“If he wanted to tell you that he misses you, he would have said so.”
God, I was stupid. As easily as that, I’d let Gray knock me off-balance. Again. He wanted me to get on with my life. So why wouldn’t he let me?
His words were a phantom soundtrack that followed me through the week, a constant loop ofnever wases andmight have beens that drowned out everything else. It played me into sleep,streaming in the background while I packed the girls’ lunches and met them after school, when I sat in class or tried to study.
But I didn’t text him back.
—
Hello? Earth to Dee,” Reeti said on Sunday as we poked along the flea market stalls.
“Sorry.” I picked up a sweater—mohair, I thought, stroking the front—and put it down again. Gray said I looked sallow in green. “I’m kind of out of it.”
“I can tell. Everything all right? How’s your sister?”
“She’s fine, I think. I hope.” I sighed. “She’s mad at me because I won’t let her quit school.”
Reeti cocked her head. “Not really your decision, is it?”
“No, but she only went to KU because I was there. And now I’m not.” I tried to imagine what our mother might have said, what wise advice she might have given me. Given us. As usual, I had difficulty summoning her voice. She’d been absent, after all, for large parts of my childhood, for almost all of Toni’s. Following her art.
Which was no help at all.
“You should focus on your own self,didi,” Reeti said.
“Yeah, but... What did you call me?”
“Didi. It means ‘big sister.’ Because you’re acting like one.”
“Because Iamone.”
“Yes, but Toni is your sister. Not your child.”
“She’s only eighteen. She still depends on me.”
“And who did you depend on when you were her age?”
“That was different,” I protested. “I’m used to taking care of myself.”
“Yourself? Or everybody else?”
I stared at her, mute.
“Maybe a little separation would be good for both of you,” Reeti said gently. “How are your classes?”
“My teachers are brilliant.”
Even Maeve, who only tolerated me. They were all practicing writers, encouraging and often kind. They urged us, in various ways, to pay attention, not only to the world around us, but to our thoughts, feelings, memories.
The problem came when I actually sat down to write.
Gray had stripped me naked. I cringed now from exposing bits of myself on the page for others to gawk at and criticize—the softness of my belly, the mole on my scalp, the awareness that my own mother had never found anything in me worth staying for.
Every time I sat down at my laptop, Gray’s face, Gray’s words, filled the screen.Don’t be trite. Don’t be sentimental. Don’t be a sellout. Don’t, full stop.You could be special if you tried.
So I tried.
But it had been so long since anyone besides Gray had read my stories. The prospect of sharing too much at the weekly writing workshop—of being told that I sucked—terrified me. In the end it seemed safer to use something he had critiqued, a scene from my Dust Bowl novel he once praised for its raw intimacy, where Rose, the farmer’s daughter, seeks out the traveling magician, sleeping over in her parents’ barn.
