“Molly, it’s ok,” my sister said quietly. I sniffled and got myself under control.
In the bedroom, I definitely had more clothes than I’d brought over here a few months before. I had some pictures on the walls, one of the lighthouse that he liked to visit so often, and another of Woodsmen Stadium with a pink and apricot sunset behind it. “We can leave those,” I said briskly, but I pulled off the dirty sheets to bring along. One thing I had liked about Shane was that he did a great job of making his bed every morning and, if I left before him, he had also made mine with perfectly square corners. There were so many things that I liked about him.
My sister said my name again, “Molly!” This time, it sounded like she was getting a little annoyed with the crying and I decided that it was time to go.
It was strange to be back in my former home, in the room that I’d had lived in for twenty-three years. It felt small and foreign now. I stayed in there for the rest of the afternoon, although both my siblings left to return to Walter’s, and I didn’t come out for dinner even though I had skipped most of my lunch. Maybe the missed meals would show up as slimmer thighs the next morning, but I thought not. Probably all I’d see in the mirror would be my swollen eyes.
I was still in my bed when I heard everyone else arrive later that night. “I brought you a burger,” my sister announced as she walked right into my bedroom. “It’s cold.”
“Thank you,” I said, sitting up. “How was the dinner service?”
She complained a little but it all sounded normal to me. “Max is stepping up more in the kitchen, which is good. He’s learning how to manage things, but not as well as you did,” she concluded. Then she wanted to know: “What is going on with you?”
I had thought about what to tell her. Shane’s private, medical information wasn’t mine to share but she deserved some kind of explanation. I gave her the outlines, that he had an issue with his health that was getting worse, that I had tried to help, but then I had made everything worse.
“Unless there’s a lot more that you’re not saying, I don’t really see how you did that,” she said.
“By being controlling, like I was with you. You used to cry and get upset,” I reminded her.
“You did hurt my feelings,” she acknowledged. “Mostly, I got upset because you were right about a lot of it. I had to take steps, I had to face that something was wrong and work on it.”
“I went about everything in a dumb way,” I said and she shrugged in agreement. I put down the half-finished burger and flopped back onto my pillow. “I bet that someone recorded us arguing today. They’ll probably post it as some big, emotional moment.” It had been.
“If starts getting shared, I just scrub it again,” Morgan said. “No big deal.”
“What do you mean by ‘scrub?’ And what do you mean, ‘again?’” I asked.
“You know. I could make it go away,” she told me. “It takes a little work but now I know how. Remember Daniel? He’s really good at that kind of thing and he showed me some tricks. He helped me squelch the video of you at the party. Now, it’s almost impossible to find, even if you search for it really specifically.”
“You did that for me?”
“That whole thing sucked,” she answered. “I figured that I could do something for you and Daniel did a lot, too.Er ist ein guter Kerl.“
“What?”
“Are you feeling better?” she asked, and I sighed. No.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
My sister left, and I got up and went to the window. I saw the same moon from the night before, but it looked lesser now. The light had definitely dimmed.
Chapter 16
The Woodsmen were playing and I didn’t even care. Seriously. I stared at the game and it didn’t make one rat’s ass bit of difference to me—and I had never felt like this before. I was a fan, wasn’t I? Apparently, not anymore. The preseason was over and this was opening night. And I didn’t care.
On the other hand, the rest of my family (minus Max) was entranced. We always turned off the sound on the TV so that we could listen to the Woodsmen radio announcers, Herb and Buzz, but my dad liked to talk over them, to read aloud the statistics on the screen, and to voice his own opinions about the plays being called. It was often hard to hear the professionals and it had always driven me crazy—but tonight, I didn’t even care.
I didn’t care about the score, I didn’t care about the stats, I didn’t care about the players and their personal stories, I didn’t care about my dad’s opinion on the problems with special teams, I didn’t care about the anecdotes from fifty years ago that Herband Buzz were relating. I only sat up and paid attention when the camera switched to showing the coaches high up in their booth, which it had done once or twice. That was where Shane was sitting tonight and unlike me, his focus was totally on the game. Every time I saw him, which was only for a few seconds before they flipped to another angle, I felt myself tense and lean forward.
And when my sister spotted me doing that, she got upset then shook her head. At halftime, she addressed my behavior in the kitchen.
“You have to pull it together.Spinnst du? Mom is going to notice how you’re acting and this will become a big deal.” She shook her head again. “I thought you were getting better.”
“Stop speaking German!” I barked back. She and Daniel were officially a thing, although they had still never met in person. That was going to change this fall when he flew here to visit, and she was getting her passport so that she could go visit him, too. She was doing much better with her love life than I was but fortunately, I hadn’t lost my friend-life. Yes, I’d rushed out of Shane’s house, crying, but we hadn’t even started to unload my stuff when Morgan had frowned at me.
“So, you’re running away again?” she had wanted to know.
“That’s very immature,” my brother had thrown in and she’d pointed at him, nodding.
