But maybe that was why they were already angry when they arrived, because they didn’t want to shell out for a motel? I could understand that because I also disliked spending money, which was why I was still in this affordable duplex—why leave, Shane had asked, when we have a great setup? He wanted to save, too, which I understood a lot better now. It wasn’t only that he was worried about the present, but about the future, when his job prospects in football might have been severely curtailed…
But here were his parents, standing in the living room on the floor that I’d mopped and then gone back over on my hands and knees, just in case. I was smiling and so was their son, but they were looking around the apartment and frowning, and then they looked at me and did the same thing.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked. I started to list the options and felt my pockets for my server pad. Carrying one wasnew to me at the restaurant where I was now working because we had done counter orders at Walter’s.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Shane offered. They did, on the couch. I realized then that the furniture was a bit lacking, because the two of us could have either stood nearby or joined them by sitting cross-legged on the floor. At least that was very clean.
“How was your trip?” I asked.
His mom answered. “It was fine. There was a delay in Detroit.”
“I could have come down to get you,” her son mentioned and she looked upset.
“You shouldn’t be driving for that long!” Then she frowned again, and she looked over at me.
“Um, I was thinking we could have sandwiches for lunch,” I said. “I’m great at BLTs.”
“All those additives?” his dad asked, staring accusingly in my direction. “That’s not a good choice.”
“Dad, come on,” Shane said. “You know I’m only buying healthy bacon.”
He did, and it was extremely expensive compared to the bulk orders of non-healthy bacon that we’d bought for Walter’s. “And I would use organic tomatoes and non-GMO lettuce,” I added, but both of his parents were now glancing at each other and they only seemed more worried, not less. So I gave up on the idea of sandwiches.
I was supposed to go to work, anyway, because I had gotten a second job as a clerk at the drug store—with the part-time hours there along with the full-time hours at the restaurant, I was making some money, although I’d had no bites on all the applications and résumés I’d sent out. I left, saying it was nice to meet them and they murmured something back, but I tended to doubt their sincerity. They didn’t appear to think that it had been nice to meet me at all and I wasn’t sure why. No, people didn’t fall in love with me at first sight (and in fact, no one had ever fallen in love with me, period). But usually, they didn’t dislike me this strongly until they’d known me for a while. It would have made a lot more sense if we’d talked and they’d hated me after learning more about my personality. But to step into the house and immediately glare?
“Did you tell your parents something awful about me?” I texted Shane when I had a short break and could disguise the fact that I was using my phone. My manager didn’t want us to be on them even when we weren’t officially on the clock.
“Why would I have done that?” he asked me back. “And what would I have said?”
Well, I could have thought of a few things. “Mom, Dad, we’re so close as a family and we love each other so much. Molly’s family has completely splintered and they all hate each other. The next thing that will happen is them all rolling in the gutter to fight over the few pennies of profit from the sale of the house and the restaurant, provided those sales ever occur and also in the unlikely event that there’s any profit at all after the debts have been paid.” Or he could have said, “Mom, Dad, here’s Molly. Shemoved in with me because I felt pressured into accepting her and she has no prospects for the future besides a degree she took too long to obtain, which has done her no good. Oh, also, she doesn’t have any other friends.”
I didn’t answer him by saying any of that, though. And there was no reason that he would have poisoned them against me, either, because he was a basically kind, nice person. Of course, he had his moments. He had lost his temper when his truck was recently leaking oil in the driveway (there had been a plethora of good-gollys when that had happened). He was annoying about dishes. If you put down a glass or cup, even for a few seconds, you would find it next on the dish drainer beside the sink, already washed.
The biggest problem that I had with him was his absence. He just wasn’t around enough! It would have been nice if he were home every night and also every weekend, so that we could have done more hiking or just hanging out. I would have enjoyed that even if his parents were pestering him the whole time with questions about his sleep, diet, and mental state (which they did).
I left the drug store and went to the restaurant where I was now working, a slightly more upscale place than Walter’s (they had real menus, they had servers, and they didn’t have a sign that said anything about refusing service due to shirtlessness). I regularly had customers that I recognized or who recognized me. I didn’t usually care, even if they made a remark about the throw-up girl from the frat party or asked me if I’d tried any butt stuff yet, since that had been a question I’d answered in that fun, famous interview.
This evening, though, I ran into someone that I didn’t expect and it did throw me off more than usual. I went home still thinking about it, still agitated, and that feeling only grew when I found Shane sitting on the couch. It hadn’t seemed small when he and I had used it together but when I had left the apartment earlier today, his parents had wanted him to squeeze in the middle, between them. We really needed a few chairs and probably a table where we could eat.
“Why are you still up?” I immediately asked. I wasn’t very pleased about this sleep disruption for him.
“I’m not tired. We drove around today so I could show them the area and then my mom insisted that I nap in their hotel room.”
I tried to think of the last time I had napped and concluded that I must have been a toddler. “Did you really sleep?”
“No, because she was sitting next to me in the bed watching videos with the volume up. She also asked me a few times if I was awake. I was,” he informed me. “I wanted to talk to you about what you asked me earlier. What you asked about my parents believing something bad about you.”
“I don’t care if they don’t like me,” I assured him, but oddly, I found that I did. I had wanted them to be impressed with the clean apartment and I had wanted them to believe that their son had a good support system, which I hoped that I was.
“It’s not about you,” he said. “In the car back from the airport, my mom wanted to talk about my last doctor visit.”
“You don’t have to tell them your medical information.”
“I know that.” He patted the cushion next to himself and I sat down there. This couch might have been small, but it was certainly comfortable. “If I don’t mention that I’ve been to the doctor, they worry that I’m not going enough. If I tell them that I have, then they want to know what she said. If I refuse to disclose that, then they imagine the worst. If it’s actually good news, they start getting their hopes up that maybe, somehow, I’m being cured. A miracle,” he explained. “If it’s bad news…”
They would have been more upset than I had been. “That’s a no-win situation, then.”
“It’s worse because this is a genetic problem,” Shane told me. “If I had been injured or it sprang out of nowhere, it could have been an act of God. They feel like they should have foreseen this. No pun intended.”
