He paced a few steps, ran a hand over his face. “Why don’t you trust me? I’m not that same guy anymore, Lay.”
Knowing that didn’t make the situation any less outrageous. And besides, he was getting all bent out of shape because of a meeting with Devin. I wasn’t the one that would be rolling around naked with my ex in front of dozens of people for some movie that the whole world would see. I thought I was content to let Trip make his own decision about it, but obviously, I was fooling myself. So was he. “I do trust you, but why would you even want to do it? You hate Bert; you want nothing to do with Jenna. It just feels like you’re trying to punish me somehow by even considering this role. I’ve already apologized for the mixup five years ago; the fact of the matter is that I’m here with you now. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Aaand get ready for some more inappropriate brain-vomit in three… two… one…
“Your mother was right. You don’t know how to forgive. Maybe I deserve a little of that, but this is going too far. I’m not your father.”
The look Trip shot me froze me in my tracks. “Now you’re bringing my father into this? Way to go for the trifecta, there, Lay.”
I knew I was opening a whole new can of worms at what was most likely not the most opportune moment. But screw it. I didn’t want to waste a good argument. We weren’t normally fighters. It wasn’t every day that we had a big blowout to hash out all our crap. Well, prior to the past few days, anyway.
May as well lay everything out on the table.
“You say you can’t forgive your father even though you know what it must have been like for him. You know what it’s like to have that weakness. But I think that wake was a really good first step. You made sure that it was beautiful.”
“I did that for my mother.”
“You did that for you. To say goodbye properly. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s cathartic.”
He stopped pacing around the room and looked at me like I’d just shat in his Corn Flakes. “You know what? Don’t go standing there psycho-analyzing me, Lay. That’s a shitty thing to do. I could toss out a ton of jargon to describe your fucked-upness, but I’m not doing that to you. I don’t try talking you into forgiving your mother; why is it so important to you that I forgive my father? Why can’t you just let it be what it is? Why can’t you just let it go?”
“Why can’t you? Stop shutting me out. Stop treating me like I’m constantly betraying you. Stop punishing me!”
“Stop. Pushing. Me!” He turned and stomped a few steps away, tearing at his hair with his fists. He flung his hands out to his sides and threw his head toward the ceiling as he let out with a screaming, frustrated, “Fuuuuuck!”
He bent in half, braced his hands against his knees and took a cleansing breath, coming down, refocusing. It was enough of a tantrum to wipe him out, and I watched his torso slump in fatigue. He was trying to keep his rage in check as he turned back to me and said in a measured voice, “Just think about it. We can’t change the stuff we have no control over, remember?”
“What do you mean?”
“It means that I can’t change the fact that my father was an asshole. You can’t change the fact that your mother left. I can’t control what the tabloids say about me—or you—and it shouldn’t matter what they say anyway. I can’t control who gets cast in a movie and I can’t change the list of women that I’ve slept with. I can’t stop the fans from asking for autographs. I can’t stop a photographer from taking a picture. We can’t control other people’s behavior. We can only control our own.”
I couldn’t believe he was content to just throw me to the wolves. I wasn’t used to being tabloid fodder, he knew that. Because we couldn’t change what happened meant that we should just do nothing about it? That was his ideology, not mine. “That’s a bit of a cop-out, don’t you think?”
His newly-found calm cracked at that as his voice rose a notch higher. “A cop-out? I’ve been living my life by those words for three years now. You’re going to stand there and tell me the theory I base my life around is nothing but a cop-out?”
“No. I didn’t mean it like that. What I was trying to say is that it’s a little too convenient to write everything off to a simple catch phrase. Sometimes, you have to get down in the mud and get your hands dirty. Sometimes, you have to actually figure some stuff out for yourself. And sometimes, you need to ask for help.”
“I don’t need anyone’s help. I’ve been doing just fine on my own.”