Things You Save in a Fire(10)

“Bullshit. That woman made you. She gave you life.”

“She left me. And she left you, too, buddy, by the way!”

“Are you still mad about that?”

“Yes. No. Both.”

“You can’t stay mad forever.”

“Wanna bet?”

“You’ve got to move on.”

“You moved on with a new wife. I can’t get a new mother.”

“True. But your old one is knocking on your door.”

In a way, I’d felt abandoned again when my dad started dating Carol. And I won’t say that Carol was awful, because she wasn’t technically a bad person, though she was a little prissy for my taste.

The point was, my dad and I had been lonely together for years, like it was our thing. Like we were in a special club of two: People Abandoned by Diana Hanwell. But then he found Carol, an administrator at his school—a divorcée, in her pastel culottes and espadrilles—and then, of all things, he decided to marry her. That was that. He couldn’t be in our loneliness club if he wasn’t lonely anymore.

He left.

Or maybe I kicked him out.

But some part of me flat-out refused to leave that club. It was the principle of the thing. In some funny way, I was still standing up for my teenage self.

Because if I didn’t, who would?

Now, here was my dad going over to my mom’s side. “Why are you advocating for her?” I demanded. “She left you! You loved her, and you were good to her, and she cheated on you.”

He knew all this, of course.

“These things happen, Cassie,” he said. “Life is messy. When you’re older you’ll understand.”

The fact that he wasn’t mad made me madder. “I hope not.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” he said.

What was he doing? Was he trying to model behavior for me? Was this some kind of teachable moment about growth and change? It seemed so patronizing. I might not know everything about forgiveness, but I sure as hell knew you didn’t get there by pretending earth-shattering betrayals had been no big deal.

Your wife cheating on you is a big deal. Your mom abandoning you is a big deal.

I wasn’t going to insult my teenage self and all she’d been through by just shrugging and saying, Nobody’s perfect.

“I think you’ve forgotten how bad it was,” I said. We’d eaten SpaghettiOs for a solid year.

“I probably have,” my dad said.

“Well, I haven’t.”

“Don’t you know that expression, ‘The best revenge is forgetting’?”

“Seems to me like the best revenge would be revenge.”

“Tell me you’re not plotting revenge on your mother.”

What would that even look like? It was far too late for revenge. “Of course not,” I said, though, in a practical sense, by keeping my distance for so long, that’s what I’d been doing for years. “I’m just refusing to give her a pass.”

“Sweetheart,” my dad said tenderly. “Let it go.”

“She’s the one who called me!”

“It’s been a decade.”

“A decade I’ve spent building a nice little life for myself—in Texas.”

“She needs you.”

“I won’t dismantle my entire life and move across the country for a woman I’m not even close to.”

“I think she’d like to be closer.”

“Too bad. She can’t just demand closeness. She gave up the right to be close to me when she left.”

“She’s not demanding. She’s asking.”

“I can’t believe you’re defending her!”

My dad was quiet for a second. Then he said, “You know, there are people who have no choice but to spend their lives avoiding their mothers. People whose mothers are mean, or toxic, or drunk. People whose mothers hurt them every time they let their guard down. But you are not one of those people. Your mother is actually a nice lady.”

That was a lot of verbiage for my normally strong-but-silent dad. Practically a soliloquy. “How can you say that after what she did to you?”

“People make mistakes.”

“You can’t make me forgive her,” I said, barely able to believe how petulant I sounded.

“You’re right,” my dad said. “I can’t make you.”

For a split second, I thought I’d won.

Then he went on. “But you’re going to go anyway.”

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“I’m right,” he said. “Because you were raised to do the right thing. And she’s the one who raised you.”





Four


THE NEXT MORNING, I was on shift by 6:30 A.M., the cut on my hand bandaged, ready to keep plowing forward with my life.

But the captain must have been watching for me, because as soon as I walked through the doors, she said, over the loudspeaker, “Hanwell. In my office. Now.”

I was passing Hernandez right then, and he crossed himself at the tone of her voice.

I walked to her office all chastened, with my head tilted slightly down, but just as I stepped through her door, my phone went off.