Page 153 of Reckless
“And you were.”
I looked up sharply.He went on before I could answer.
“The problem was not that it meant nothing.It was that it carried your meaning more loudly than hers.”
That was the cleanest version I’d heard yet.
And because it was my father, I knew he was right.I leaned back in my chair.“She said she wanted to be chosen.”
He agreed.“She’s smart which is why you chose her.”
I looked at him for a long second and realized, and too late, that my father would have known what to do was because my mother would have made him learn it or die trying.
“Then why is this so difficult,” I asked.
“Because,” he said, “you are used to being loved with no effort.She is asking whether you can just love her.”
That one got in deep.
Kelly had not wanted security from me.She had wanted to see whether I could stand in uncertainty and still choose her plainly.
I had failed that test spectacularly.I laughed once, quietly.“I did ruin it.”
My father’s gaze stayed steady.
“No,” he said.“You saw your flaws.It’s what a good marriage does to all of us.We get married and then realize all our problems in a way we never do when alone and then with that information we then choose to be better or not.”
I looked up.
He did not soften the line.“That is not the same as ruin, unless you intend to remain the man she saw.”
The room froze.If I went to her now, it could not be to say I was not that man.
I was.
It had to be to say I knew it now and was willing to stand in front of her without my usual behavior long to let her decide what to do with me.
That was much uglier and much more real.
My father, seeing enough of that move across my face, took his first sip of tea.
“Then go speak plainly,” he said.
I searched him.“You say that like it’s easy.”
“No.”He set the glass down.“I say it like it is necessary.”
I left lunch and drove straight back to the island.
I drove past my own road twice, mind working so hard against itself that I almost laughed at the absurdity of it.
By the time I pulled over near the marina to stop moving, I had discarded three terrible ideas and one almost-worse one, no flowers in hands, no signed transfer of the tea glasses into a museum of my stupidity and no practical outline of what partnership could look like in stages if she was willing to discuss terms.
My own instincts were not going to work.
So I sat in the parked Rover with the windows down and the smell of the sea coming in and thought about Kelly.
Kelly with her shoulders tight at my family’s table when she was working too hard to make herself easy for everyone else.Kelly laughing in my apartment because she was furious and turned on and too alive to flatten it.Kelly on the beach telling me she was glad it was me.Kelly in the restaurant saying I don’t want to be impressed.I wanted to be chosen.
