She says nothing and keeps driving, for a second making me think she didn’t hear me.
“He was different than other men I’d dated.” She sighs. “Smart. It made me feel special that he picked me.”
I feel my heart break more, if possible.
“You didn’t need Dad to make you special,” I whisper.
She shrugs. “I was working all the time, just so we had money, and I mean any money at all, and I guess I couldn’t really understand why he couldn’t go out and get a job too, just to help me, instead of sitting in there writing every day. But I never said anything, you know? I’d just come home in a really bad mood, and I was angry a lot.
“And the truth is—I’m not just saying this to make you feel bad, because I really don’t want you to—when you got older, it was hard because you two were so much alike. You could talk about books, and you had the same crazy imagination and even talk in a similar way, and I just . . . couldn’t keep up. I didn’t even have the energy to, if I could. I guess it felt sometimes like he was always the good one. And I was always the bad one.”
We just drive for a minute, letting it hang there. What can you say that’ll make up for years? Nothing adequate.
I just mumble: “It’s not like that. I can see now, I was really little, and I was just, I was dumb. I didn’t realize.”
She nods and says quietly, “I know.”
We sit there for a minute, and she says, “He called to explain about the book.”
“How could he possibly explain that?”
“I understood. He was mad at me when he wrote that, Scarlett. I was mad at him too, obviously. It wasn’t a good situation.”
“And you just said it was okay? Is it okay?”
“That’s not an easy question to answer, really.” She keeps her eyes steady on the road. “I mean, yeah, it’s fine. I guess there’s a lot I have to worry about that’s more important than some character based on me ten years ago in a book I won’t read. I’m much more upset that he’d do that to you.”
I stare out the window.
“You’re wrong, though,” I say. “I’m more like you than like him.”
She shakes her head.
“I am! I work really, really hard. Not at school, but at the stuff I like to do. My eyes are gray like yours. Our voices sound exactly the same on the phone too. Even people we’re really good friends with can’t tell the difference.”
My voice wavers a little bit as I see her start to tear up, but I keep going.
“And I know now how important it is to try your best to understand people. Even people you don’t like, or people you don’t have anything in common with. And that’s all from you. All of that stuff? That means you’re smart as hell. Dad’s the stupid one.”
She swallows hard.
“I’m really sorry, Mom.”
A tear rolls down her cheek, and she brusquely wipes it away with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara.
“You don’t have to apologize for anything,” she says. “I’m so proud of you—exactly who you are, every single day.”
When I get home, for the first time since Ruth died, I feel like writing. But not the way I have been. I always rush through stuff. When I read the old installments now, everything seems so flippant, surface-y. Especially the first fic: I cringe when I reread it. How could I have been so catty? And if I stop writing like that, can I even write at all? It’ll be hard, but I have to try.
Chapter 25
The Ordinaria
The Mullens had no language for it until this year. Its anniversary, if you’d call it that, was coming up—six years—and they’d suddenly begun to discuss it for reasons that Sheila did not like. That night, for instance, over their usual haphazard dinner schedules. She ate at six, then he came home and ate at ten; sometimes she sat with him and had some wine.
Steve sighed heavily, put down his fork down, and said, “It’s been . . . you know . . . so long that we’ve been trying to come to terms with the thing.”
They referred to it as “the thing,” as in the drive-in movie or some as-of-yet unidentified bumps you’d anxiously notice on your body.
They hadn’t said her name in the house for four years. They’d never verbally agreed outright not to, but to say it out loud to each other seemed crude, like an unexpected emotional slur tossed at the other person.
Steve had become a workaholic, spending fifty-five hours a week at the lab developing and then overseeing the global release of the Miss Ordinarias. But, blind with grief he hadn’t adequately dealt with, he’d accidentally wound up giving the new products dangerously high levels of empathy, feelings, and life, to somehow make up for the fact that his daughter’s had been taken away. Some he focused on more than others.