Page 51 of Comfort Read

“And you don’t have to fix everything⁠—”

“Look,” Maggie says, holding up one hand to silence him and pulling a bottle from her purse with the other, “do you want a drink? Because I, myself, think this calls for a drink.”

Kit’s not sure he does want a drink—he’s not even totally sure what time of day it is, having been in this office so long as to have lost track—but he shrugs, and sits up. “Yeah, okay. Why not.”

There’s a brief conversational detour revolving around Kit’s inadequate glassware options, but once they both have a chipped coffee mug full of red wine to sip from, Maggie takes a deep breath and says, “Okay, Critter. Here goes: You are angry with me.”

Kit blinks at her. “No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.” Maggie gestures towards him with her mug, nearly spilling it onto the already stained hardwood floors. “You’re angry at me about this, and you have every right to be, but you were angry before, too. Before Thanksgiving, before you brought Sage to the rescue. You’ve been angry at me, and at Mom and Dad, and at Justin, for a long time now. At least since the day Emerson left you, but I think it started earlier. Way earlier. I’m tired of not talking about it.”

“You—I—what?” Kit stares at her, feeling frustration pooling in his gut despite his best effort to push it aside. “You can’t just decide my feelings for me, Mags. They’re my feelings. If I say I’m not angry then I’m not angry!”

“You sound angry,” Maggie points out, maddeningly calm. “And you act angry, whether you want to admit it or not. You act like you think we’re monsters⁠—”

“No, I don’t!”

“—who are more interested in scoring points against you than in being on your side.” Maggie ignores Kit’s words, as his outraged, defiant squawk, to take another sip of her wine. “It wasn’t like this when we were kids, you know. We were a team back then, the five of us. What happened to that?”

“Who says anything happened to it?” Kit believes what he’s saying, he does, but there’s this strange knot in the pit of his gut, making every word feel like a lie. “Who says we’re not still a team? Just, I don’t know, a bigger one?”

“Well,” Maggie says slowly, drawing the word out a few extra syllables. “If we were, then I think, just for example, you might have come to one of us and said, ‘Hey, I’m a little bit homeless and living out of my bookstore, any chance I could stay at your place for a while?’”

Kit freezes with his mug halfway to his mouth. “You know about that?”

“We all do,” Maggie says, her voice quiet and sad. “You’ve never been as subtle as you think you are.”

“Hell.” Kit puts the wine down, scrubs his hands over his face. “Do we have to do this now, Mags? Can’t we just have one conversation at a time? Does it have to be you blowing up my love life and you blowing up my spot on the housing situation?”

Maggie drums her fingers on the nearest bookshelf, but her eyes are kind. “Yes, it does. Because I’m pretty sure they’re the same conversation.” More softly, she says, “Come on, Kit. You’re angry. You’ve been angry for a long time. Is it helping anyone, carrying it around like this?”

“Of course it is!” This bursts out of Kit with a vehemence that startles him, and, as though a dam has broken, a torrent of words pours out in its wake. “Of course it’s helping you; it’s the only way I can help you; all I’ve ever done for this family is bring shame and stress and problems! I got hurt as a kid and it was all anyone talked about in this stupid town for a year, and then Mom and Dad nearly killed themselves getting through that lawsuit, and then all through high school everyone had to be so careful with me and my trauma and my jaw problems and all of it. Justin was the smart one and you were the exciting one and I was the one who made everyone worry. For years! That’s all I was. I could tell how relieved you all were when I moved in with Emerson, it was obvious, you might as well have written, Dear Kit, Thank God we no longer have to stress about what will become of you on the housewarming card! And then he dumped me and we were right back to square one, the whole town gossiping about me and all of you acting like I was some fragile piece of glass who would never recover from being shattered. And when I found a movie star, Maggie, a literal movie star to make me look slightly less pathetic, even that was a worry. But what the hell am I supposed to do about it? Do you expect me to say, ‘I’m mad at you for caring about me, because it makes me feel like you’ll never stop seeing me as a child’? Is that what you want?”

“Yeah, Kit,” Maggie says, smiling sadly at him. “If that’s how you feel, then that’s exactly what I want.”

Kit stares at her, his breath catching painfully in his chest. He doesn’t know what to say to that at all, but Maggie just gazes back at him, level and patient, waiting. When had she learned to do that, exactly? Was it parenthood that taught her how to access this place of measured calm? Was it some latent gene she inherited from their father that only activated once she had kids of her own?

However she learned the technique, it works, because eventually Kit mutters, “Well, that’s stupid.”

“Why?”

Kit scrubs a hand over his face, feeling small and useless, infantile. “Because it’s a stupid way for me to feel! Because I should feel grateful you care at all, or old enough not to care, or⁠—”

“You know something? I’m not interested in how you think you should feel.” Maggie takes another sip from her mug, and then sets it down. “That’s why we worry about you, in case you were wondering. Not because we think you’re fragile or a child or any of that other stuff you said. Because of ‘should.’ All we ever hear from you is what you think you should tell us, what you think you should feel, what you think you should say. But that’s not what we want, Kit. At least, it’s not what I want.”

“Then what do you want?”

“The truth.” Maggie fixes him with a gimlet stare, the one Kit has to imagine strikes fear into the hearts of her children and probably, on occasion, even Mitch. “Even if it’s messy. Especially if it’s messy.”

“The truth?” Kit starts to laugh. It’s not a pleasant sound, mirthless and concerning even to his own ears, but he can’t make it stop, even when he bites down hard on the inside of his cheek. “The truth—Maggie, come on. You don’t want that. No one wants that! The truth is that I’m a failure. The truth is that I’m homeless and worthless and an embarrassment and just blew up my last chance, my only chance, to turn things around. The truth is that I’m going to lose this bookstore just like I lost Sage, and lost Emerson, because I’m not good enough to manage anything on my own! The truth is that I have to tell you what you want to hear, I have to act like everything’s fine, I have to, because if I let you see what a mess I really am, I’ll lose all of you, too.”

Kit slaps a hand over his mouth the second the words fall out of it. He hadn’t meant to say that. He hadn’t known he was going to say it; he hadn’t even known that he thought it. But it rings in the air around them with the unmistakable peal of honesty, too real for him to even attempt to take it back.

Maggie stares at him for a moment, her eyes wide and abruptly wet. Then her face twists into their mother’s most set, determined expression. She crosses the room in two strides, puts a hand under Kit’s elbow, and hauls him up out of his chair. He thinks for a crazed second that she’s going to put him in a headlock, wrestle him to the ground like she used to when they were small. Instead, she pulls him into a hug that drives the air from his lungs, so tight he’s sure he can hear his bones creaking.

“If you think you’d get rid of us that easily, you’ve got less sense than Mitch’s goddamn chickens,” she hisses against his ear. “We love you, Kit. We want you to be okay because we love you. Not what people say about you, or how well you’re doing, or the person you think you should be. You.”

“Oh,” Kit says in a small voice. Hesitantly, he lets his arms—which were, until now, dangling at his sides like limp noodles—drift up to hug Maggie back. “…Really?”