She looked as if she was ready to swallow her tongue.“Well.I guess, I have said … I’m sorry.”She shook her head.
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said.He took a deep breath.“In all honesty, you are right.Ty did lead Melanie into addiction.And if I were you, I think I would be angry about that forever.”
“There’s no room for anger.Not now.Not when we have Marjorie.We need to have as much love as possible, which means we don’t have time for all that.”
“I didn’t realize that emotions could be scheduled,” he said.
“That sounds dangerously close to being therapy adjacent.”
“Oh, it’s not really therapy adjacent.It’s straight from therapy.”
She looked surprised.“You don’t seem like the type.”
“Why?Because I’m a rural dude who works with his hands?”
“Yeah.But also because of other things I’ve observed about you that are specific to you.”
Something hot spiked in his gut.Maybe it wasn’t fair, but he found himself being irritated.Because she didn’t know him.She never had.She didn’t know how he dealt with his feelings about his family.
Hell, emotion had to go somewhere.
For Ty, it was wadded up into a tight ball, shoved into the very center of his chest, and lit on fire by the drugs flowing through his veins.
Since Clark had embraced radical sobriety, it meant dealing with things in a whole different manner.
“I’ve been to therapy,” he said.“Extensively.To deal with the trauma of growing up in my family, to get to the root of the addictive behavior that seems to run in my DNA.I don’t drink.I don’t do drugs.So I had to work on sorting things out instead.And I have, Ellie.Whatever you think about cowboys or poor kids or—”
“What are you saying?”She looked offended.“First of all, I’m a teacher.I have kids of every background come into my classroom, and I love each and every one of them.”
“Do you make assumptions about them based on where they’re from?How they dress?”
“No,” she said.“Well.Maybe.But it’s not about making assumptions, it’s about trying to figure out where I think they might need a lift.But one of the things I also understand, Clark, is that kids who look like they come from the nicest house on the block might also be facing challenges.Sometimes the suffering happening inside a house is invisible.”
“I didn’t say you had it easy.But I don’t like that it shocks you that I cook, that I have the emotional maturity to take a look at my own issues and decide to deal with them.”
“It’s not about you.It’s about every … every relationship in my life, honestly.Clark, my parents have never dealt with a single issue.My father buries himself in work, hides away in his own hobbies and activities when he gets home.My mom needs everything around her to be perfect so that she can feel perfect.She defines herself by her house.By what her kids are doing.My sister drowned under all that pressure.She couldn’t cope with the emotions overflowing inside her when she was trying to succeed at ballet.My mother drowned her spark, her talent, her personality.Everything.”
She shook her head.“And then there was my boyfriend, Jason, who had the emotional intelligence of a turnip.He played Xbox instead of ever having a conversation.He was a successful man.With a good job.And I looked around the house we shared and realized I was in a younger version of my parents’ marriage.Not even the promise of a commitment or children or anything like that, but with a man who worked, made the money, and then completely checked out at the end of the day.So it isn’t you.I have a hard time believing that anyone around me has done the work of analyzing their emotions.I’m sorry if my surprise felt personal.If it’s personal to anyone, it’s me.”
He felt as if little shards of glass had scattered from her lips and stuck themselves around his heart.He felt like shit, because he had just accused her unfairly, based on his own assumptionsabout her.Based on the way he’d felt about her in high school, and dammit, the way she still made him feel.She made him feel he wasn’t good enough.She made him feel like that teenage boy who wanted nothing more than to kiss those rich-girl lips, to experience something he knew full well was too good for him.
He had brought his bullshit to her door, and all the while he’d been accusing her of doing the same thing.
“Sorry,” he said.“Genuinely.That was kind of an Uno reverse.”
“What?”
“You know, the game.Uno.”
“No …”
He sighed.“Never mind.I mean that I tend to think you don’t have a very high opinion of me, but that assumption is actually me not thinking very highly of you.”
She looked away.“Yeah, but I’ve also said some really unkind things to you.So maybe be a little bit more gracious to yourself.I’ve never seen you do anything that wasn’t kind, Clark.You’ve always been there for your brother.Sometimes, I just feel so angry about everything that happened to our siblings that I’m not rational.”
“You don’t need to be, do you?”
“I don’t know.Maybe.Maybe not.”
