“I think you’re talking about me? I think so,” I hazarded. “If I’m right about that, then you’re wrong, because you absolutely can have me. You already do!”
“I can never give you what you deserve. I’ll always be something else you have to take care of,” Shane said. “You won’t be able to have the life you want if—”
“You have no idea,” I said. “You don’t know what I want because I don’t know what I want! Except one thing I’m sure about is you. I don’t plan to take care of you, not any more than you takecare of me. I’m not going to check on you at night like I used to do for my sister.”
“Did you do that? Were you that worried about me?”
I turned and looked at the upstairs window. “Morgan, stop eavesdropping and go away!”
“You’re in our front yard. I don’t know how you expect privacy,” she informed me. But at least she closed the window.
“We should talk about this later, and not on your lawn,” he said.
“I’ll drive you home,” I told him.
“That’s exactly what—”
I turned and ran inside to get my purse and keys but he continued with the same thought when we got into my car.
“This is exactly what I was talking about. You have to drive me around,” he said.
“You’re going to do things for me, too.” I wished I’d stopped to put on a bra. We lived on a dirt road and it was bumpy.
“You can do everything yourself,” he countered. “You ran the restaurant.”
“Not very well. It folded, remember?”
“You applied to college and got yourself through that.”
“Barely, and—so what? Lots of people go to college and lots of people work. You’re making me sound like some kind of hero when all I’ve really done is mess up!” I explained how, in great detail. He already knew about my poor treatment of my sister but I elaborated on that, and I also told him about how I’dhelped to inflate my brother’s ego with my adulation and how that had led to a crash-out that Max was just recovering from now, more than ten years later. I reiterated that I’d never noticed some of the problems with the business (my mom’s mistakes with the finances) and never acted on others (the fact that the building was rotting away).
“Morgan said I propped them up. I did, but that was it. I propped but I didn’t resolve or fix anything. She also said that I should have let them all fail and I agree with that. Maybe they would have gotten better years ago, if I hadn’t been so busy being a crutch,” I told him.
“I think you’re way, way too hard on yourself,” he said.
“Maybe I am. But I’m saying that I’m not getting back into the solution business.”
“There’s no solution to what’s happening with me.”
“There are solutions but you don’t want to see them! I’m not making a bad joke,” I immediately added. “You need to think about another way that you can continue to be involved in football, or you can come up with a different job that you’re interested in, one that doesn’t depend so much on your vision. You should plan ahead about learning braille or if you would want to work with a service dog. You can do all those things yourself because it’s not like anything has diminished your thinking. I was so insulted when you said that the other coaches were treating you that way. It’s ridiculous and I wouldn’t want to work like that.”
“We’ve talked about it, actually. The more time I’ve spent with them all, the more they understood and I’ve told them directly that they need to treat me as their equal. But it’s hard for me to deal with and understand a disability. It makes sense that other people also have a problem with it,” Shane answered.
“You’re more generous with them than you are with yourself. I’m not sure what we’re even arguing about,” I said. “Am I trying to convince you to want me? Are you trying to convince yourself that you don’t?”
“I don’t know either. I was stuck on giving you that muffin.” He paused. “I understand now that it was a little strange to bring it home from Virginia, but it gives you a good idea of how I’ve been doing lately. I’ve been so busy with work that I didn’t think I’d have time to miss you, but I did. I thought about you constantly. That’s why I ended up in your yard.”
We were pulling up to the duplex by that point, which felt exactly like coming home. “I missed you, too,” I said. “I think that moving out was the best thing I could have done. It gave us both a few weeks to think and figure out what we want.”
“Even if what we want isn’t the best thing?”
“How do you know what the best thing is? Don’t be aVollidiotor even a half-idiot.” I sighed, tired of arguing. “I want to go back to sleep.”
“In the interest of not being any kind of idiot, I’d like to invite you inside. We could talk about this more or maybe you’d just like to curl up in my bed again. You used to fall asleep there and I loved that. Do you want to come in?”
I did. “I won’t read to you, so don’t worry.”
“I miss that, too. I miss hearing your voice and I liked those stories. I started thinking that it made me a baby and…I was taking everything the wrong way.” He unlocked the door and we went inside, where it looked emptier without my folding table and with the bare bookshelf. Without any additional discussion, we walked into his bedroom and I lay down on the same side I had previously occupied. He turned off the lights but I didn’t close my eyes. I looked into the gray darkness, thinking about vision and all the things we didn’t let ourselves see.
