Page 114 of Can't Help Falling

Kylie pointed toward the wad of cash on her desk. She shook free of Tyler’s hands and strode over to the money, carefully rolling it back into the neat wad it had been in before Tyler had ruffled through it. She stared at the money in her hand.

Tyler watched helplessly as tears dripped from her chin and onto the front of her zipped sweatshirt.

“I can’t figure out what it is that I did that made her leave, Ty.” She was whispering now, like there was no more voice left inside of her. She wiped her tears with the back of her wrist, still talking to the money and not facing Tyler. “I mean, I know, I know. I’ve been to the therapy. It’s not my fault. Blah blah blah. But logically, Tyler, I had to have done something that put her over the edge.”

“Kylie, no.”

She cut him off. “She wasn’t a good mother. I get it. She’s not patient with me. She doesn’t like whenever I made things hard. It makes her so mad. But I knew that if I just went to bed when she told me to and ate what she put on the table and didn’t complain or ask for too much then she was gonna at least keep being there. At the very least. And I don’t getit. What was it? I don’t understand what I did that was the last straw.”

“Do you know what arbitrary means?”

She glared at him. “Yes.”

“It basically means something that doesn’t correlate with anything else, right? It’s almost random.”

“You’re saying she randomly chose to leave me?”

“No. I’m saying the reasons she chose to leave were not ones you could have predicted. If she was going to leave, she was going to leave and there was nothing that you could have done.”

“Because I’m a kid?” She finally tossed the money back down and faced him. He took her place on the edge of the bed, feeling the adrenaline from their fight course through his system like a drug. His legs felt jittery; his heart pounded in his throat.

“Because nobody can control anyone else,” he said quietly. “Because you can’t make someone do anything. Ky, if Dad taught me anything, if my mother taught me anything, shit, if you taught me anything, it’s exactly that. You can’t control someone. There’s nothing you could have done to keep her there if she didn’t want to stay. Not cleaning the house every day. Not getting good grades. Not winning the freaking lottery.”

Her face collapsed like a kicked-in tin can. She took a shuddering breath and scraped her eyes on the inside of her elbow, making the fabric of her sleeve dark with her tears.

“Don’t tell me that it’s all random, Tyler. Don’t tell me that there’s nothing I can do but wait for people to just leave. I have to be able to do something about it.”

She reached over and shoved the money to the ground, spiking it like a football. The rubber band that had been holding it snapped and half-curled bills spiraled across the floor. “Shit!”

She slid down the side of the desk, folded up and sank her forehead to her knees.

The guardian in him wasn’t sure if he should stay away or not. But the human in him, the brother in him, was crawling across the floor, arranging himself next to her so that their shoulders pressed together.

“Kylie,” he said, pushing his weight into her. “I love you. I don’t say that enough. I just want you to know that in this moment, when we’re screaming at each other and everything is terrible, I love you.”

She didn’t move from her tortoised-up position, her face hidden.

“And I didn’t mean to make you feel powerless. I’m just trying to make it clear to you that you are not the reason your mother is looney tunes. And I’m not saying that to you in some school-therapist sort of way. I’m saying that to you as a logical person who has looked at the situation and made a judgment. I know what shitty parents look like. I had two of them before Dad died. And now I have one. Just like you. Maybe I’m not supposed to say that to you about your mom. That she’s shitty. But I don’t know what I am supposed to say either. So, I might as well tell you the truth.” He sighed and realized that her position actually looked pretty good. He rested his own forehead on his knees and talked to the ground, finally saying everything he’d been thinking for months.

“Leaving you the way she did makes her a shitty parent. And you know what? I hope to God she goes to therapy and parenting classes and rehab and turns her life around and can be a good mom to you. Because you deserve that. You deserve a good mother. But I cannot sit here and listen to you thinking that your mother could have been better if you’d been better. Because that’s just not the way it works. Please. If you can’t believe me yet, can you please just trust me that at some point, you will agree with me? Just trust me. I promise. Please trust me.”

“I can’t trust you, Tyler,” she whispered, dropping the bottom out of his heart.

“What?”

“I can’t trust you because you won’t tell me. Why won’t you just tell me?”

“Tell you what?” He’d have told her anything she asked at that point. If he’d had a diary, he’d have read it to her front to back.

“Tell me what your last straw is.”

“My last...” He groaned and banged his head backward a few times onto the desk behind him. “Fucking Lorraine,” he griped with so much vehemence that Kylie’s head popped up, blurry, red eyes and all.

“What?”

“Kylie, someday you’re going to realize that what I’m about to say isn’t a lie. Okay? Just, someday you’ll believe me about this. But I don’t have a last straw. Not when it comes to you. I mean, my temper has a last straw. I might yell at you. As evidenced by the nine-part opera that just played out in here. But please, kid, believe me. When it comes to loving you? Being there for you? Putting a roof over your head and food on your plate? I’m not measured in straws. Therefore, you’re never gonna find the last one. There is no last one. I’m measured in, I don’t know, whatever happened during the big bang. Some sort of material that is actually expanding. You’re never going to reach the end of it.” He sagged forward onto his knees again. “I’m not making sense, am I? My head is spinning.”

Whether he was making sense or not, Kylie didn’t answer. After a few minutes, he felt her lean back onto the desk, unfolding just a bit.

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