That “maybe” had also sounded like a definite “no.” “Why not?” I wondered. “Is it because of your vision? Do you think they would care?”
“They wouldn’t be mean about it.”
“Would they act unsupportive? Standoffish? Emotional? What are you afraid of?” I asked him.
“You know, Molly, there’s a heck of a lot—” He stopped. “I’m not afraid of them acting any particular way. I just don’t want to deal with it.” He stood up. “My parents want to meet up good and early. I hope you’ll come out with us tomorrow. Will you?”
“Yes, absolutely.” I was used to being around people who didn’t like me—I had spent all those years with my family, after all. A few hours with his wouldn’t be so bad.
But I was nervous the next morning, anyway. “No one is going to look behind the refrigerator,” Shane told me. He had helped me move it away from the wall and I was a little sorry that we had, because it was truly disgusting back there.
“We better get going,” I said. “We don’t want to be late.”
“If we leave now, we’ll be twenty minutes early,” he countered, but he did acquiesce. When we walked outside, he called my name and tossed over the keys, so I ended up behind the wheel of his truck. Due to the fact that I went a lot faster than he ever drove, we were more like twenty-five minutes early. They were, too, though, and his parents came out of the motel after only a moment. Per the discussion the three of them had the day before, we drove out into the countryside to see the blooming orchards, trees full of perfect cherry blossoms.
I hadn’t ever done much sightseeing around my own town and it was fun to look at things from the tourist perspective. His parents, Nedra and Johnny, were acting slightly warmer and more accepting than they had the day before, too, so that made it easier. In fact, Nedra even talked to me, asking questions from the passenger seat where Shane had insisted that she ride.
“Have you always lived in this area?” she wondered. “It’s lovely.”
“I’ve been here my whole life except for one week when we took a school trip to Washington, DC,” I answered. I had looked forward to that trip for months, dreaming about my taste of freedom and how fun it was going to be to get away from the restaurant and my family. But it hadn’t been quite as great as I had anticipated. It would have been better with friends.
“Molly is like you, Mom. She never lived anywhere but our hometown in Arkansas,” he explained to me.
“I would live other places, though,” I added. “I wouldn’t mind moving somewhere else.”
“Where we are is equally beautiful,” she told me, and I answered that I would love to visit someday. “We’re always hoping that Shane will come home, eventually,” she said next. She glanced into the back seat, where he was shoehorned behind me. I looked into the rearview mirror to see his reaction to her words and watched him give up absolutely nothing. He was looking out of the window and acted as if he hadn’t even heard.
“I love these old barns,” he mentioned blandly.
“Your grandfather’s property has the barn that you could fix up,” his father said. “I would help you, son. We could do that together.”
“My dad and I used to like to build things,” Shane told me. “A chicken coop, garden beds.”
“We used to build ramps, too. Shane and I got involved in a group that helped out people with disabilities who needed betteraccess to their homes,” Johnny said. “It was a great thing to lend a hand. Everybody needs that sometimes.”
I glanced in the mirror again. I had said just about the same thing to Shane and he hadn’t put himself in the basket of people who needed things. But his dad was correct.
“I need a hand,” I announced without thinking.
“What’s the matter?” his mom asked. She sounded concerned.
“I’m not sure what to do about myfamilybusiness,” I said. “My great-grandfather started a restaurant, Walter’s Café.”
For the rest of the ride to the lighthouse, which Shane had wanted to visit (again), I told them about my family’s problems. It had started with difficulties after the broken water pipes and subsequent flood a few years back, something that Johnny Bishop understood well since he was in the insurance game.
“That will set you back,” he mentioned and also had questions about our coverage. He winced slightly (and I happened to catch that in the mirror) when I disclosed how underinsured we’d been.
I told them about our struggles to recover from that, like my dad borrowing money from predatory lenders and then gambling, two terrible strategies. I also got into my mom’s issues with bookkeeping (she’d used actual ledgers and not accounting programs, which had been one of her problems) and how much we owed on thefamilyhouse. “Now that my dad is gone and the restaurant needs repairs, I don’t think we’ll ever reopen,” I concluded.
“That’s a hard situation,” his mother sympathized.
“It’s embarrassing, too,” I said. “I can’t really believe that everyone behaved that way. My sister and my brother didn’t want to help but I really did. I really did,” I repeated. “Not that I’m some kind of hero, because I wasn’t always making things better. I argued a lot with everyone and I had a bad attitude that dragged us all down. If I had dropped out of school, I could have helped a lot more financially. My dad was furious with me because I refused. I had thought that with a degree, I’d be in a much better position to do something for our family.”
“Like what?” Nedra asked. “What did you plan to do for a career?”
It was funny that she wanted to know, because I’d been thinking about that a lot. “I didn’t have much of a plan,” I admitted. “I still don’t.”
“Molly has submitted so many applications,” Shane said. “She’s just not getting any bites.”
