“When he lost his job,” she said, “he told us he couldn’t find a new one. My mom believed him, but I wasn’t as sure, so I decided one day to skip school and follow him to one of his interviews.”
“Where’d he go? The racetrack?” I guessed.
She shook her head. “The casino. When I told my parents, my dad said it was a one-time thing. Plus, he’d won that day, so he was riding a high. My mom wanted to believe him so badly, she wouldn’t listen to me. Ignored all the evidence I gave her.”
My heart beat faster with secondhand anger on her behalf.
Her bottom lip quivered, but otherwise she didn’t break. “He needed help, but no one would believe me. I tried to tell my aunts and uncles, but my mom said I was exaggerating. It wasn’t until she caught him sneaking a bracelet out of her jewelry box—a gift he gave her for their twentieth anniversary, by the way—that she finally acknowledged he had a problem.”
There was a shift as bitterness swept through her.
“But by then,” she announced, “it was too late. He’d cleaned out my family’s savings, every account, including all the money I’d saved up for college. More than twelve thousand dollars I’d accumulated over my life, most of it from jobs I’d worked. It was all gone.”
“Oh, shit.” I didn’t know what else to say. Her mother hadn’t believed her, and her father . . . He’d stolen from her.
She reached up and tugged at the loops of her hair, adjusting her damp, messy bun, but I got the sense she’d done it to occupy herself rather than have to look at me and see pity.
“I know he couldn’t help it, his addiction.” Her voice was detached. “I know I should forgive them, and I think someday I will, but I’m not there yet.” She gave me a flat smile. “So, like you, I didn’t tell my parents that I got kicked out of my house, but,” she lifted a shoulder up to her ear, “we don’t exactly talk these days.”
Her story weighed heavily on me, and I had to battle back the strong urge to do something. I wanted to—I didn’t know—hold her? Offer some kind of comfort? But surely I was one of the last people she’d want that from.
“That’s . . . understandable,” I said quietly. “But what about the summer? The holidays? Do you go home?”
“Only when I have nowhere else to go, but I always take classes during the summer semester. It’s why I’m graduating this fall, ahead of schedule.”
“I’m taking a few classes this summer, too.” I grimaced. “My parents told me I needed to lighten my load for my senior year.”
“You don’t get along with them? It’s none of my business, but things seemed tense with you and your dad.”
“Yeah, tense is one word for it,” I started, not sure if I wanted to get into the whole thing.
But she’d told me something personal, and it seemed only fair to reciprocate. I raked a hand through my hair as I considered where to start.
“My parents are strict,” I said finally. “It’s very much ‘my way or the highway’ with them, which I was okay with until I got to high school. Sophomore year, I had a girl over, and she shut my bedroom door. The door had to stay open, according to my parents. Like, it was rule number one.”
And open didn’t mean cracked or six inches of gap. They wanted it all the way open.
“After that incident, which was a big fucking deal,” I continued, “I could forget having girls over. I got a bullshit curfew and wasn’t allowed to stay overnight at friends’ houses anymore.” I sighed. “It fucking sucked.”
It was clear she was trying to reconcile this information with the guy I was today and struggled do it.
“I don’t think they realized that the harder they tightened their grip, the more I pushed back. I found ways around a lot of their rules,” I said. “Maybe my friend has car problems, or the boss wants me to stay late at work. They always bought whatever I came up with, so for my senior prom I decided to go really big.”
“What’d you do?”
My smile was evil. “I told them I didn’t have a date, so I wasn’t going.”
I’d built up interest in her, and she waited expectantly for more, but nothing came. Her expression changed, looking like I’d stranded her on the edge of a cliff. “That’s it?”
“My cousin’s wedding was in Kentucky that same weekend. I told them to go without me.” I affected a pathetic voice. “I was too sad about my lack of a prom date to go.”
She saw where the story was going. “You threw a party.”
“Hell, yeah, I did. It was supposed to be just a few couples, but a lot more people showed up, and there were so many cars in front of the house, one of the neighbors called my parents. They left the wedding and drove straight home.”