She bites her lip like she’s thinking. Then, carefully, she takes my left hand and puts it on her waist. She lifts up her right and spreads her fingers. I weave mine through and pull her close sowe’re barely touching. Following her lead, I sway with her in the middle of the dusty gravel road.
“I don’t want to go home,” she whispers.
“Then don’t.”
The words come out before I can think. I don’t regret them, though.
“Don’t go home,” I say. “Quit the damn job. Come work for Deacon or something.”
The corner of her mouth turns up, but it’s a little sad. Her head turns, settling against my chest. The powerful urge to wrap my arms around her and tell her not to worry, I’ll take care of keeping her fed and housed, comes over me. It’s the first time I’ve felt this way. I never had the resources before.
I never felt this way about anybody until now.
“My parents paid for college,” she whispers. “Not just for me, but my older siblings. I’d hate to disappoint them.”
“You know they’d love it if you stayed.”
“Yeah, but it’s still a lot of money for me not to use my degree.”
“What’s your degree in?”
“Marketing.”
I’m not really sure what that is. Growing up, I went to school until I was a teenager, mostly because the truancy officer kept threatening Aiden that if he didn’t take us for the minimum allotted time, she’d have to call the county on us. So Aiden made sure we were on the bus at least half the time. They couldn’t come get us unless we were absent for thirty days running. He never did the same for Freya. She missed so much school, and I regret not stepping in and standing up to Aiden over that—not that it would have done much.
None of us were heading to college even if we wanted to go, that was clear. The men in our county went right to the factories and the mines. The girls got pregnant and shacked up before their twentieth birthday. Nobody wanted to do either, but afterthe corporations and the pharmaceutical companies were done with our towns, there wasn’t much else to do but work and fuck and make more babies so they could grow up to do the same.
I never thought I’d be where I’m at right now.
“Having a degree…that’s something I never thought much about,” I say finally. “I knew I’d never get one. Wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did.”
She shifts to look up at me. “I always thought it was just the way things were done,” she says. “But then I met you, and Freya. I got some perspective.”
“How’d you mean?”
“It’s a pretty big privilege,” she says, like she’s thought about it a lot. “Mom told me some of the things Freya went through. It gave me some perspective I never had before.”
I consider this, surprised. “What things?”
She’s thinking, cheek back on my chest.
“I was safe growing up because my parents were around. They made me go to school, made sure I had life skills to get me by. They loved me,” she says slowly. “Dad sat with me for hours doing homework. Mom talked to me about all the awkward things, like not getting pregnant, staying safe. They paid for my school and co-signed my loans when they couldn’t. Nobody did that for Freya.”
A sharp pain goes through my chest. “No, they didn’t.”
“Did they do it for you?” her voice rasps.
Which part? My mind goes back to the darker parts of growing up. Aiden always talked pretty plainly about sex in front of us boys, so I was always aware of it. When we hit adolescence, I remember him telling us to wrap it up or we’d end up like him—working his ass off every day with four mouths to feed. A warning with a side of guilt, like we were responsible for our own existence. The education discussion never came up. It justwasn’t a possibility when every day, there was a new bill in the mailbox.
“Nah, not really,” I say. “Aiden just made sure we had jobs.”
She lifts her head, looking up into my eyes. “Do you hate him?”
My throat is dry. I swallow something dark back. Aiden was my father but not my blood. He raised me like I was his own, but he didn’t love me like it. He was rough, toxic, dangerous, and he wanted sons just like him. There was a time when I thought that was narcissism, but now I know he was trying to keep us alive. Aiden hit me, fought me, tore me down, but he also fed me and kept a roof over my head despite my existence as a reminder of his greatest trauma. For that, I don’t hate him, not even for keeping me so doped up he didn’t have to face what happened in the mines.
But for the things he did to Freya, I do.
For that, I’m glad he’s dead.
