Things We Didn't Say - By Kristina Riggle Page 0,60
his bar. Sometimes I’d see him with a band, fiddling with those knobs and sliding buttons for the budding rock stars who called him Gramps. He called them “Assholes” and smiled, so they assumed he meant it affectionately. For some of them, that was true.
He would later tell me that my rock-bottom moment was also his.
“You’re young, Edna Leigh,” he told me, when my stitches were itching under the bandage and he’d brought me some stuffed grape leaves and baba ghanoush from Olive Express. “If I did that, I bet I’d be dead, or paralyzed or something. I’m sixty-some, and I’m not made of rubber like you.”
“Ha, I only wish I’d bounced,” I said back, sounding cockier than I really felt.
He quit his bartending gig and gave up working sound. He went to work for his brother, though there’d been bad blood there for the longest time.
The cold finally gets to me. I should also check in with my mom. She never used to be the “checking up” type, but after Billy, everything changed.
In the house, Jewel has fallen asleep in her mother’s lap. Mallory’s asleep, too, her head tipped back on the couch. Not sure why she should be so tired, since she seems to be the only one who slept last night. Rather soundly, in fact. So soundly she couldn’t hear me knocking on the door just a few feet away, when I was locked out.
I prefer privacy for talking to my mother, anyway.
These two halves of my life will have to mesh if we get married, but I find it hard to imagine this.
The phone rings a few times before she picks up.
“Hi, baby,” she says.
“Hi, Mom.”
“How was your day?”
“Ummm . . .”
There are tears, now.
“Honey? What’s wrong?” I hear her clunk a glass down on the table. I imagine her sitting forward in her chair, concern written in the lines on her face, lines put there by me, Dad, Billy.
“It’s okay, now,” I tell her, wiping my face hard, shaking my head. “It’s just been a hard day.”
“Oh, sweetie.”
Her concern does me in.
I do tell her, some of it, anyway, an edited version of events, leaving out most of the stuff about Mallory. She interrupts my story with lots of “Oh, honey” and “Oh, baby,” and commiserating gasps.
Finally she says, “Thank God he’s all right. What happens now?”
I shrug, then remember she can’t see me. “I don’t know. I’ll have to let Michael deal with it, I suppose.”
“You can’t sit on the sidelines forever, if you really are going to marry him. Are you sure you still want to do that?”
“Yes,” I croak out. My throat feels raw.
“Why do you want to put yourself through all this? Edna, honey, you’re so young yet, you can have any kind of boyfriend you want, someone who can afford to pay attention to you, who doesn’t have to spend all his energy on other people, someone without an ex-wife. And don’t you want babies of your own?”
“Of course. And I’m going to, with him.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Mom—”
“He’s got teenagers, and he’s what, thirty-five?”
“Thirty-six.”
“I guarantee you he’s reaching the end of his rope with kids, especially after this. Would you be willing to give up ever having a baby of your own, to stay with him? Is he worth that?”
“I can’t talk about this right now.”
“I just don’t want to see you throw away your youth by making your life harder than it has to be. Don’t do it just to win him. This is not some TV show with the guy as the prize.”
“So we’re watching The Bachelor again, are we? Will you give me a break, please? We’ve been through hell, here.”
“I’m so sorry my TV watching isn’t up to your lofty standards.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I thought that’s why you bolted town, to go off and live your dreams. This is what you dreamed of? Teenage stepkids who run away and sneer at you?”
“You make it sound so awful.”
“I’m only repeating what you tell me. Why don’t you call Pete? He misses you. We all do.”
“That’s what this is really about. You don’t like that I left.”
“Of course I don’t. I miss my children.”
I suck in a breath at her phrasing, comparing my absence and Billy’s. “I’m right here, on the phone.”
“And never here where I can see you. Are you eating? You sound thin.”
Despite it all, I have to laugh. “I sound thin?”
My mom laughs, too, and the tension falls away like leaves from an autumn tree.