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I sigh.
“Nothing,” I tell her.
“Caleb,” she says, in the same tone she always uses when she knows I’m lying to her.
“Mom,” I mimic back.
“Don’t get sassy with me,” she teases. “Come on. Seth mentioned Delilah twice during dinner and you didn’t even react.”
“That’s because he’s none of my business,” I say, raising the dregs of my iced tea to my lips. “If he thinks befriending Satan is a good idea, that’s on him.”
She laughs, resting her forearms on the deck railing, looking out at the backyard with me.
“I did something I really shouldn’t have and now I feel shitty,” I finally say.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t want to say.”
My mom gives a long-suffering sigh, still looking out at the forest.
“How bad?” she asks. “Am I gonna want to call the cops?”
I roll my glass slowly between my hands and consider the question.
On the one hand, Thalia’s a consenting adult, so I’ve done nothing illegal.
On the other, it’s ethically murky at best, and my mom is both a college professor herself and an ardent feminist, so there’s no way she’d take this well.
“Maybe not the cops, but you’d want to call someone,” I tell her.
“Lord,” she says, mostly to herself. “You know, once upon a time I thought that if I kept the five of you alive until you hit eighteen I’d be done with parenting? I was an idiot.”
I just laugh, and she does too.
“Some people believe sharing your secrets cleanses the heart and mends the soul,” she offers, and now I frown at her.
“You don’t,” I say. “Clearly.”
“No,” she agrees. “I think that white lies are the only thing standing between polite society and utter barbarism.”
“And also regular lies,” I point out, without venom.
We’ve had some version of this conversation a thousand times in the past ten years. She knows where I stand and I know where she stands, and it’s been a long time since either of us got angry about it.
“I still wish you’d never found out,” she says.
“Me too.”
“Doing a bad thing doesn’t make you a bad person,” she says, after a moment. “Neither does choosing the wrong thing. It just makes you human.”
I swallow, staring forward into the late-autumn night.
“But what are we, if we’re not the sum of our actions?” I ask, not expecting an answer. “What else even matters?”
“Intentions,” my mom says, thoughtfully. “Hopes. Feelings. Thoughts. Desires. All those things matter. If they didn’t, we’d never forgive people who made mistakes.”
“Have you forgiven Dad?”
The question hangs in the air for a moment. For all we’ve talked about this, I’ve never asked about forgiveness before.
“No,” she says, simply. “I haven’t and I’m probably going to be angry with him until the day I die, which doesn’t mean I don’t feel other ways, but I’m pretty sure that one’s here to stay.”
“Oh,” I say, a little surprised at her honesty.
“Just because it’s a virtue doesn’t mean I can bring myself to do it,” she says, shrugging. “He robbed me of a husband, and a partner, and he robbed you of a father, and I really could have used some help around here. God, if someone else could have picked Daniel up from the police station once in a while it would’ve been huge.”
I snort, because the man currently holding a sleeping baby inside raised some serious hell as a teenager.
“I think I’m close to it,” I say, surprising myself. “Forgiveness, not picking Daniel up from the police station.”
“If he got hauled down there now, he’d have Charlie to reckon with,” my mom says.
“I don’t know which is worse.”
“What about your brothers?” she asks, back to the topic at hand.
“I never told them,” I remind her. “You know that. They don’t know there’s anything to forgive.”
She taps her fingertips together, still leaning over the railing, then cocks her head at me.
“And you’re really not going to tell me what this bad thing you did was?”
I consider it. For half a second, I consider it, but there’s no way.
“I’m really not,” I confirm. “You’d hate it, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it again.”
“That’s not like you.”
“I know.”
“Still,” she says slowly, thinking, watching the dark back yard and the forest beyond. “It’s better to do a bad thing with intention than slide into it half-assed. Own your actions and then, when the shit hits the fan, own up to them.”
I almost ask her if that’s what she wishes Dad had done, but it’s a moot point because he never got the chance. Maybe if he’d owned his actions he’d still be here, but that’s a long road with too many what if’s.
“Language,” I tease her instead, and she just sighs.
“It’s the one downside of having grandchildren,” she says, straightening, both her hands going to her lower back. “Are you spending the night or heading back?”
“Heading back,” I say, holding up my glass. “It’s iced tea.”
