he loves to fish. He’d go every Saturday,” I said, feeling a powerful need to defend my father, trying to dispel the possibility of yet another of his lies. “So why not go there? Doesn’t Vermont have great fishing?”
“Why go anywhere at all?” asked Ben.
“Back to that,” I said. “The big mystery is why he left in the first place.”
“Tell me again what he said.”
So I told him, as best as I could remember. I wished now that I had recorded the call, if only so I could’ve heard Dad’s voice again. It had been a disturbing, strange, emotional, and confusing conversation. I kept hearing him crying; something I’ll never forget.
“Sounds to me like it’s really important to your dad that Mr. Fitch looks after you all, like with money and stuff,” Ben said, reflexively using Simon’s last name, because we were in school. I nodded, having had the same impression.
“I get it,” I told him. “I just don’t get why he can’t come home, and why I can’t tell Mom or Connor that Dad’s alive and well. And why would he say he’s done bad things and hurt people? And what did Mom do? He’s blaming her for something and told me it can’t go unpunished. What’s that all about?”
Ben gave another shrug. “I don’t understand my parents. How the heck can I understand yours? But he told you to make nice with Simon, right?”
Again, I nodded. “Yeah, make the peace because Simon’s helping out financially and my dad can’t.” I made it sound as if sucking up to Simon would be harder than taking one of Ben’s math tests. “I suppose I could get Mom to quit her job. That would make Simon happiest of all.”
Ben looked confused. “Why does he care if she’s working?”
I laughed because I lived it and Ben didn’t, but still, he’d picked up on something that had never made sense to me.
“He says it’s because of me—I need my mom around more, I’m really fragile right now, and I need her full attention.”
“You seem to be doing fine,” Ben said. “More than fine. Like, you dealt with Laura Abel and all that stuff while your father was missing. That doesn’t make sense. Maybe Mr. Fitch thinks he should be the one to make all the money.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“But Seabury’s not cheap,” Ben added. “You’d think he’d be psyched your mom was making extra money.”
That was a head-scratcher for me, too. We all knew teaching wasn’t a path to riches.
“Could be he has family money,” suggested Ben.
“Possible. My dad said he was going to check into Simon. Maybe he did. Maybe he found out Simon’s rich and that’s why he wants me to make the peace.” I paused because something wasn’t sitting right with me. “But Simon has to rent out his house to afford ours,” I added.
A surprised look came to Ben’s face. “Really? That doesn’t sound rich to me. We have a ski condo that we rent, and it’s like a super-big hassle. My dad is always complaining about renters, cleaning, maintenance, all that stuff. If he had the money, he wouldn’t rent it to anybody.”
“Well, Simon rents his,” I said, not really seeing Ben’s point. “It’s got access to the lake and is close to skiing, so he says it’s filled up pretty much all the time.”
“How much is the rent?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, annoyed now, because what did rent have to do with my father? “We don’t really talk about it.”
“You’ve been there?”
I nodded. “We went swimming there once or twice, back when he was getting ready to move in with us.” I pursed my lips together like I had sucked on a lemon.
“So you know what it looks like?” he said.
“Yeah. Sure.”
Ben went to work on my phone. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Trying to figure out how much rent he gets,” Ben said.
“Why?”
“We’re trying to get a sense of how much money he’s got, right? So this rent, plus his job, minus what your house costs, should tell us something.”
I didn’t get a strong feeling that Ben knew exactly what he was talking about, because as kids we didn’t deal with money. Even so, it was an interesting exercise, so I went along with it. Ben had pulled up all the rental properties in Seabury listed on Airbnb, which was one of the websites his parents used to rent their ski condo.
I looked through the pictures from the search results, but none of them were