Page 36 of The Cadence
“I checked it,” I said. I had, because he’d texted and asked me to.
“I couldn’t stop thinking it, though. And sometimes…this sounds crazy.”
I put down the knife and onion that I held and waited.
“Sometimes I think that I’ve been in an accident when I drive. I’m sure that I hit another car, or sometimes I imagine that I hit a kid.”
“Holy Moses!”
“I haven’t. I know I haven’t, but I can’t stop thinking it anyway,” Will said. “I’ve driven back around, retracing my route, to make sure that everything is ok. Today, on the way home from the stadium, it happened again.”
“I would have seen.”
“I know and I told myself that, but it doesn’t help. They’re called intrusive thoughts,” he explained. “I’ve been reading about them. When I’m playing or practicing, they don’t happen as frequently but when I’m tired like this, they’re harder to control. After games, I always feel…”
“Scared? Overwhelmed?” I prompted.
“In danger of letting them take over,” he concluded.
“I’m sorry to hear this.” I walked around the counter to be closer to him. “What can I do?”
“Nothing. I’m not sure why I told you.”
“You should tell me things,” I said. “You should maybe tell a medical-type person, too. Because I bet there are strategies you could use other than powering through and being upset.”
“I’ve been reading about strategies.”
“Like what?”
“There are a few.” Will pointed at the stove. “I don’t think it’s my imagination that the chicken is burning.”
“Shoot!” I ran back around and rescued it. The damage wasn’t too bad. “It’s still going to taste fine.”
“You’d eat it anyway.”
“What?” I glanced over my shoulder.
“You don’t ever complain about food. The last time we went out to eat, your burger was raw in the middle but you were going to ignore it,” he recalled. “I was the one who said it had to go back to the kitchen.”
“I felt a little sorry for that waiter. He was new.” I nodded, though. “You’re right, and I’ll eat anything. I have a steel-lined stomach, I guess, and I don’t have a great sense of whether things taste the way they’re supposed to. It’s from when I was a kid and I fixed my own food. I ate anything and everything.”
“Because no one was feeding you,” he said, and I nodded again.
“My mom did when I was young. She must have,” I said. “Mostly I remember getting by on my own.”
“Because she left you.”
This was always a hard thing for me to talk about but people always wondered. My grandma’s friends had asked her so many questions when I’d shown up on her doorstep, and in a house the size of hers, of course I had heard them. “Did her mother just forget her? And you never saw her for all these years?” someone had whispered. The answer was a little complicated but boiled down to “yes.”
“My mom met Clifford and she wanted to be with him,” I said. “She was more interested in her new man than in her daughter.”
“How old were you?”
“Uh…I guess I must have been around six when they first got together. I was at an age that I should have been in school, but then we moved farther out into the country to be closer to him and she never got around to signing me up. The change was gradual,” I explained. “First, he started spending a lot of time with us.” I remembered because he’d smelled terrible and he’d always brought his two mean dogs with him, so I hadn’t liked it. “Then he and my mom started going over to his place more and more, since it was closer to the bar they liked. Also, even with how he smelled and his two mean dogs, it had to have been nicer than staying in our house.” She had never made much effort to keep things clean and I had never understood that you were supposed to. It was something else I’d learned later, from my grandma.
“And your mom left you,” he said again.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “She left me. She would still come back now and then, but I was mostly on my own. When I was thirteen, oneof the neighbors noticed it and called the police. It wasn’t like we lived close to each other, so no one knew what was happening,” I added. It hadn’t been their fault. “He only found out because he was checking on everyone after a storm.” He had ridden up on his ATV and I had been thrilled, since a tree had come down and smashed through the roof. I hadn’t known how to handle it and I had no idea how to get in touch with my mom. He hadn’t been able to believe that I was there alone, and that it was more or less a permanent thing. I hadn’t hidden it from him and I’d left that day on the back of his ATV.
