Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(62)

“This is the part that she would hate, and I know she’d hate it because during our first-ever conversation, she told me that she didn’t want to be thought of as some wise old person, only still alive to teach us all valuable lessons. But maybe the most valuable thing Ruth taught me is the importance of trying to understand people who are different from you, even though it’s so much harder than writing them off, because it might make you admit something to yourself that’s painful. Sometimes you won’t be able to understand, and that’s okay. It’s the trying, and realizing the importance of trying, that makes a person really special.”

I finish reading, my paper blowing a little in the wind at its well-worn crease. To my surprise, almost everybody is in tears, including some of Ruth’s family that I’ve never met and Dawn. Even Avery looks a little tearful.

I flinch when I see my dad in the very last row, sitting straight up like he knows he’s in trouble and doesn’t want to make it worse. As I climb down from the podium, it’s over. Everyone disperses. I stay to help fold and stack the chairs.

Dad jumps in front of me as I carry some chairs to a van, saying, “Scarlett, I know you’re furious with me, and I completely understand why.”

I say nothing.

“I was just . . . I was a different person. I was really unhappy. So was your mother. And it just happened. I swear I tried to take those lines out, but the editors insisted I leave them in, keep everything as pure and raw as the original manuscript was at the time.”

Puuuuuuke.

“I really . . . I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Please, you need to forgive me. I’m devastated.”

There are a lot of things I could say to him. Like: Yeah, you were devastated when you got a book deal. You were devastated when it got optioned by a major movie studio. And you were really devastated in that online magazine profile that included glossy photos of your apartment and your new wife and daughter, in which I was not mentioned once. But if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that life is short.

“You’re not a good writer,” I say and then walk away.



In the car on the ride home, I feel like a raw nerve. Once the floodgate opens, it turns out it’s hard to shut it off. It’s begun to rain. Dawn keeps looking at me nervously, like she has for the last few days, checking to see that I haven’t disappeared or died or something.

“I really hope this doesn’t ruin your relationship with your dad,” she says tentatively.

“Wha—give me six months and maybe a frontal lobotomy, then tell me that.”

She nods. We drive in silence, and I flip the radio on. “Fire and Rain,” James Taylor, in case I wasn’t already in the mood to weep.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“I asked Dad once, but it occurred to me that I never asked you. . . . Why did you marry him?”

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.”