Page 8 of Falling for the Mechanic
“—because if you didn’t work so hard, you’d have a boyfriend by now,” he continues right over me, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Hell, maybe even a husband. A pretty girl like you? Shouldn’t be spending her best years staring at a computer screen.”
The whiplash of the conversation leaves me dizzy. “Dad, my job is important to me. It’s a good career—”
“Did you use the crystals, Chelsea?” Mom interrupts, her hands fluttering anxiously. “You have to use them. Intentionsare nothing without action! I also sent a black tourmaline for protection. Is that city apartment safe? I have nightmares, you know. I just think about you getting caught alone at night.”
Finn sighs, reaching over to turn up the television.
“It’s safe, Mom. And yes, I—”
“Career,” my father scoffs, the word sounding dirty in his mouth. “A career is what a man has to support his family. A woman has a job until she starts a family. You’re getting closer and closer to thirty, sweetheart. The clock is ticking.”
I’m only twenty-six!
The air feels thick and suffocating. My cheeks are burning.
This is what I get for staying away for so long. If I came by more often, they’d have less to hit me with each visit. It would be more easily survivable.
“Not everyone wants that, Dad,” I say, my voice tighter than I intended.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone wants that. You just don’t know what you want yet.” He says it with such finality, such dismissive certainty, that it steals the air from my lungs all over again.
A hysterical thought bubbles up. Is this what they did to Finn? Did they just talk at him, over him, until he felt so unseen and unheard that the only way to get any oxygen was to explode? To get himself kicked out just to breathe?
The overwhelming need to defend myself, my life, my choices, wars with the crushing exhaustion of knowing it’s utterly pointless. They don’t want to hear about my life. They just want to critique it.
To think that I was ready to complain about my job. To tell them the drama that’s currently going down. At least then, I could’ve handed them ammunition.
“Anyway,” my mother says, clapping her hands together as if we’d just had a lovely, agreeable chat. “We’re going to that lovelyMexican place for dinner tomorrow. You brought that orange dress I bought last year for you, didn’t you? The one with the bat design? You look so pretty in that one.”
“Mom, it’s too cold out for a dress.” I keep my voice steady, trying to put a little weight behind the words. I need to. “I got rid of it because it shrank in the wash, remember? I told you after it happened.”
For a second, there’s nothing. Just the blare of the football game and the cheers from the fans over a touchdown. Then, it happens. The switch flips.
Her face, which was alight with manic planning, goes utterly blank.
I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until my lungs start burning.
“You got rid of it.” The words are toneless, devoid of the shrill excitement from moments before. She isn’t asking. She’s stating a profound, personal betrayal.
“It shrank, Mom. It didn’t fit. I couldn’t even—” I try to explain, the old urge to soothe her rising up instinctively.
“I spent good money on that dress.” Her voice is a low, cold whisper, a complete one-eighty from her clapping hands. She’s not looking at me anymore; she’s staring at a point on the wall behind me, her jaw tight. “I saw it and I thought of you. I thought, ‘Chelsea would look so beautiful in this.’ I wanted to do something nice.”
“It was nice, Mom, I appreciated it, it just—”
“No, you didn’t.” Her head turns slowly, her eyes finally focusing on me, and the hurt in them is raw and bottomless. It’s a canyon of pain I didn’t create but am always expected to fill. “You never appreciate anything I do. You just…get rid of it. You throw my love away like it’s trash.”
Tears well in her eyes, but they’re tears of a deep, sudden sorrow, not of anger. The anger will come later.
“Elaine, for heaven’s sake, it was a dress,” my dad mutters from his recliner, but he doesn’t move. He just sinks deeper into the leather, shaking his head instead of calming her.
“It wasn’t just a dress!” she cries, her voice cracking, the sound heartbreaking and suffocating all at once. She wraps her arms around herself, shrinking in on herself. “It was a gift and you got rid of it.”
“It was a shitty dress,” Finn adds from the side. “Who gets a dress that can only be worn on Halloween?”
I just stand there, stranded in the middle of their living room, feeling like a teenager again. Smothered. Invisible.
It’s suffocating in here.
