Page 57 of Nothing But It All
“That I have to see every fucking day. It matters to me.”
“You and ladders have proven,repeatedly, that you aren’t friends. I apologize for wanting to save your life.”
“I didn’t ask you to save my life. I asked you to hang a mirror.A year ago.When you don’t do it, I have to because it can’t sit there leaned up against the wall forever. It’ll get broken.”
He nods, holding up a palm. “Okay. What else?”
“You know what I really hate?” I ask, my face heating. “I hate when youarehome and the shop calls and you just get up and go. There’s not even a flinch of thought about it.The shop always wins.It doesn’t matter if we’re doing something as a family or at a wrestling meet. You just ... go.”
“But, Lo—it’s my business.”
“Yes,but we are your family.” I force a swallow past the lump in my throat. “I’m not saying you never have to get up and go because, believe it or not, I am rational. I understand things are important and you’re the boss. But you’ve trained your team, Jack. They’ve stopped even trying to do things because they know you’ll come running. That pisses me off—not just for me and Maddie and Michael, but for you too.”
His temple pulses.Have I pushed too far?
“Okay, got it,” he says. “What else?”
I stare at him for a long moment.What else? He really wants me to keep going?But the longer I sit quietly, the longer he waits me out.
Fine.“Mow the field beside the house.”
“I did mow the field beside the house.”
I laugh. “Yeah. You did. Two years ago. Want to know how I know? Because last year, I paid to have someone do it because the kids couldn’t even play basketball on the driveway because of the bugs. And last month, the guy I hired last year came back to see if I wanted him to do it again—which I did, by the way. Did you even notice? Or did you assume, I don’t know, that I was doing it?”
He sighs, his jaw flexing.Guess what, Jack? I don’t like this either.
A rise of emotion lifts from my chest—the burn of anger, the fog of sadness, and the bitterness of regret. It’s all I can do to hold it together—to stay calm. To show him the things that have gotten me to this point. But the mountain of grudges I want to get off my chest feels insurmountable, and the pain of it all grows by the second.
“Okay,” he says, finally. “I’ll put a reminder in my phone to mow—”
“I hate that you never want to have sex with me.”
The words are in the air before I know I’m going to say them. It’s as if they’ve been sneaking behind the other frustrations until they could find an opening to burst into the scene.
And in the scene they are.
Jack’s eyes widen, and his jaw falls open. I pull my arms down and shift on the bench.
“You think ...,” he says, pausing to gather himself. “You think that I don’t want to have sex with you?”
The words are padded with disbelief. They’re laced with shock. He says them like he’s still trying to process them ... and failing.
“What else am I supposed to think?” I ask, my cheeks warm to the touch.
He runs a hand down his face.“Wow.”
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” I say. “I don’t get your attention.”
“When I give you my attention, you get pissed.”
It’s my jaw that drops this time. “What areyoutalking about?”
“I come up behind you while you’re cooking, and you complain about your day. I ask you to ride with me to look at a car, and you act like it’s the last thing you want to do. I climb in bed and reach for you, and you pull away and rattle off a list of all the shit you want me to do—and none of that is having sex.”
“I ...”He’s right. I do that.I force a swallow that almost gags me.Why can’t he just hear me?“I’m bitter. That’s the ugly truth of it. It feels like just another thing I get to do for you.”
His eyes widen.
