The Mother-in-Law(24)
“The process?” I blink hard. “What does that even mean?”
“Don’t you and your dad have processes around money? Like when we got married, you asked him for money then.”
“I never asked him for anything. He offered to pay for our wedding.”
“But you knew he would offer. That’s a process. Kind of.” Ollie smiles a little, but it slides away when I don’t return it. “Listen, I’m sorry. You’re right, I shouldn’t have involved you.”
“You shouldn’t have involved yourself.” I look at the dashboard. “Your mother was right. We’re adults, we’re smart. We need to take responsibility for our own lives now. I don’t want to ask them for money again. Not for a house. Not for a car. Not for a litre of milk. Okay?”
“Okay just hang on a min—”
“I’m serious, Ollie. No more asking for money. This is a deal breaker for me.”
“A deal breaker?”
“Yes.”
Ollie takes a deep breath, lets his head fall back against the head rest. Silence hangs between us and I can feel Ollie wrestling with it. It’s hard; I get that. It’s instinctive to reach out to your parents for help when you need it, everyone does it. It’s as familiar and comfortable as getting dressed in the morning. But at some point in adulthood, you have to teach yourself a new way to be. It’s infuriating that Diana had to be the one to teach me that.
Finally Ollie nods. “Okay, fine. I’ll never ask them for money again.”
“Even if we’re poor and starving and can’t find a crumb between us?”
“Even then.” He gives me a resigned smile. “There is no one I’d rather starve with than you.”
We laugh and I find myself impressed with the speed in which Ollie came around. I wonder if it’s because, in the back of his mind, he knows that we will never have to starve. He knows that at some point a huge amount of money will be coming our way, more money than we could possibly know how to spend.
And to access it, all we need to do is wait for someone to die.
13: DIANA
THE PAST . . .
The kids have barely left the house before Tom starts pouting. I knew this would happen, with the same certainty that he knew I was going to turn down Ollie’s request for money. When you’ve being married for as long as we have, while you may hope for different results, you stop expecting them. And, if you want a happy marriage, you have to look to the other things, the things you do see eye to eye on. Lucky for me, when it comes to Tom, there are many of these.
Tom sits heavily in his wingback chair.
I hold up a hand, palm forward. “I know what you’re going to say, Tom, so please save it.”
“Did I say anything?” He lets old a long, world-weary sigh.
“I don’t like being the bad guy, Tom. You know that.”
He shifts in his seat, his expression resigned rather than annoyed. “I do know that.”
As far as arguments between Tom and I go, this is as heated as they get. Once upon a time, Tom had more fire to him, but now there’s only a handful of things that really make him fly off the handle. Traffic. People leaving lights on around the house. Racism. You know, the important things. Today, despite our differing views, Tom and I respect where the other is coming from. Tom grew up in the outskirts of Melbourne where the suburbs meets the country, a low socio-economic area even before he was orphaned and had to move further out to live with his grandparents. He was schooled in a rough area, and left at fourteen to do his apprenticeship with a local plumber. Once qualified, he found himself a job on a residential development project, befriended the owners of the development and suggested they try their hand at retirement communities—a suggestion so profitable he wound up a business partner in one of the largest residential development companies in Australia.
“I would have thought that you of all people would understand that you don’t have to be given a handout to succeed, Tom.”
“But things are different now,” he says. “Everyone is going to university, working for free to get experience, using their private school networks. It’s harder than in my day.”
But of course this is just part of the waffle that private school parents tell each other to justify the exorbitant fees they pay. After Tom badgered me for years, I finally relented and allowed Ollie and Nettie to attend schools with term fees high enough to feed an entire Afghan village for a year, but years later, I’m still doubtful as to whether the schools were any better than the local ones. What I am sure about is that giving children handouts—no not children, adults!—after they have already been privately educated and given every advantage in life, simply to keep pushing them further ahead from those who are trying to make their way without assistance, is not the right thing to do for anyone involved.
“It’s always been hard, Tom. You were hungrier for it than our kids are, that’s all.”
Unlike Tom, I grew up in a fairly middle-class family. We didn’t have the kind of wealth Tom and I live with now, but we were comfortably off. The fact is, I wouldn’t have been hungry for it either if my circumstances hadn’t taken a drastic dive in my youth.
“I think Ollie could do with being a little hungry. A little hunger is good for young people. It was the making of you.”