He nodded slowly. “I know how you both can be.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that . . .” He shifted in the seat. “This way that you are, Liv? You learned it from her. When it comes to you and your dad, she’s cold, even if she doesn’t mean it.”
Cold? Did he not see how her ridiculous passion and lack of self-awareness had set fire to our family? How she’d lost everything as a result but couldn’t accept an ounce of blame?
“When my dad and I left, it just gave her an excuse to be unhappy. And something to crucify us for. It’s always been one extreme or the other—narcissistic indifference or irrational madness. She’s never been good at expressing herself.”
“Neither have you.”
I crossed my legs under me, chewing the inside of my cheek. “So . . . does that mean you think I’m cold?”
“Sometimes, yeah,” he said, flipping through the pages of his book but keeping his eyes on me.
“Oh.” It wasn’t an entirely unfair assessment, but it was nonetheless painful to hear out loud. I never meant to be cold, just not hot enough to burn those around me.
Including Bill.
If he truly believed I acted that way, then why describe my icy phone call just now asniceinstead of calling bullshit on me? Instead of forcing me to ask my mom how shereallywas, or tell her howIreally was? Or make me confront the reasons for him and for myself that I couldn’t go deeper?
Because my ability to enact logic over emotion suited him, even if it made me cold.
And that was why Bill suited me.
He never would’ve married someone emotional and fiery like my mother. He’d never be that person, either, never pick up and disappear the way Greg had done to Gretchen, or drive me away as my mom had done to us.
And I’d be a complete fool to risk the stable life we’d built for the chaos and destruction my parents had subjected me to.
But was starting a family the one thing that Bill couldn’t give up? A concession I’d have to make to keep this life? As my mother had said, he took good care of me. Whenever I called, he answered. When I told him in the morning that I needed an ingredient to make dinner, he never forgot to pick it up on his way home. Small things like that made for a big deal in a partnership.
“Could you tell if she was drinking?” Bill asked.
“I don’t think she was.”
He put an arm behind his head and glanced at the ceiling. “I know I’ve offered before, but we can send her some money. Now that I’ve got more coming in and all.”
Bill didn’t offer money toanyone, but he had a good relationship with my mom. She adored him for the stand-up guy he was, and he adored being adored. Beyond that, I didn’t really get it. “Dad says that’s ‘enabling,’” I pointed out.
“I just feel bad,” Bill said. “Your dad spoils you, but the second he’s no longer court-ordered to send Leanore money, he completely cuts her off.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes. My dad was generous, but it only looked like spoiling to Bill, who could be cheap. “We shouldn’t send anything,” I said. “The combo of free time and unearned income only made Mom’s indulgences worse.”
Her addictions, more like. I knew I should verbalize her disease, but nobody else ever did. Not my father, not Mack nor Davena, not even Bill. Nobody called her an alcoholic, so I didn’t, either.
“She’s in her fifties,” he said. “Your mom’s not going to change.”
“Shecouldchange,” I said, “but not until she acknowledges there’s a problem.”
“I just hate to see you two fight.”
“We don’t fight anymore,” I said. “That’s the underlying issue. If I say even one wrong thing, it can cause the next World War between us, or between her and my dad. So I don’t say anything at all.”
“What I mean is . . . when the time comes, I want our children to know their grandparents,” Bill said.
I didn’t. My toxic mother should stay away from impressionable children. But voicing that sounded harsh, and it could invite questions I knew Bill didn’t want to ask, and ones I didn’t want to answer. And I knew if I ever told Bill the whole truth about the night my mom had put me in the emergency room, there was a chance he’d take her side. Nobody could understand sitting on a hospital bed at dawn, answering invasive questions about my home life while I’d balled my bloody pajama top in my lap—a concert tee with Shania Twain’s face on it.
But it wasn’t fair to blame Bill for not getting it when I’d kept some of the worst details from him. It hadn’t necessarily been intentional on my part, but although Bill was a good listener, he wasn’t one to dig for more, either. He knew my father and I had left one night after an argument, and that was as much as I was willing to volunteer. As for the scar on my side that had been left behind? Bill never asked about it, and I was fine with that.
