Page 84 of Let Me Love You (Excess All Areas 5)

She let go of his hands and began to pace over the potholed tarmac. The urge to defend them was strong, but she understood his point. “I get that, Ben. I do. I did a whole psych thing at uni. Most adults carry trauma that they don’t deal with and therefore pass on the effects to their kids. I hate to say it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Michelle isn’t around.”

Small frown lines appeared on Ben’s forehead. “What do you mean?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter…”

“It does. Why isn’t Michelle here?”

Chaya shrugged. “I know Nan doesn’t mean it, but her house is a shrine to the career she was forced to give up to have Michelle. All those pictures up the stairs must have reminded Michelle how she was the reason Nan didn’t have the career she deserved because she lived in a time when abortion access wasn’t good, and a girl was ruined if she got pregnant out of wedlock. Nan is proud of what she achieved and tells people the story all the time. But if you’re Michelle, and all your life you’ve known you were unplanned, and, given the sacrifice Nan had to make, unwanted, wouldn’t you carry trauma?”

Ben looked as though he’d been hit with a pickaxe. “Give me a minute to think that through…” He rubbed his hand over his scruff as he thought. “Nan wouldn’t have done that on purpose.”

She slipped her hands on Ben’s hips and squeezed. “I know. But she did it all the same. And therefore, Michelle deserves to be angry. And Jase can be angry at Michelle because the way she dealt with it caused his trauma. When you grow up feeling unwanted, you accept the tiniest amount of love from someone else. She probably didn’t even realise that what she had with Jase’s dad wasn’t love or loving. She just wanted to feel loved and wanted by anyone, so she accepted the sliver of it Jase’s dad was willing to give her. And then she escaped her trauma by causing Jase’s.”

Ben placed his hands on her shoulders. “If you follow that thinking through, I wonder if some of that’s why Mum stays with Dad. The opposite of Michelle, she felt the need to double down and show marriage and family are more important than anything else. They must have picked up on Nan’s vibes. Nan wanted her career. She wanted to make movies and sing and be friends with the people in those photographs. But I bet they dropped her, not even intentionally, once she was saddled at home with kids and a husband. They were off doing their thing. And I bet that hurt and made her sad. Even if she didn’t mean to make the girls feel like it was their fault or that they weren’t wanted, somehow, they picked up on it anyway.”

She could see the hurt in his eyes. “You don’t need to think less of Nan. She’s made it her life’s work to look after you all.”

“I wonder if she did it because she realised what she’d done with her daughters, though. How easy it is to accidentally alienate those closest to you.”

“My dad’s is rooted in being first-gen post the holocaust, raised by terrified parents who’d suffered unimaginable loss. Watching friends ebb from the faith. I feel he’s shunning me to disassociate from my failings. Like, he feels I’m opting out of the Jewish diaspora’s responsibility to uphold our culture and values. It must really hurt him.”

“That may be true. But none of it is your fault.”

“It’s not fair we have to carry the weight of it, though. And what will we do or pass on to our kids? I can already see myself clinging hard to my faith to prove to my dad that I didn’t leave it or lose it, that my kids have it. And then, my kids hate our faith because I’ve forced them into it. And maybe that alienates you. And you…you see a shitty relationship between your parents, and you might need our relationship to be absolutely perfect to believe it works. And I already feel the pressure to be perfect. So, then I kill myself trying to make everything about our life perfect. And every argument, we both think our relationship is falling apart. Jesus. And now, I’m ranting conspiracy theories, theorising that our future life is going to go to hell in a handbag before we’ve even had it.”

Ben cupped her cheeks and kissed her hard. “That isn’t going to be our life because this moment is a bit like the Matrix. We just saw through how it happens. How lines and families and traumas and hurts and fears manifest and show themselves. You know we took a month off break to work on ourselves?”

Chaya nodded. “It was awful not speaking to you, but it forced me inwards.”

“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “But I just realised. I thought we were done, but all we did was scratch the surface.”

“So what do we do?” Chaya asked.

“You and I are going to choose to break all the patterns that came before us. I don’t even know what that looks like. Therapy, journaling, righting past wrongs, making amends. Fuck, I have no clue. But we do the work on ourselves, Chay. Find the best versions of ourselves. We feel good in our own skins. And when we have kids, we can parent them with clear hearts.”

“I want that, Ben. I’m tired of trying to always be perfect. No one can be. Not me, not you, not my parents. We have an advantage that so many other new couples don’t have.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re already best friends. We knew the kind of sacrifices and compromises we’d need to make going in. I want us to inspire each other to be better, to try new things.”

“I know new things you can try,” Ben said, wiggling his eyebrows.

Chaya laughed, as she knew he’d meant her to. “I’m sure you do.”

“Why are we painting the walls if they’re just going to get dirty again?” Shawn asked as he rolled white paint over the last section of the breeze block walls.

Ben looked over at the young lad in the dark blue overalls Ben had got him. “Discipline. Nice work environment. It’ll feel better being in here. Perhaps I’ll install some framed car posters.” He returned to cleaning the grease off the four-post lift.

“Right.”

It had been like that for most of the afternoon since Shawn had arrived, straight from school. A question. An answer. A period of silence, even as music played. But the lad had been well-mannered, as if the angry teen Ben had seen earlier in the week had been an apparition. Now, he didn’t know which side of him to believe.

“I’ll get to help with the cars, though, right, not just making this place look nice, right?”

Ben grinned but didn’t turn around. “You’re an apprentice. You’ll do whatever the hell I tell you and be happy about it. You ever get pissed, you just think about your hourly rate and then get on with it.”

“Fine.”

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