“Because it feels right, because I feel like I’m supposed to be with him.” I didn’t think he needed to know about Nana’s letter. That I believed she’d been involved in getting Jack and me back together. He’d never consider that anything but a coincidence.
“And you think if you give up your life and your dreams to follow him around he’ll still respect you? That he won’t get tired of feeling responsible for you all the time? He’s not giving up his life for you, but you seem pretty wishy-washy about sacrificing not only your future, but this town’s respect, and frankly my respect, and our family name.”
Blood drained from my head leaving a buzzing emptiness in its wake. A sharp prick of hurt stuck me in the back of the throat, and my eyes welled with tears. I pulled the paddle out of the water and laid it across me.
“Joey—” I tried, but it came out a whisper.
“I’m sorry, Keri Ann.” Joey stopped paddling too and reached out the end to grab a hold of my kayak. We paused in the middle of the waterway. It was the dead of night, but the moon was like a spotlight on earth. His features looked pained. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “But this is the way I feel. I don’t think he’s using you. He’s seems like a pretty genuine guy. But I can’t see the two of you together. I just can’t. And I think in the end, you’ll be the one hurt.” He raked a hand through his hair. “God, do you even remember Mom and Dad? Mom danced, did you know that? I loved watching her dance. It was magical to me. She’d take me with her sometimes if I didn’t have school. She was amazing. People told me she was good enough to be in New York, dancing as her career, but she met Dad and fell in love. He promised her they would find a city that had a dance company. He kept promising, promising. Then she had us and eventually all she wanted to find was a teaching job. If she couldn’t dance for herself, then she’d teach others. But no. Dad kept fucking moving, and she eventually gave up. She just gave up.”
I wanted to tell Joey this had nothing to do with me and Jack, but he’d never talked about Mom and Dad, and I wanted to soak it in like a desert rain.
Joey let go of my kayak and started paddling again. Slow and forceful strokes. I followed, pulling my paddle through the inky water.
“When I was nine or so,” Joey said as I pulled up close, “you were twirling around the kitchen in this apartment we’d just moved into in Wilmington. You were so little.” He smiled. “We were there for some other deal Dad was working on. A sales contract or something. And mom, she … she started crying out of the blue. She was crying while you were dancing around the kitchen. I didn’t know what to do. I thought we’d upset her, or something, or you’d done something wrong. I knew she’d been trying to get a job since we’d arrived, so my nine year old mind wanted to help her feel better, and I told her she should teach you to dance. She just looked at me, sobbing, and then stood up and went and pulled out all of her dancing stuff, leotards and ballet shoes, and threw them in this big metal garbage can that was outside.
“She threw all her stuff away,” he said, shaking his head as if he still didn’t believe it. “The way she was acting was so scary I screamed at her to stop, and you were crying at all the commotion. Before I knew it, she had set the whole lot on fire. The neighbors called the fire department. It was awful.”
I sat in stunned silence. Tears streaked my cheeks. I felt the cool sting of the salt in the breeze.
We’d both stopped paddling again.
Joey was far away in his mind, his eyes glazed as he remembered. “Dad came home a few hours later celebrating. He’d just ‘closed’ the deal or whatever. He didn’t even know anything had changed or that anything happened that day. It all just went on business as usual. But everything was different. God, she was so different. She wasn’t sad so much as she was just … nothing. I hated it. It was awful. And I hated that Dad never even noticed. I don’t even know if they ever discussed it, the fact that she wasn’t looking for work anymore. That she never danced again.” He took a deep breath. “I look at you, and you remind me of Mom so much. The mom I remember when I was younger. You are creative and honest and good and beautiful, and if it is at all within my power to save you from a situation like that, where you’ll give yourself up for someone else, then by God, I have to try.”
He looked at me, his normally blue eyes dark in our current black and white world. But they glittered unshed tears. He let go of his tightly-held paddle with one hand and clenched and unclenched a fist.
I reached for his hand and held it in mine. My heart felt like it was breaking. I’d never known. I was thankful not to have experienced her pain so keenly, but immeasurably more sad I had no memory of it at all. I had no images of the magical and dancing mom Joey so obviously remembered in his mind.