Shona put tea bags in the cups, took a lemon out of her fridge, and began slicing it as they waited for the kettle to whistle.
“You have a boyfriend?” Shona asked.
“Been seeing him for over a year now.” Vivian had met Logan in mid-November of her first year at college. The relationship started a month, she thought, before it happened, but she did not say that to Shona.
“That’s nice. You met him at the college?”
Vivian explained they’d met on the mountain when she was buying a ski pass, how they were in line next to each other.
“So he’s a student?”
“No, bartender. And ski bum.”
“Must be nice,” Shona said.
“Yeah, he pretty much does what I came here to do, only I’m not really doing it.” Vivian told Shona how she’d wanted to come here to work and ski, how she’d made a pact with her parents about college.
“Your parents. They’re faring okay?”
“I guess. I mean, it’s hard.”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s, well, it’s all so complicated.”
“How so?” Shona’s eyes were large and doe-like. Vivian wanted to fall into them, the way she used to stare at her mother’s eyes when she was little and scraped up after a tumble.
Vivian thought of her mom again. She was a genuinely pleasing person, like Shona. But her mom, well, was too genteel to stand up to their father when Ryan had said he didn’t want to play football. Their dad insisted it was “nonnegotiable.”
He decreed it and therefore no bending or breaking his rules.
This rule’s logic went something like this: Boys need to play on a team so they can learn how to be a part of something bigger than themselves, so they learn how to cooperate and experience camaraderie, which in turn makes them successful humans.
Their dad had played football in high school and college. He was convinced it had taught him how to succeed. As a software engineer who’d helped launch numerous start-ups, he said playing football taught him how to be a team player. He insisted his son should have the same experience. No, the sameopportunity.
But Ryan didn’t see it as that. He saw it as a sentence. During summer break, when Vivian was still home after her senior year in high school, when Ryan was entering his freshman year, she could remember the arguments. Ryan insisted he didn’t want to play any sports at all, and her dad said that was not an option. Ryan would come to Vivian to complain, to say that Dad didn’t get him, didn’t understand that team sports weren’t for him. She had tried to explain to him that it wasn’tsuch an awful idea. Secretly, she—athletic like their dad—had thought it would benefit him for all the same reasons Dad had mentioned.
Plus, she wanted more for her baby brother’s high school experience than always being the geeky kid. She wanted him to be accepted the way she was, to have ready-made friends that came with a team, maybe put some muscle on his lanky frame and some color to his cheeks so he could get a girl.
She didn’t say all this to him, but she’d thought it.
Ryan moved on to their mom, hoping she would strike a compromise. “How about I join a club, like the kids that work on the yearbook?” he’d suggested. “Or even the speech and debate team. You know how much I hate to be in front of people. That I’d be willing to do that shows you how much I don’t want to play.”
Mom had smiled sweetly at him. “You could do both. Or even all three,” she said. “But you know how your dad is when he sets his mind to something.”
Later, he entered Vivian’s room while she got ready to go out with friends. She was getting tired of his protests. They had ended up in a fight, and he had called her a daddy’s girl, saying she went with everything he said because she was “superficial.”
Now Shona handed Vivian a steaming cup with the tea bag already in it and a spoon and a wedge of lemon on the saucer. She grabbed honey from a cabinet and set it before Vivian.
“That honey’s from the Flathead,” said Shona, “and they say you should always have local honey because it helps your system get used to all the hay-fever triggers around here.”
Vivian squeezed the plastic container and watched the golden gel stack up and swirl into her spoon and slowly ooze over into the cup. Vivian was fairly certain that if she asked Ryan about it, he’d tell her it was a myth, that local honey doesn’t ward off anything.
“You were saying,” Shona said. “It’s complicated?”
“Grief. It’s complex, because everyone has their own stuff to deal with as they process their own loss, but at the same time, they have todeal with the other person’s shit, too. I think all the signals go haywire. It’s why so many couples don’t make it after ...” Vivian petered out because a lump had suddenly formed and congested in her throat.
“I totally understand,” Shona said. “Your parents? Are they getting any help? Doing any counseling?”
