Page 67 of Saints & Sailors

“Yeah, I worked my ass off during my senior year to start saving money, and then finally at twenty, I bought a bus ticket, packed a bag, my guitar, and I took off for LA.”

“You worked as a busboy?” I tried to recall.

Scott nodded. “I worked at the country club during the day and played in my band some nights. I met your mother at the club. She was a regular with your grandparents, the noble Barringtons. Madeline, she was only seventeen at the time, had just graduated high school, but very bright and years beyond her peers.”

One thing about my mother, she wasn’t judgmental. She always tried to get me instead of simply throwing me in therapy and drugging me up to make me fall in line like some parents did at my old school.

“Yeah, Mom’s different.” At least, she was before she got rid of me.

“Unlike everyone else, she treated me like a person and actually talked to me that summer. I guess you can say I fell for her fast and hard.” Scott seemed helpless as he furnished a smile. “Some guys on staff told me to leave her alone, that it wasn’t worth the risk of my job, but I couldn’t back down. I invited her out one night when my band was having a show, and it shocked the hell out of me when she actually came. Maddie was from an aristocratic world, and yet she was in this really grimy bar just to see me. Sorta like a white rose in a field of weeds.”

His words resonated with me. Back home, to some, Scott too had been a dandelion, and not even just in LA; here in Meadow Grove, too.

In that moment, I didn’t feel so different from him. For most of my life I felt defected or disconnected from my peers. Truth was I carried pieces of Scott with me as well. He’d been an outsider too.

“So you two hit it off?” I was surprised to find out their age difference and that my own mother had snuck into a club to see my father play a show.

“Oh yeah, it was instant. She stayed until our set was done and we grabbed a table and talked all night. One thing about her, she kept me on my toes, and I’d never felt that before. Her mind, her humor, her beauty—I was in love for the first time in my life.”

I was conceived in love. The thought was sobering.

It wasn’t until Scott admitted it that I realized that I needed to know this detail.

“What went wrong?” I prompted him to tell me.

Gone was all the stars in Scott’s eyes as guilt and shame took over. “Your grandfather caught wind of what was going on. He tried to get me fired from the club for it. He said I was harassing Maddie, but she stood up to him about that. Maybe in some ways, it was doomed from the start. We were from two different worlds, and sometimes love isn’t enough, Saylor.

“When Maddie found out she was pregnant, she was happy and scared. Your grandparents wanted her to go to school in the fall and do something impressive with her life, and getting knocked up by some busboy in a band wasn’t exactly groundbreaking.”

“But it happened.”

“Yes, it did. We laid in bed and planned a life together. Call me crazy, but I wanted to marry her, not because you were on the way, but because I loved her and I just knew she was the one,” Scott insisted.

“Why didn’t you?”

Scott held a hand up, as if to settle me down before he continued. “Mr. Barrington never liked me for your mom. When he found out about the pregnancy, he wasn’t excited at all. He ‘grounded’ her, kept her from leaving the house and seeing me. Maddie called me crying about it, and I got in a cab and stormed over and met him at the door.”

I watched his face go from shame to anger as he spoke of my grandfather.

“I demanded to see her, but he wouldn’t let me in. He looked me in my eye and told me I was nothing. He pointed his finger in my face…” Scott raised his to illustrate the gesture. “…and he said to me, ‘You will never know what it’s like to have a seat at the table. People like you eat in the kitchen, and people like Madeline dine first class. You have soiled my daughter, and now it’s up to me to fix it.’ He told me I could barely take care of myself, let alone two more people. He listed my flaws and I saw them for what they were: the truth. He told me the best thing to do was leave.”

For a while, he didn’t speak, and I could see the weight of the past eighteen years lifting from his shoulders with his confessions.

“And what did you do?” I wasn’t sure why I’d asked, because it seemed pretty obvious.

Scott met my eyes, holding them and me in place as he spoke once more. “I left.”

I felt my face getting hot and I had to look away and blink.

I. Did. Not. Cry.

He left me.

This was a fact I’d known all along, but hearing it from him touched me in a way I couldn’t shake. He didn’t fight for my mother. He didn’t fight for me.

Hearing it out loud hurt in a way I couldn’t bury. Couldn’t brush off.

I’ve got issues, I admitted to myself as what I felt was right in front of me to no longer deny.