at me or hang up the phone, but he does neither. “I threw the remote because I was trying to get you out of the fucking room before Kevin made things worse. Therewas probably a better way to do it, but, you know, I drink too much. I make a lot of mistakes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I intervened because I didn’t want to see you end up like your brothers. So even if I failed you in every other way, I didn’t fail in that one.”
It’s not an apology, but I never expected one from him—apologies are not in his makeup. So, again, what did I want, in making this call?
I suppose I mostly just want to say goodbye. Because even if I’d have risked going down there before, I won’t now—Elijah isn’t going to stand for remotes thrown at my face or threats made to my career, and the way he’d respond to those things could be ruinous. I might have been willing to let myself get dragged down, but I will never let him get dragged down with me.
“Elijah’s planning to move with me. Either to Boston or wherever I go after this next year, so I doubt I’ll be back there much.”
“Don’t come back,” he whispers. “Ever.”
My eyes sting. I brush at them. “Okay.”
There’s a long moment of silence. The crickets on his end seem to rise up to fill the void.
“Don’t know if I ever told you this,” he says, “but I won the Beaufort science fair. Ninth grade. I wanted to be an astronaut.”
He never told me. He locked up his past and any hopes he once had for his own life and pretended they didn’t exist.
“I didn’t know.”
“I never amounted to anything,” he says, “but I’ve amounted to something through you, and that’s probably more than I deserve. Take care, kiddo.”
A part of me still feels as if there’s some better solution here. That if I were smarter, or a better daughter, I’d force him into rehab and clean up my brothers’ shit while I was at it, but no...Inlife, there are problems that remain thorny, that you will never tie up with a bow. My dad and my brothers are among them, and I’m done trying.
He hangs up to return to his bar.
And I return to Elijah and the big, bright future I never thought we’d get.
39
ELIJAH
One week after Kelsey returns from her honeymoon, I’m on a flight to Boston. Easton meets me in baggage claim, even though I told her not to, and I’m not complaining because I don’t know how I’d have stood to wait the twenty minutes it would have taken to get to her apartment.
I pull her against me tight. How did I go for so many years without this? I suppose you just get used to pain over time. But the time apart is unthinkable now. I don’t think I could go through it again.
These weeks haven’t been easy for her, either, but for different reasons.
Thomas has been polite, and they still text each other when an interesting study comes out—I’m mostly not jealous about this—but she has gotten the cold shoulder from several people she once considered friends. She’s also working her ass off to make sure no one can say Thomas was carrying her research until now. This semester has only begun, but when I video chat with her, I can hear the exhaustion in her voice and see the circles under her eyes. Half the time when I call late at night, she’s still in the lab—when I apologize, she laughs and remindsme that she would be a lot less happy if she were with Thomas right now. Which is true. The next year will be hard on both of us, but it will be worth it in the end.
“So, you got everything covered?” she asks once I put her back down.
“Yeah.” The guys who work for me are more than competent, and hopefully that means they will be ready to take over my business when I eventually leave. At the moment, everything is up in the air—Easton doesn’t even know where she’ll be next fall, and I’ll still need an income until then. But my mom’s decision has changed everything—not simply with Easton. I’m applying to doctoral programs for next fall, in the Boston area and elsewhere, waiting to see where Easton ends up.
“The guys had no problem with being left in charge,” I tell her, twining my fingers through hers as we walk toward the parking garage. “The real problem was my mother.”
She stops in place. “Yourmother? I thought Kelsey was watching her this weekend?”
I laugh. “She wanted to come with me this weekend and didn’t understand why I said no.”
