Until the Day I Die(5)
I want Shorie to start fresh too. She’s already on her way, with a full ride from National Women in STEM, along with career and mentorship opportunities that the organization will provide. She’s got a chance to really make something of herself and her talents—if she’ll just trust me and fly on her own.
But if she won’t fly, I’m going to give her a push. As I see it, that’s my job as her mother. And once I’ve done that—once I’ve gotten everything at Jax squared away and the company sold and my daughter launched into the world—then maybe, at last, I can focus on other things.
Like how I am going to survive the rest of my life without my husband.
5
SHORIE
Ben Fleming wants to sleep with my mother.
Sorry, no—I should just say it right out: Ben Fleming wants to fuck my mother. And OH MY GOD, just thinking those words makes me feel like I need to take a thousand scalding showers and then lock myself in a sensory deprivation chamber.
At first, I thought I was imagining it because of all Mom’s other strange behaviors. The blank way she looks at me, her forgetfulness, the constant working—and when she’s not doing that, the constant sleeping. But now that I think about it, these past couple of months, it does seem like Ben and Mom have gotten . . . tighter. I watched them the whole ride down from Birmingham from the back seat of Ben’s truck. They chatted and laughed and periodically touched each other’s arms. Oh, my goodness, look! There’s a deer on the side of the highway eating grass! How amazing! I must touch your arm for the hundredth time! I wondered if Sabine would’ve minded if she’d been there.
Anyway, just add it to the list of suck: my dad is dead, my mom is making me go to college instead of letting me stay home and work at Jax, and now there’s uncomfortable parental flirting. That last one, the flirting, doesn’t just suck; it actually fills me with Hulk-level rage. That the two of them can joke and laugh like one didn’t just lose a best friend and one a husband mere months ago infuriates me. And do they not care that I’m right there, watching them? It’s fucking disrespectful is what it is.
Now, standing in my new dorm room, organizing my books, I am so knotted up with fury and fear and homesickness that I can’t open my mouth. And even though the thought does occur to me, briefly, that I may possibly be overreacting to this Ben-and-Mom thing because I’m actually angry at Mom about other stuff, I shut it off and slam books onto the shelf instead.
Coincidentally the one I’m putting up now is my copy of The Emotional Dictionary. It was a graduation gift from Daisy’s mom. Clearly she was trying to tell me something. Like that I’m maybe emotionally constipated or something. Which I’m not at all. Just because our culture expects girls to emote all over the place, that doesn’t mean we should if we don’t feel like it. I have emotions, plenty of them, and I can show them anytime I want. I cried when I learned about Euler’s Identity, as a matter of fact. Right there in the third row of Ms. Blaylock’s trigonometry class.
Just to prove to myself that I’m perfectly comfortable with my emotions, I list out the ones I happen to be feeling right now. For each one, I slam another book on the shelf. Melancholy, BAM! Despondency, BAM! Misery, BAM!
Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother. And I know what I’m thinking about my own maternal flesh and blood is disgusting and offensive, but it’s the truth. It’s not that hard to tell when a man wants a woman. Well, correction: as long as I’m not the woman in question. That, I’m not so good at.
And there’s this: My mom is more attractive than your average suburban mom. She has long Disney-princess dark-brown hair and the bone structure of a runway model. Unfortunately she happens to dress herself like a color-blind toddler. And puts her hair in one of those midlevel, mom-style ponytails, scraped back and twisted with a scrunchie. She may be old (forty-eight?), a mad workaholic, and annoying as crap, but she would be a catch for any man her age. I guess. But it’s way too soon for her to even think about moving on. Way too soon for flirting. Especially with Ben Fleming.
And I don’t even know where she finds scrunchies anymore.
I load more books onto the shelf. BAM! BAM! BAM! I shouldn’t be here, moving into this dorm, wasting my time going to dumb-ass English comp classes that I could literally sail through even if I were in a coma. I should be in Birmingham, working at Jax, doing what my dad did, taking care of everything he used to take care of. Isn’t that the point of college anyway? To figure out your future? My dad already gave me my future.
My senior year, instead of playing lacrosse after school, I went to Jax every day and shadowed him. He showed me everything: the back and front end stuff, the database of all Jax’s users, and the way the servers keep the whole show running smoothly. He explained Scrum, the work-managing system they followed to build Jax. And Slack, the software they used for assignments.
Dad also had his own quirky organizational system. He didn’t use the calendar on his phone, or any other kind of personal-assistant app. He carried around a journal, slim and bound in coffee-colored leather, where he kept a record of everything—every problem he encountered, every to-do list, even ideas he had for new features. He jotted little poems to me and my mother in it, sometimes those dumb motivational quotes. He got a new one every month, and at the end of the month he put the old one on the shelf in his office at home.