Georgie, All Along (62)

“Why’d you do all that?” she asks. It’s the most incisive question possible, slipped right into the silence I left open too long.

I clear my throat again, all off track. I don’t much want to tell her about the why.

But what questions she asks, I’ll try to answer. I owe her that.

“Pretty likely story, I’d say. Every prominent family needs a square peg, a black sheep. I’m that, for the Fannings.”

She narrows her eyes, but not in a suspicious way. In a waiting way. I don’t want to tell her all of it—the parts I’m ashamed of, and the parts the man she’s now working for should be ashamed of. But I can tell her some.

“My dad,” I begin, ignoring the way my teeth seem to want to clench together at the thought of talking about him. “He’s a guy who cares a lot about reputation. His own, and the whole family’s. He’s successful, and my grandfather was successful, and so was my great-grandfather. He had a lot of ideas about how his kids should behave.”

How I should behave. He was harder on me than he was on Evan, certainly harder on me than he was on Olivia. He seemed to have a deep-down sense that I’d come out wrong, that I needed a firmer hand. More rules, more discipline. Whatever passive impatience he showed to my mom or my siblings, he turned to active cruelty when it came to me.

Georgie’s watching me close, and I can see her mind working. I wonder if, with Paul and Shyla for parents, this is almost impossible for her to understand. But I keep going anyway.

“I hated his rules.” I hope she hears the way I mean that hated. I was so angry, all the time, like there was a wild animal inside me. “I hated how all he cared about was the way things looked. Going to the same church service every week, getting a family photo taken at the same time every year, being at the inn for events. Always dressed a certain way, always smiling, no matter what he and I had said to each other in the car on the way over.”

“You fought?”

I shake my head, dropping my eyes and shoving my hands in my pockets. Fighting isn’t the right word for it. We were a powder keg, me and him; it was more complicated than simple fighting. I can’t think of anything kind we ever said to each other.

“All I cared about back then was messing up what he cared about. He wanted things in our family to look a certain way, then I pretty much wanted them to look the opposite. That’s why I did all that shit. To be petty. To hurt him. To make him look bad around here.”

“Levi,” she says, and that way of saying my name is nice, too. “I’m sure you didn’t mean—”

“I did,” I interrupt her. “I own it.”

She presses her lips together, obviously stopping herself from arguing. Instead, she asks another one of those incisive questions.

“Is that why you dropped out of school?”

I swallow. “I didn’t drop out of school. My dad sent me to a different school, out in western Virginia.”

“Oh.”

Every part of me is begging her not to ask another question, because I don’t want to try to answer anything about this. It wasn’t so much a school, after all, as it was a “facility,” a place where families—and sometimes judges—sent kids who kept causing trouble. The learning part was secondary to everything else, and everything else was basically a bunch of troubled teenaged boys whaling on each other while the people in charge of teaching us “discipline” pretended not to notice. If I was fucked up before I went there, it had nothing on how I was when I finally got out.

“Your mom was okay with that?”

Well, at least she didn’t ask about the school.

I shrug. “My mom left the running of things to my dad. She’s not the most involved of parents. I doubt she noticed I was gone.”

She furrows her brow, looking down at her feet.

“But then you came back.” There’s a thread of hope in her voice, as though we’re coming to the part where I turned it all around. But it was a lot of mess before I got to that point, including the one I made the first time I finally got up the courage to see my family again after I’d left that place. The worst mess, made all in one night, and the reason I don’t see any of them anymore.

Even though I try hard not to, I can still see my dad that night in my mind’s eye. His face blazing red with anger, his fists balled. I’d thought, I’m killing him, just from all the effort he’s making not to hit me, and for a terrible split second, I couldn’t decide what I wanted more. Him gone, or him finally giving in and getting me gone.

You are a poison to this family, he’d said to me. Leave this town and don’t come back, ever, not even on the day they put me in the ground.

“My dad was right about some things,” I say, forcing that night out of my mind, focusing on everything I learned after it. “A man’s reputation does matter, and I’d pretty much ruined mine over the years. I spent a long time getting people to see me different so I could make a living around here. I run a business now, one I’m lucky to have. I’ve got a house that I probably don’t deserve but that I take good care of. I keep to myself, and I try to be responsible. To make sure people see me a certain way.”

She furrows her brow. “My parents don’t—”

“I know. But I didn’t know, not when they walked in on us. Or I couldn’t get to the knowing, if that makes sense. I—” I break off, shaking my head. “It was old wounds, opening up. I panicked. Your dad, he’s one of the only people who passed on good words about my work around here when no one else but Carlos would. I owe him.”