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“If we stay that long, Frankie will be up past her bedtime.”
“It’s fine. She’ll fall asleep in the car.”
“You could stay over,” her dad says. “We’ve got two rooms empty upstairs even with Alison here, and that air mattress we could put up in the finished part of the basement—”
“Three rooms, Dad?” Caroline asks. “Really? You’re going to go with that?” She hops up on the countertop next to my left elbow, putting me right in the line of fire between the two of them.
Her dad glances at me. “Is this how it is, West?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“She’s living with you, taking care of your sister for you, and now you won’t even let her visit overnight for Christmas unless I let you share a room?”
“No, sir,” I say. “That’s not how it is.”
“That’s sure what it sounds like.”
I clear my throat. Try to think of some way to say it that’s tactful, but fuck it. I’m not tactful. “Caroline’s in charge. I just go by whatever she wants.”
He looks at me for a minute. Makes this hmph kind of noise. “That’s the first intelligent thing I’ve heard you say.”
Caroline reaches across me and punches him in the shoulder, hard.
“Hey,” he says. But it’s mild, and he’s looking at her with affection as he rubs his arm and asks, “What about what I want?”
“You’re not the one who has to sleep in the bed,” she says.
“I’m not talking about beds anymore.”
“Fine, then let’s talk about what you’re really talking about—you’re not the one who has to live with it, Dad. I am. So I’m going to make the decisions, and you get to decid
e whether you support them or don’t, but that’s the extent of it.”
“When you’re making decisions with my money, going to school on my dime, it’s not the extent of it. I get a say. You owe me a real conversation, not just this garbage about I support it or not but that’s all. I’m already living with it. I didn’t get a choice on that, but we’ve got a choice on this lawsuit.”
“You don’t have to live with it the way I do,” Caroline says. “You’re not getting deposed. You’re not taking calls from the state senate and telling them, Yeah, you’re right, I could help you, but I won’t, because I’ve got this vendetta I’m in the middle of, so no.”
“We talked about this. We knew it was going to be hard, that’s just the way these things go. It’s normal to get discouraged at this point in the proceedings, but when you start something, you see it through—that’s what I taught you.”
“I’m not quitting, Dad.”
“What you do is you put your finger on what you want, and then you go after it. If you think you can just give up at the first sign of trouble—”
“I’m not giving up!”
If I were her dad, I’d back the fuck off, but I guess the two of them are too much alike, because he sounds just as pissed when he replies, “What do you call it, then? Halfway to trial, and you’re going to walk away? We could nail this kid, Caroline! We get a judgment against him, that gives us a lien on his future salary. We’ll make it so he can’t take a step for the rest of his life without this breathing down his neck. Make him pay.”
I’ve been washing the same plate for a solid minute. The water is running, steam rising off it, and you could cut the tension with a knife.
Caroline cuts it with one question. “What if I don’t want him to pay?”
Her dad sets down the plate he was drying and leans his hip into the counter. I might as well be invisible, standing here between them. “Why wouldn’t you want that?”
“Because there isn’t any justice in it,” she says. “It’s not a scale I can balance. He puts my naked body online, sends his dogs after me, makes my life scary—”
“Makes your life hell,” her father says.
“—and I decide, Hey, then I’m going to do it back to him? That’s your solution? That’s not justice. It’s vengeance, and it’s petty.”
