“How do you feel?” I asked Finch on the way home from the Volpes’ house. We were in my car, but he was driving.
“I feel great,” he said. “Really great. I’m so glad we did that.”
I felt a wave of relief as I said to my son, “Doesn’t it feel good to do the right thing?” The question was a little heavy-handed, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Yeah,” he said, glancing over at me. “It really does….And Lyla? She’s a cool girl….”
He bit his lip, smiled, and slowly shook his head, the way he did when watching an amazing play in a football or basketball game. It was in stark contrast to Kirk—who always got up and clapped and yelled at the television.
“Yeah. She is,” I said, thinking that there was something about Lyla that seemed lacking in other girls I knew through Finch, Polly in particular. A certain genuine quality. Polly was always perfectly polite, saying all the right things to me, making eye contact and fluid small talk. Yet there was something about her that seemed almost too polite, scripted even.
“Mr. Volpe was nice, too,” Finch said.
I nodded, thinking of our conversation on the back porch. We’d talked about Finch and Lyla, wondering how it was going inside. But we’d also discussed kids today in more general terms. How they hid behind their phones, saying things that they’d never say directly to someone’s face—whether mean or sexual or just plain bold. We pitied them, and pitied ourselves as their parents. Tom never let Finch off the hook for what he’d done to Lyla, but he’d definitely softened since the coffee shop.
Finch slowed at a yellow light, then came to a full stop. His foot on the brake, he looked at me, big-eyed. “So, Mom. I think I am going to ask Lyla out at some point….You heard Mr. Volpe say I could, right?”
“Yes,” I said, still surprised Tom had left the door open on that possibility. “But you also heard him say she probably wouldn’t go….”
He nodded, now staring up at the light, waiting for it to change. “Yeah. Well. Maybe I’ll just call her. I really want to talk to her some more,” he said as the light turned to green.
I understood the feeling—I wanted to keep talking to Tom, too. Conversation felt healing, and we all needed that.
“In any case, I think you should wait until after your hearing,” I said, part of me worried about how it would look: Finch manipulating the situation. On the one hand, I was tired of worrying about appearances, sick of making decisions based on what others might think. But on the other, this just wasn’t a good idea.
“Yeah,” Finch said. “I got it.”
“Also, just so you know, I’m going to tell Dad about our meeting and your apology,” I said. “As soon as he gets home…”
“Okay,” he said with a shrug.
“Your father and I have had some differences lately, but we need to be a united front. Especially when it comes to you.”
Finch glanced at me knowingly, then nodded, as if he, too, had noticed the sea change in our home and marriage—which seemed to have begun when Kirk sold his business.
I thought about that time now. At first, the three of us were thrilled—giddy. But things quickly turned tense, even ugly, during the winding-down period, which included parting ways with his top executive, Chuck Wilder. Chuck had no real piece of the business, as Kirk had put up all the capital and had one hundred percent ownership, but Chuck put in a lot of sweat equity over the years, giving up more lucrative jobs because he believed so much in Kirk’s vision. I think he’d also had an expectation of being included in the massive payout, and in my view, it wasn’t an unwarranted one.
But Kirk flatly refused, even after Chuck’s wife, Donna, showed up on our doorstep, confiding that she was extremely worried about her husband’s “mental state.”
“It’s not personal,” Kirk had said. “It’s just business.”
“But it is personal,” Donna had said. “Y’all are friends.”
“I know we’re friends, Donna. But I have to separate that from my business decisions,” Kirk had replied calmly and coldly.
I remember feeling shocked, but also not. It was in keeping with Kirk’s attitudes toward tips. He was perfectly capable of leaving a paltry amount, and in extreme cases nothing, if he deemed the service bad. And effort didn’t count; ineptitude was ineptitude. In any event, Donna, just like a waitress or two along the way, ended up in tears. Kirk was unyielding.
In the hours and days that followed, I had searched for signs of remorse, but Kirk’s only reaction was indignation. How dare Chuck put Donna up to this shameless attempt at manipulation? He’d paid Chuck a great salary for years and owed him nothing further.
“But we made so much money,” I remember saying. “Why can’t we just throw him a bone? A hundred thousand dollars or something?”
“Hell, no. Why would I do that? That’s not the way things work. It was my capital.”
His use of the word my instead of our made me uneasy, as I’d noticed that the more money Kirk made, the more likely he was to call it his. But I also remember telling myself that it really didn’t matter. Because he always had the best interests of Finch and me at heart.
I compared our current situation to that one, and at first blush, they felt similar. Our family was still first.
But as Finch stopped at another traffic light, I thought of a rather significant difference. With Chuck, Kirk had operated under a completely rational set of rules. Fair was fair. Rules were rules. But those same reasoned principles went out the window when they conflicted with Kirk’s best interest. Suddenly things weren’t so clear-cut; his black-and-white world had turned gray. In Kirk’s mind, Finch was a “good kid” who had saved up enough points to be given some leeway. He had essentially earned one free pass—or more precisely, a fifteen-thousand-dollar pass.
“So what time is Dad coming home?” Finch asked now, clearly thinking about Kirk, too.
“Sometime this afternoon,” I said, pulling my phone out of my purse to check the flight information, just as a text came in from him that read: Hey, do we have anything on the calendar tonight?
No. Why? I wrote back.
Thinking about staying another night. Getting a migraine and just want to lie down. Will take an early flight tomorrow.
Okay. Feel better, I wrote back, relieved that I could put off our conversation about Tom and the money a little longer. I gave Finch the update on his father’s return, and he just nodded.
“Does Dad know you and Polly broke up?” I asked.
“I dunno,” he said. “I don’t think I mentioned it.”
“Have you talked to her?
“Not much….She’s nuts, Mom.”
I felt myself tense up, having long noticed that this was something men (and boys, obviously) did after any breakup. Dub their exes “crazy.” Discredit them, make it seem as if the men were lucky to have gotten out of the relationship. In fact, Julie had once told me it was the most common narrative in the aftermath of a divorce—the justification men used for their own misconduct. A form of misogyny.
“Don’t say that, Finch,” I said.
“Sorry, Mom. But there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know….She really can be a bitch—”
“Finch!” I said. “Don’t ever call girls names like that. It’s so incredibly demeaning.” I wanted to add, Have you learned nothing from all of this?—but I stopped myself. It was the most we’d talked in such a long time, and I didn’t want it to end on a sour note.
“Sorry, Mom,” he said again as he turned onto our street. “I just lost a lot of respect for her recently. Ya know?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I know how that can be.”
* * *
—
A SHORT TIME after we arrived home, Finch found me in my office.