Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,23

obliviously making tea and watering hydrangea beds in this stupidly cute town—that, suddenly, really pissed me off.

I looked at her, so polite and friendly in that goofy calico eye patch.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing ever happened with him.”

She responded slowly, like she somehow knew I was lying. “Oh,” she said. “That’s too bad.”

“Not really,” I said. “He turned out to be a dick.”

The language made her blink. “Did he?” she said.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of mimicking a normal conversation—until I realized I was shaking. Not trembling, the way your fingers do when it’s cold, but rumbling deep inside my core, as if my emotions were colliding with each other in plate tectonics.

Could she tell?

I wasn’t waiting to find out. “I really do have a lot of work to do,” I said then, taking another step up. The stair squeaked.

She read my expression, and my voice, and my urgency, and I could see her mentally back off. She’d gone too far, she suddenly realized. Tried too hard. Violated the essential rule of human relations that if you chase too hard, everyone eventually runs away. “Of course,” she said, taking a step backwards. “Not tonight. To be continued.”

“Or not,” I said.

She saw her mistake. In trying to pull me closer, she’d pushed me away. She met my eyes one last time and gave a sad smile. “Now I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

I’d already turned away. I paused and looked over. “What work?”

“Getting you to change your mind about love.”

I shrugged, like I was sorry to break it to her. “I’ll never change my mind,” I said. “I know too much.”

“Maybe you don’t know enough.”

Why wouldn’t she just let me go upstairs? I let the irritation in my voice leak out. “Just look around at the world—at the lonely and the cheated on. The violent. The abandoned. I know exactly what people do to each other. I’ve seen enough ruined lives to last forever.”

“None of that is what I’m talking about,” she said. “None of that is love.”

“There’s conquest, and there’s status, and there’s porn. Love is something girls invented so they could feel better about it.”

I’d shocked her. Good. “If that’s what you truly believe,” she said, “then I feel so sad for you.”

“I feel sad for all the women out there dragging their boyfriends to Bed Bath & Beyond and making them shop for throw pillows. They want the fantasy more than they want the truth.”

“What’s the truth?” she challenged.

“The truth is that love doesn’t exist.”

I meant for that moment to be my win—I meant it to convey to her that whatever it was she remembered of me, or expected of me, or wanted from me, it wasn’t happening. We weren’t going to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and be besties. We weren’t going to talk about boys or braid each other’s hair or treat this whole long year like a slumber party. That one fierce statement was meant to settle how things were going to be.

The girl she remembered was gone.

My mother should have nodded, looked down, and given up. But she didn’t. If anything, the words seemed to spark more resistance in her.

She stood up a little straighter and looked me over like she was really seeing me for the first time all day. Then she said, “Sounds like you just threw down a challenge to the universe, lady.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” she said, looking a little triumphant, “that you clearly, obviously, any second now, are just about to fall in love.”

Eight

WAY TOO MUCH conversation. I spent the next two days fiercely avoiding my mother.

No easy feat in a house the size of a shoe box.

I skipped dinner. I went for runs. I made “visual inspections” of the town of Lillian. I did the grocery shopping and picked up a lavender neck pillow for Diana at the pharmacist.

When I did interact with her, helping her on the stairs, say, I kept my interactions short, polite, and action oriented. I would not have another conversation like that with her. I hadn’t come here for therapy, or to have my mind changed—about anything. I’d only come here because I had no choice.

Basically, I was just holding it together until I could start my first shift at work.

I had already timed the drive from Rockport to Lillian, twice, and scouted the station so I’d know how to get there. I’d been to HR downtown to fill out reams of paperwork,