a set of beaters when I got to the Johnsons’. She seemed in no hurry to go home, so I sat down at the kitchen table and debriefed my day with Bev. When I got through telling her about the Seth and Kate transformation, she seemed to have nothing to say.
“Isn’t that amazing?” I prodded. “I mean, that they’ve been so uptight about something good that they’ve made it uncomfortable for everyone else—including themselves.”
Bev made a production of washing up her mixing bowl and measuring cups. “People can be silly that way,” she said.
“Silly is a bit of an understatement. If your feelings for someone get in the way of your other obligations, you’re better off just blurting it out and putting everyone else out of your misery.”
“Uh-huh. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
I crossed my arms and tried to figure out what my suddenly enigmatic friend was talking—or not talking—about. At the table, Shayla shoved not one, but two whole cookies into her mouth, distracting me from the pondering at hand.
“Shayla! What are you doing?”
I think she tried to say, “Eating cookies,” but it came out sounding like an ancient Germanic dialect, accompanied by a virtual meteor shower of cookie bits. Bev lunged for her dishcloth, Shayla started to giggle, and I made a mental note to tell Scott about the incident when I saw him at school tomorrow.
It was at that precise moment that the sky opened up and God—sounding a lot like George Burns, actually—bellowed something like, “Get a grip, Shelby! You’re wasting daylight here!” I figured it would have been disrespectful and dangerous to point out that it was actually closer to nighttime, what with the Big Guy’s ability to zap people from heaven and all.
To be completely honest, the sky didn’t actually open and there’s a good chance George Burns was only in my mind—sharing billing with George Clooney, perhaps—but I was struck with a truth so clear and so urgent that there was no avoiding the corresponding action. My rejection of Scott’s pursuit hadn’t prevented anything. He was already a part of my life. He was already the person I wanted to tell about Shayla’s misbehavior, the person I wanted to make laugh, the person whose opinion mattered more to me than anyone else’s. He was already anchored in my life, and the thought of losing him to my desperate independence was intolerable.
I left Bev standing at the sink and set off toward Scott’s apartment in a haze of revelation and resolve, but I hadn’t made it halfway there before my courage began to wear thin. Thirty-five years of disclaimers and denials were squawking in my mind like the Aflac duck.
I’d done my job well, as the daughter of a tyrant. I’d learned all the lessons and internalized them to such a degree that they had become part of my emotional landscape, a landscape littered with the corpses of aborted and abandoned desires, of stifled needs and evaded longings, of emotional calluses so thick and deep and embedded that I feared nothing short of surgical intervention would remove them. An image of God as the Great Physician popped into my mind and I wondered if he’d answer just this one prayer, if he would give me just this one moment to reclaim a bit of the woman he had intended me to be—pre–Jim Davis, pre-maiming, pre-survival.
I walked down the silent, rain-burnished streets with a growing urge both to flee and to prevail, my steps emboldened by a sudden consciousness of need, my strides restricted by a fear of scorned endeavors and disemboweled hopes. My dread deepened as my urgency increased, and I longed in a flash for the return of the woman I’d been just moments before, whose rejection of risk had yielded a stable, predictable, safe, and stunted life. But in that instant when realization had dawned in a spray of crumbled cookie, when my mind had finally understood my heart and seen the stranglehold of my past on my future—in that moment I’d become too certain to hesitate. I was Seth and Kate encased in self-denial. I was Trey, my protector, shackled by his scars. I was my father, my tormentor, enslaved by his own terrors. I was my mother’s helplessness. I was my future’s emptiness. I was all I had pledged and purposed to abhor.
My turmoil must have showed on my face when Scott opened his door, because the smile that was growing there froze, then dissipated. He ushered me through