Chapter Thirty-Three
Zack
It was my dad’s birthday, the reason I had gone home in the first place. And Kelli wasn’t even here.
I wasn’t sorry for what I had done. It’s hard to explain the sense of betrayal I felt when she offered to help me write an exposé on the Navy. She wanted to turn me against my own buddies. I wondered if her boss had put her up to this or if she was driven by some longstanding grudge against the military because of what had happened to her in Somalia. Maybe she had been planning her revenge for the last twenty years and she saw in me, finally, a chance to get even.
It wasn’t how I had expected this relationship to end. She had played her role so convincingly, had almost made me believe she really loved me. But then there at the end she had finally tipped her hand. Dad always used to say you could pretend to be someone else for a while, but in the end the truth would come out, so it was better to be who you were. Kelli had proven the truth of that. If she had really believed she could keep up the charade all the way to the altar, she was a bigger fool than I thought.
When I woke up the next morning, I found Dad seated at the dining-room table wearing one of them red pointed hats looking slightly embarrassed. Curtis and Darren sat on either side of him, dressed in their Sunday finest, and even Gandalf the dog wore a red bow. Mama was making French toast, maple-roasted bacon, smoked sausages and banana pudding, and had brewed a fresh pitcher of orange juice to replace the one we had drunk yesterday.
I’d known since before I got up that Mama was getting ready to give me a lecture, and she did not disappoint.
“It’s a shame Kelli couldn’t have stayed longer,” she said as she set the gravy boat down on the table. “Of all the girls you’ve brought home, I think I liked her the best.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a shame things didn’t work out.”
“What happened, exactly?” asked Curtis, reaching for the pitcher.
It didn’t seem fair to talk about what she had done when she wasn’t here to defend herself. “I’d rather not get into it,” I said curtly. “Sometimes things just don’t work out.”
“You’ve just gotta keep looking until you find the right one,” said Darren. “She’s out there somewhere, but you’ll never find her unless you go after her.”
“Darren,” I said, “you’re the last person in the world who ought to be lecturing me about ‘finding the right one.’”
“When’s the last time you even went on a date, Darren?” asked Curtis.
“Doesn’t count if they were drugged,” I added.
“Y’all need to be stopping so mean to poor Darren,” said Mama. “Give him enough time, and he’ll find the right girl”—which was the funniest thing anyone had said so far.
I had thought that would be the end of the lectures, but after breakfast, Dad asked me to come outside and help him with the fence post. We’d been working on that fence post for about a year now, and it wasn’t any closer to being fixed. I’d figured out a while ago that Dad only used the fence as a pretext to have conversations he couldn’t have around the rest of the family. Reluctantly, I grabbed my shovel and followed him outside into the bright August sun.
We hadn’t been out there for more than a few minutes before he asked me, “So what really happened between you and Kelli?”
I knew he was going to keep asking me until I gave him a straight answer. Reluctantly, I told him about how she had learned I was writing a book and how she had offered to help me expose the “evils” of the military.
“And you know I hate that shit,” I told him. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s liberal do-gooders who think they’re single-handedly going to bring down the world’s most powerful military, who think they’re better than us because they’ve never had to kill nobody, when the only reason they’re not dead or enslaved is because we defend them.” I was so worked up I wanted to hit something, but I settled for ramming the shovel into the dirt.
“Well, I don’t know all the details of what happened, but from what you told me, it sounds like she had a pretty traumatic experience with the Navy when she was little.”
“She did, and I don’t blame her for that, but look, it was one bad apple. The entire Navy isn’t like that, and she ought to know that better than anyone.”
Dad stood silently for a moment, staring down into the hole we were digging as though lost in thought. “This just feels like the sort of thing that you could have worked through with a bit more communication,” he said finally. “When your mother and I was first dating, she walked by the malt shop one Thursday night and saw me sitting at the bar with a pretty girl. She called me that night and broke up with me. It wasn’t until a few days later, I figured out why she had done it; right away I went over and explained to her that the woman had been my therapist . I hadn’t wanted to tell nobody I was seeing a therapist because I didn’t want to embarrass myself. But I made things a lot worse by not talking about it.”
“Dad, that was a completely different situation,” I said, feeling irritated. “You know I respect you and Mom, but things were a lot different when you and her was coming up.”
“Well, I just think you ought to talk to her before doing anything rash,” Dad said. “If I was her, I’d be panicking right now, wondering what I had done and why you had thrown me out of the house.”
“I thought I made it pretty clear,” I replied.
“Maybe so, and maybe you’ll talk to her and realize you did the right thing by making her leave. But I don’t want you to look back in a month or a year and wonder if you did the right thing, and not be able to take it back.”