Georgie, All Along (97)
I swallow thickly, knowing already where he’s going with this.
“We never gave you a life like that, Georgie, and we didn’t intend to. We tried to give you a life with different kinds of advantages.”
Two months back here, two months poring over that notebook and being with Bel and falling in love with Levi, and I can see all those advantages clearly now. They encouraged me to make friends, to try new things, to make mistakes. They gave me the space to be a blank, a mess; they never treated me like their puppet. They gave me what I needed but never told me what I wanted. They made sure I had a place to come when I was finally ready to figure it out.
They loved me, no matter what. No strings attached.
I wipe at the tears rolling down my cheeks, mumbling my messy, inadequate gratitude. My mom scoots her chair closer to mine and puts her arm around my shoulders, squeezing as best she can.
“You can’t be everything to Levi, Georgie, same as your dad and I could never be everything for you,” she says. “You were right to give him that time. You’ve got to let him take it for a few days.”
“And be there for him when he’s ready,” Dad says. “Have faith.”
He picks up the banjo again, strums a gentle tune. Mom leans back in her chair again, and it’s as though they’ve reset themselves, right back to the way they were when I got home.
“Anyway, you’ve got plenty to do,” Mom says, breaking the silence.
I look over at her, raise my eyebrows.
“All that stuff you figured out you wanted, right? It wasn’t all about Levi.” She waves a hand. “We’ll do some crafts together. Go see that precious little baby. You can help your dad with the shutter out front. Go dancing, if you want.”
My heart fills, aches, at what she’s giving me.
Something she and my dad have given me all my life. Something I’ve always taken for granted.
She’s giving me something for the moment.
A soft place to land.
Chapter 22
Levi
The first time I ever got in trouble—real trouble, outside-of-the-house trouble—I was eleven years old. It was a Saturday, and back then Saturdays were important days for my dad when it came to the inn. When the weather was good, like it was that day, he’d be out on the golf course, playing rounds with important guests, glad-handing and finding ways to talk about his plans for the future of the property. A few times, I’d been on the course with him, dressed in stiff pants and uncomfortable shoes, a shirt to match his, meant to be looking like one of those future plans. But Dad learned pretty quick I was too sullen to be out there, too uninterested in shaking hands and smiling, and on that day, he’d taken Evan in with him.
On golf Saturdays, it wouldn’t ever just be golf—it’d also be dinner later at the inn, the whole family dressed nice and being seen by the guests. My dad would order for the table—one of the specials for each of us, so the dishes would come out and be seen, too, no matter if what was put in front of us was anything we’d actually want to eat. Good manners. Pleasant smiles. Frequent, welcome interruptions from people coming by to say hello, to shake my dad’s hand and compliment him.
A happy family, a successful family.
I hated those dinners.
That Saturday, I’d resolved not to be there; I’d been on fire with the idea of not being there. The week before, my dad had locked up my bike in the back shed, a punishment for coming home from school with a note from my teacher about my refusal to participate in some classroom activity or another. But I wasn’t going to let not having my bike stop me. Probably I would’ve busted open that shed and gotten it out, except that’d only prove he’d taken something from me that mattered. So I got out there on my own two feet that day, leaving the house while my mom was in the shower and the nanny was tied up with Olivia. I’d walked three and a half miles to the Food Lion that sat right on the border between Darentville and Iverley; I’d swiped a handful of plastic bags from an unmanned cashier’s station. Then I’d started filling them up with everything that struck me as the opposite of a special from The Shoreline’s kitchen. Doritos. A plastic tray of cupcakes, almost all frosting. A block of cheddar cheese. Bags of candy.
In the end, it was clear I didn’t expect to walk out unnoticed. I made it as far as the first automatic door before the store manager—who’d been watching me the whole time, it turned out—caught me by the collar of my T-shirt and led me back behind the customer service desk, where a couple people waiting in line to cash checks or buy lottery tickets tried not to stare. I sat in a plastic chair and calmly gave the manager the number of the front desk of The Shoreline.
I’d felt huge. Satisfied. Successful.
But I had to sit in that chair for a long time, as it turned out, and even an eleven-year-old will get to thinking after a while. I did miss my bike a whole lot, was the thing. I didn’t like cupcakes. The nanny we had at home was an all right person, and now she’d probably get an earful from my mom. Whoever answered that front desk phone, they probably hated having to go find my dad, having to tell him who was on the phone and why.
It’d be nice if all that thinking had stopped me from making trouble going forward, but the thing is, it’s not as if an eleven-year-old comes to the right conclusions all the time. Instead of stopping myself from making trouble, mostly what I did from that point on was figure out a way not to do any sort of thinking at all about what I’d done.