Page 10 of The Cadence
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here at all. Where are you moving?”
“That’s a little up in the air, but a girl I’m working with at the Biscuit Barrel may have a space opening in her apartment. I’ll have to figure out what to do with the dining room set because it won’t fit in that place,” I said, running my hand across the table. “I’ll be able to bring my own bed and my grandma’s sewing machine.” I looked at the boxes, too. “I want to keep her baking sheets and bowls, all the kitchen equipment. It’s packed now and maybe I’ll leave it that way until I have a bigger place of my own.”
“When do you need to be out for good?” he asked.
“Friday.”
Will Bodine stared at me. “Today is Wednesday. You don’t mean this week.”
“Yeah, I mean in two days. Most of the boxes will fit in my car and so will the sewing machine and her fabric and yarn stash. If I have to leave the other stuff, like the dining set and my bed, I guess that’s ok.”
“And then…what? You’ll sleep in your car with your belongings until you find a place to live, and then you won’t have a bed to use if you do?”
“I’ll figure it out,” I said.
“You seem very calm about it.”
“This isn’t the worst problem,” I answered. “The worst problem is losing somebody that you love. After that, nothing seems so terrible. I’ll get you the tea.” I had left a few things out of the boxes, and one was a glass that I filled for him. Then I invited him to take a seat at the dining room table, the one I wasn’t sure what to do with quite yet. “What’s wrong with your father?”
“What?”
“Didn’t you say that you came back here again because of him?”
“He’s all right,” Will answered.
“Are he and your mother still fighting?”
He looked at me for a moment before nodding. “You remember,” he said, and I nodded back. “They’re still like catsand dogs and they still won’t divorce and leave each other the hell alone.”
“Do they need you to come home and referee?” I asked.
“No, they never listened to me anyway,” he said. “He’s been acting worse, though. You know about his car accident.”
Everyone in this town knew about his car accident, because a collision with an ambulance ferrying a patient to the hospital was going to draw attention. It had drawn national attention, just a little, and just because his son was a pro athlete. Luckily, everyone (including the patient) had survived and the gossip had died down.
But I imagined how Will would have dealt with it. I remembered how he’d sat at this table seven years before when he’d come to tutor me, and how he’d carefully removed three pencils and his calculator from his bag. He’d made miniscule adjustments with his long index finger, just a slight tap one way and the other, until they were perfectly spaced and aligned. No one would have enjoyed a family member getting into a drunken car accident and hurting people, of course, but I bet that the disorderliness of it bothered him in another way.
“I’m glad you were able to come back and deal with whatever’s happening now,” I said, and he looked at the boxes.
“I’m fine, but your situation concerns me. It may not bother you, but it absolutely needs to be dealt with. You can’t sleep in your car.”
“That’s a last resort,” I assured him.
“You won’t go to any of the people from your church?”
“I won’t do that to them. I mean, I might for a night or two, but I would need to have a definite idea of what was next so that they didn’t feel stuck with me. They would want to help but they can’t,” I said. “If they knew that I didn’t have a place to go right now, they would all be anxious. So I’ve been lying.”
He squinted.
“I know that I shouldn’t, but it’s for a good reason,” I explained. “I think that gives me a pass.”
“Lying is ok if you mean well.”
“In this case, it was for the greater good. I’m not going to give a blanket dispensation,” I cautioned, “but there are occasions when you have to. My grandmother really didn’t like lying in a general sense but she did at times. She told me that her son was a Marine, for example, because she wanted me to be proud of him as my father. I believe that he did once visit a recruiting office, but that was as far as his military career went.”
Will seemed interested. “What about him? Could he help you right now?”
“No,” I answered. “Definitely not. He died in prison three years ago. It was really the beginning of the end for my grandmother.” Despite his flaws, she’d loved her only child.
