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It would rot there. I didn’t know that yet.
“Quit crying,” he said. “It’s just a fucking cat. ”
When he got in the low-slung car, pulled the door handle shut, and drove away, I didn’t hate him. I blamed my mom for all of it—the argument, his anger, the kitten.
I didn’t hate him, but I understood for the first time that he and I aren’t the same.
He’s the kind of man who would kick a kitten.
I’m not.
My mom doesn’t seem to get that. This morning she sent me a text that said, Happy Valentine’s Day to the love of my life!
I held the phone in a tight grip. It was either that or fling it across the room.
The love of her life.
When she’s with my dad, she calls him that. Wyatt Leavitt, the love of her life. Her sweet man. Her wanderer.
“There’s nothing like passion,” she told me last time she took him back. “You wouldn’t understand, Westie, you’re too young, but passion is what we’re made for. Without it …” She shrugged, cast her eyes at the ceiling, searching for the right words. “Without it, we’re just animals. ”
This about a man who’s gut-punched her. A man who split my lip when I tried to protect her because he was smacking her around, calling her names, slapping her silly while she cried and begged him not to, not to hurt her so bad, “Please, honey, don’t. ”
The love of her life.
And I look just exactly fucking like him.
The hostess, Jessica, sticks her head through the door. “Sixteen’s ready for the check, eight’s stacked the menus up by the edge of the table, and I took a dessert order for you on twelve. If you don’t get back out there, I’m telling Sheila to fire you. ”
“Coming. ”
I open the outside door, drop the half-finished cigarette on the concrete step, and grind it out under my shoe.
Jessica waits until she actually sees me moving before she heads for the front.
I take the check to table sixteen, get table eight’s order, deliver dessert to twelve. Then I check on my other tables. The whole time, my mother’s words are drilling a hole between my eyebrows.
The love of my life.
I’ve dedicated almost ten years to trying to be the man my father should have been but isn’t. A man who will put the family first, no matter what. Keep them safe, keep them fed, keep them happy.
I never wanted to be her love. Her kind of love—it makes you weak. It drags you under.
But tonight, more than any of the past twenty-two nights I’ve spent without Caroline, I can’t help thinking there’s more than one way to drown.
Another waiter passes me and says, “Jessica just gave you six. ”
“Thanks. ”
When I take the water pitcher over, I find my econ teacher at the table. A plump woman, she once brought along four kids and a bag of powdered-sugar doughnuts to a study session and let them go to town. She’s with her husband tonight, dressed up nice. She shows me off a little. “One of my best students last semester,” she calls me, and she says she hopes to have me in her seminar next year.
I take their order and wish them a happy Valentine’s Day.
I like her, so I make an effort to uncurl my lip when I say it.
Back in the kitchen, I put the order in and pick up appetizers for another table, a four-top. I push through the kitchen door with a plate in each hand, two more balanced on my forearms, thinking about another dinner with another woman old enough to be my mother.
Two years ago on Valentine’s Day was the first time I ever set foot in the Tomlinson house. Mrs. Tomlinson had a candlelight dinner prepared at the resort kitchen, and she said she’d pay me two hundred bucks if I played waiter for a couple of hours.
