“I get privilege,” I said. “What I don’t get is how you’re supposed to put up with thisgarbagefrom everyone all the time. Even people you kind of like. You try to tell them that they’re wrong, and why, and it goes in one ear and out the other.”
Dad gave me a small, sad smile. “Sometimes it takes a little while. If you want them to understand, you have to keep trying. But you also have to realize the difference between someone who can understand with a little work, and someone who doesn’twantto understand. I learned a long time ago not to spend too much time on people who didn’t want to see things the way I see them. It isn’t worth the energy.” His expression brightened again. “Sometimes, though, it is. And those times can be very worth it. Those are the times you can learn from one another. That’s what happened with me and your mom.”
I started. “You and Mom? You had to explain something to Mom?”
He laughed. “Your mom grew up rich—she was an Aberdeen, after all. Even when their house burned down, they still had money. I had to explain a lot of things to her, like why anyone would ever think of splitting a roll of two-ply toilet paper into two one-ply rolls.”
“Was this before or after you got married?”
“Way before. But after we started going out. She was sonaive, your mom—did I tell you how we became friends?”
“You hung out at the Fool at, like, one in the morning.”
“Yes, but did I tell youhow?”
“Drinking, I assumed.”
“No, no. I tried to con her.”
That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. “And she didn’t fall for it?”
He smiled ruefully. “Ah, but she did. She fell hard.” He scratched his chin. “I knew who she was, but we’d never spoken. She struck me as one of those uppity types. Kind of floated around, like nothing could hurt her. A rich kid. Pampered. I wanted to knock her down a few pegs, so I scammed her and got away with all the money she had on her. It wasn’t a lot, but you could tell she was going to use it for something or other. Maybe she’d been saving up, I don’t remember.”
“So you scammed her,” I said. “That’s super romantic.”
“It is, isn’t it? No, I gave her the money back. It was the first time I’d ever really felt bad about stealing from someone. She didn’t fall for the scam because she was stupid, though I’m sure some people would call it that. She fell for it because she didn’t expect anyone to try to steal from her. She still had that kind of trust in others. I saw it when she handed me the money. Then it became a choice between two evils. Keep her money and have cheated the trusting innocent, or give the money back, apologize, and ruin her trust forever. Not just trust in me, buttrust in anyone. What kind of rotten person does something like that? No one ever loses their own innocence. They have it taken from them.”
By people like us.He didn’t say that, but I heard it. That was the Novaks, after all: rotten people.
“But you gave her the money back.”
“I gave her the money back. In the end I figured if I didn’t ruin that trust in her, someone else would, but at least I’d apologize for it. I expected her to hate me. I think she was more stunned than anything. Then confused, and she thought the apology was part of some bigger scam. After I convinced her it wasn’t, she asked if I wanted a drink, and she went on and got me drunk and wheedled my entire life story out of me, along with about twenty-five bucks for the booze.”
“So she stole back from you!”
“She was good like that. You girls got your quick learning skills from her, I’ll tell you that. I woke up in my bedroom the next morning, hungover as hell, and found her in my kitchen making pancakes. She regaled me with my own embarrassing childhood stories, we called a truce, and we saw each other nearly every day for the next twenty-six years.”
Twenty-six.
“That’s all I was getting at,” he went on. “Your mom and I didn’t see eye-to-eye, but that doesn’t mean she was a bad person. It meant she hadn’t seen what I’d seen. She didn’t havethe same experiences, and the worlds we lived in were very different because of it. But she learned, and I learned some things, too, and we became better people together. I wouldn’t have given her up for anything.”
Twenty-six years. It seemed like an eternity.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Didn’t like that story?”
“No. It’s just—the end of the twenty-six years was when she went missing.”
“Ah.” He sniffed. “Yep.”
“Do you ever think of where she might be?”
He gave me a strange look. “I’m not big on the heaven-hell dichotomy, but if I had to choose...”
“No, I mean, like, in the woods. How did her trail disappear? Where would she have gone?”
He turned his head to look at me full on then, his expression screwed up with confusion, and a sharp stab of shame hit me in the chest. His voice went flat. “What are you talking about?”
I turned away, focusing on the houses passing by outside. “They never found anything. Clothes, or anything.”
