Page 51 of The Cadence
“That was why you wanted me to be by myself in the guest cottage,” I reminded him. “You thought I would like to grieve that way.”
“I’m not grieving,” he reminded me right back, and I shrugged. Maybe he wasn’t doing it like I had, with the bouts of crying and the onslaughts of memories, but he was still going through it. “I always felt like…I always believed that I should handle things quietly, without other people interfering. You know how they talk.”
I thought of all the rumors about him that had run around our high school, and I nodded.
“It’s different now,” he continued. “If I want to think about something, I can do it in the car before I get home to you. I don’t need to be in an isolation chamber.”
“No, most people don’t,” I agreed.
“I would choose an isolation chamber over spending more time with the people at the party we just had.”
“That’s also true,” I answered. “I like Cully at the grocery store, but I have a lot of questions about his taste in women.”
“Why doesn’t his taste lead him to you?”
I stared at Will, not understanding. “What?”
“Didn’t he go after you at all?”
“You mean…you mean that Cully would be thinking without his brain about me? No,” I scoffed. “No, no way.”
“Why?”
“We’re friends,” I stated, but then amended that statement. “Actually, I would only say that we’re friendly. We make each other laugh at work when it’s boring or when the customers annoy us, but that’s all. You’ve seen his type! That’s not me.”
“You mean Kirsten.”
“That’s not me,” I repeated. “We’re very, very different.” She was small and curvy in the way men liked. She made them think of sex, which they wanted to have with her. I was the opposite.
“You mean that you know how to use cutlery, you don’t talk about your pretty parts at the dinner table, and you don’t get sloppy drunk to the point of falling down. I saw them walking across the lawn,” Will explained. “Sully had to keep her on her feet.”
“It’s Cully. You’re definitely correct about the first two, and the third one about drinking to excess isn’t anything I do very often. Only when I’m very sad and overwhelmed and get to close to good whiskey,” I answered. “I don’t really want to use the term ‘pretty parts’ anymore, either.”
“Fair enough,” he said, nodding. “Cully would have done better to chase you around instead.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” I wondered. “The two of us are very different. He’s a little boy in a lot of ways, like how he still lives with his parents. They do his laundry and he has no desire to learn how to do it himself. He only got the job at the grocery store because his mom said she was going to put his gaming laptop in the driveway and run it over unless he got his butt into gear and made some money. He doesn’t have any ambition.”
“And that’s important?”
“Not how you’re probably thinking. I don’t care about someone getting a big check each month or having a fancy house with an elevator. I wouldn’t mind it,” I had to admit.
“So, what does ambition mean to you?” he asked me.
“It means wanting to have a good life, a safe life that’s secure. I would want someone who worked hard like I do, so that I didn’t feel like I was pulling him along. I think that was one of the reasons that my mom took off with me when I was a kid. She was angry that she was the only person with a job.”
“Just like my parents,” Will pointed out. “My mom supported us all for years, but she was pretending the whole time that she didn’t really have to work. She didn’t want anyone to know that we were barely scraping by, because that would have been admitting how far the Bodines have fallen.”
“I don’t think she was fooling anybody,” I said. “Sorry.”
“I don’t care. Why wouldn’t you have to work for things? I always did and that’s the reality for most people. But for my parents, it was all about the show and not the mess behind it. I got good at picking up on clues to what was really going on with them,” he told me. “If you listen well, you can hear most of what people are trying to hide.”
“Like what?”
“Like Kirsten and the things she was saying tonight. When she wasn’t mentioning her genitalia…sorry.”
I nodded.
“When she wasn’t talking about something inappropriate, she told me a lot. She said that she’d gotten kicked out of college for academic reasons.”
