I try to give Dieter back his coat but he tells me to keep it, and I clench it tightly to my body, my teeth painfully grit.
We’ve been driving in silence for half an hour when he says, “I’m sorry about your parents’ divorce. It’s hard to hear that at any age, I’m sure.”
I give a noncommittal response, staring out the passenger side window. My thoughts are a tangle of emotions. Why did my mother have to deflect the conversation away from what we should have been talking about and treat Dieter with distrust? She should have been thanking him for everything he had done for me.
“Did she say why?” he asks.
“No. She just told me it was silly that I have a bodyguard and then talked about the case against my father. It was pathetic.”
He shoots me a look and then turns back to the road. “Maybe it was too painful for her to talk about.”
I round on him. “Why do you have to make excuses for her? We came all the way out here for nothing.”
He says nothing and we sink into silence. I keep stewing, and eventually I can’t hold my feelings in any longer. “You hold me to the highest standards,” I say, “expecting me to visit my mother and not swear or lose my temper, and yet you defend her when she springs the divorce on me and then refuses to talk about it. That’s pretty shitty, don’t you think?”
He keeps his eyes on the road and his voice is mild. “Maybe that’s because I don’t care about your mother. I care about you.”
“If you cared about me you’d be angry about the way things just went.”
He glances in the rearview mirror, does a head check and changes lanes to overtake a truck. “Who says I’m not?”
He doesn’t look angry to me. He looks like the picture of indifference.
“I was there,” he continues. “I heard the conversation. It didn’t go well, and neither of you were happy with it when it was over. But it was never going to be an easy meeting.”
“So what was the point?” I cry.
I see his eyes flicking toward the motorway exit like he wants to pull over and talk properly. “Don’t stop the car,” I tell him. “I just want to get home.”
He nods. “All right.”
We don’t speak for the rest of the drive. I know that there’s more he wants to say but if he’s not going to take my side, I don’t want to hear it.
By the time we get home night has fallen. I go through to the kitchen without even bothering to turn the lights on and slam my satchel onto the counter. There are tears pricking at my eyes and I don’t even know why precisely I want to cry.
Dieter comes up behind me, but doesn’t try to touch me. I rub my hands over my face and turn to him. “I’m fine, all right?” I refuse to cry over a divorce when I’m twenty.
“It’s okay to be angry, you know,” he says. His face is silvered with moonlight that’s coming in through the skylight.
I give a short, hollow laugh. “I am angry. I’m like ninety-nine percent anger right now.”
“What’s the other one percent?”
I think. My belly is rumbling, and I don’t want to talk. “Hunger. I kind of want pizza.”
He smiles and pulls out his phone. “I think we can manage that.”
While we wait for the food to be delivered I go upstairs to put my bag away, and then pull my hair into a ponytail and look in the mirror. It’s done now. You saw your mother, you tried, and now they can both just have their divorce and get stuffed.
After a few deep breaths I manage to force my feelings down. There, dealt with.
We eat sitting at the kitchen counter. I eye the pizza suspiciously. “That looks healthy. Did you order healthy pizza?”
“It’s vegetarian. It’s good for you.”
I want to tell him that vegetarian pizza isn’t real pizza, but it does smell good and after my third slice I have to admit I like it. “Thank you. I needed that.” I reach for the lemonade bottle, but he gets there first.
“Good. Let me do that for you. Do you feel like talking now?”