Page 92 of The Keeper
“Rachel, you have very specific ideas about what will make you happy. And there is nothing wrong with setting goals for yourself and working hard to achieve them. But you also have to teach yourself how to adjust when things don’t go according to plan, and how to build and maintain important relationships in spite of any setbacks. That’s life. And it seems like that’s what is happening to you now. Your relationship with Jeremy is a bit unstable. You’re worried about completing your coursework to the specifications needed to retain your academic scholarship. You are entering a relationship with a man, and because you don’t recognize your own worth - your words, not mine - you question his motives. In your mind, everything of value in your life is sitting on the edge of a cliff and a slight breeze could send it tumbling down.”
I nodded.
“That’s exactly how I feel,” I whisper.
“But Rachel, nothing in the world is that finite. Think hard about these questions for me okay? Jeremy. Things feel raw and strange right now. But what do you think is going to be the outcome of it?”
After a moment, I responded the only way I knew how.
“We’ll get through it. We are all each other has.”
Regina nodded, sitting forward and looking at me closely.
“And if things were to continue to feel awkward and stilted, what would you do?”
A tear slipped from my eye.
“I’d force us to have a hard conversation so we could fix it.”
“Exactly,” she said with a smile. “You wouldn’t just allow the circumstances around you to happen to you. You would do something about it. And your coursework. What are you doing about it right now?”
“I’ve been studying with a friend and working on a project in a pair instead of alone. And I’ve been going to the tutoring center to have someone read over the paper I’m working on.”
“And lets say you end up getting a lower grade than you need for your scholarship. Think of worst-case-scenario stuff. How would you handle that?”
I turned my head to look out the window.
“I guess I’d… I don’t know. I’d speak to my scholarship advisor to see if I could take a different class or a winter term elective to make it up.”
“And if that didn’t work?”
“Well… maybe I could find a different scholarship, or continue part-time on just the athletic scholarship until I could figure out what to do next.”
I could see Regina beaming at me out of the corner of my eye.
“All wonderful ideas. And those are just things you came up with off the top of your head without help from people who will want to help you stay enrolled, people who know the ins and outs of that kind of stuff.”
I nodded, feeling a small brick of worry fall away from my shoulders.
“And Mack.”
My head snapped back in her direction.
“What about him?”
She smiled softly.
“You’re nervous about your relationship because of the relationship you had with your dad. You said you’re waiting for him to do or say something that hurts you significantly, or that shows you can’t put the same implicit trust in him that you place in Jeremy.”
“Well… I don’t know about that…”. But I trailed off when she gave me a knowing look. “Okay fine, yes. I guess that’s a realistic description of how my mind is working. Fine.”
“Has he done anything so far that would make you think he doesn’t deserve your trust.”
I pulled my legs up and crossed them on the couch, thinking through everything as quickly as I could. The knee-jerk reaction would be to bring up Ronnie and the night at Smoggy Tavern. But we talked about that, and if I was completely honest, even though it devastated me at the time, I didn’t think he would ever do something like that if he was in a relationship.
There was the fact he was worried about losing his job and didn’t talk to me about it. But would I have done the same thing? I mean, I kind of did, but in a backwards way. He was willing to potentially lose his job to save us. I was willing to loseusto savehim. Both of our reactions were about sacrifice and putting each other first.
And maybe he got a bit overzealous when it came to his reaction about Thomas. But it was practically a mirror image of my reactions about Ronnie. His was just more fueled by testosterone.
