I Liked My Life(69)
“I’ve postponed most of my travel until Eve leaves in the fall, but a trip came up, only for a night, and I was hoping you’d stay at the house.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll pay you, of course.”
“When?” she asks, completely ignoring the compensation component.
“I’ll leave Sunday night and be back Monday in time for dinner.”
“Is cooking Monday’s dinner part of the deal?”
This woman is completely uninhibited. Her brain isn’t constrained by the same filter as mine. I wonder what it’s like to say whatever comes to mind without worrying about long-term implications, risk, legalities. At least the joke is obvious this time. “Yes,” I tease. “Everything from scratch, please.” She laughs. “No, of course not. You can even leave Monday morning. I just don’t want Eve alone overnight.”
“We have tutoring Monday afternoon either way, so I’ll be back then to make sure everything’s all right.”
“That’d be great. If you’re still there when I get home, maybe we can all grab a bite or something.”
Am I asking her on a date? With my daughter? I’ve officially lost it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Madeline
As the one influencing both ends of the call I know Rory and Brady weren’t purposely flirting, but Rory questioned Brady’s intentions with dinner Monday and Brady hung up wearing a boyish grin I haven’t seen in a long time. I take it as a good sign they’re exploring the possibility of each other’s interest, especially given Rory’s commitment to Eve. Rory craves the opportunity to mother someone as much as Eve needs to be mothered. It wasn’t my plan, but Rory fell in love with Eve first, and I couldn’t be more thrilled for that.
Eve doesn’t stay away from my journal, but I’m certain she’ll trust her instinct the next time I send a warning flare. And she’s shrewder now. She washes her hands before picking it up and takes great care flipping the pages, cautious to prevent further damage to the binding. No matter how certain she is Brady won’t come home, she no longer reads in common areas of the house. Instead, she goes to her bedroom, draws the shades, and locks the door. It’s such a furtive process that it’s a bit anticlimactic when everything is secure and she starts to read. Looking on, you’d expect her to shoot up heroin.
Unlike Brady, Eve doesn’t read the entries in order. She leafs through the pages until a word catches her eye. Once she picks, she reads about my day over and over, considering every line, imagining where I sat while I wrote it, picturing what I wore that day. A woman’s read. Then she writes in her journal, either directly about what I wrote or about what she thinks I secretly meant. She writes beautifully, searching for both my truth and hers. The journal is more potent to Eve than any drug.
I work to keep her away from the darker entries, though I’m not always watching at the right moment. I did my legacy a disservice leaving such a paper trail behind. I wrote honestly, but not all-inclusively, so Eve gathers insight into my anguish and imaginings, without any resolution or context. After a year of regurgitating the blah-blah details of my day, I tired of documenting the mundane. I challenged myself to dig deeper, to ask hard questions: Where am I weak? What do I regret? How can I atone? She’s convinced the answer to my death lies between the lines. She’s wrong, but I can’t conceive a way to let her know it.
I watch as she flips through the pages, circling around an entry written while I was angry with her. Mega-angry. Questioning-where-I’d-gone-wrong-as-a-mother angry. Eve and her friends had been caught toilet-papering the home of a less popular girl in their class, Jenny. The reason for the attack was as heartless as Jenny having no friends. The poor thing was an easy target, and my daughter was complicit in taking advantage of that. It was the most trouble Eve ever landed in, a night she learned I take a hard stance on anything intentionally cruel. As punishment, I volunteered her services to public works for highway trash pickup the following four Saturdays. Eve had the audacity to fight back.
“That is soooooo unfair,” she yelled, jutting her chin out defiantly. “Kara’s mom grounded her Friday night. That’s it.”
“Have you met Kara’s mother?” I railed. “Scratch that—have you met Kara? She’s never been interested in anything she wasn’t the star of in her entire life. She’s a meanie. You can be friends with who you want, but don’t expect me to skip along with the consequences. And since you feel compelled to talk back, your stint on trash duty is now five weekends.”
“Mom, that doesn’t even make sense. Who gets punished by, like, picking up trash?”
“I’ll tell you who. Teenagers who live in this house and have the nerve to treat other people like garbage. How dare you hurt this poor girl’s feelings. What the heck were you thinking?” I paused for an answer, but Eve just shook her head. “Do you really believe you’re better than Jenny because you have a group of callous, bitchy friends by your side? You have every advantage in life, and this is how you behave? Honest to God, this sort of rebellion is my worst nightmare.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal,” Eve grumbled, staring at the kitchen tile.
“Not a big deal to whom, Eve? To you? It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal because you weren’t supposed to get caught. Is that it? Because I talked to Jenny’s mother and it was a tremendously big deal in their home. Jenny has been crying all day. She refuses to go to school tomorrow. She says she gets teased relentlessly by you girls.”