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44
LOLA
Two days ago, Christian abruptly broke things off. I thought back to the stages of grief I’d learned about in college and felt like I was already well on my way through the entire process. First there’d been denial, then anger, and blah blah. But instead of ending at acceptance I just found myself feeling dejected.
Everything else seemed to be coming together in my life. I’d said my piece to Brian and Chastity. I deleted all the texts and voicemails I still hadn’t bothered to read and listen to from them. I even went as far as making a social media post to address the whole thing to the rest of my friends and former friends who had been trying to reach me since the not-wedding. It wasn’t a tearful thing, though. It was just a concise, to-the-point post that closed all the doors on that past life.
And now I was sitting across from my mom. In typical good mom fashion, she’d immediately forgiven me for everything and told me she was just happy to see me. My mom was in her late fifties and wore her graying hair in a short bob just like she had when she was my age. There were crinkles around her eyes but she was still beautiful and always supportive. I’d forgotten how good it felt to know she was in my corner.
My dad was looking around Christian’s apartment with his hands shoved in his blue blazer. He was a real estate agent who always dreamed of making it big and driving fancy sports cars, but that dream never really materialized. I figured that was why he put so much pressure on me to marry into money. To him, walking away from Brian was like the last death blow to his dream of being part of that world. I could practically see the gears turning in his head as he inspected Christian’s apartment. Not only had his daughter failed him once, now I’d failed him again by letting an even bigger fish go.
Max was in her room watching a show with Kate, and the silence of my dad’s unspoken judgment was starting to eat at me.
“Just say it, Dad,” I sighed.
My mom clutched her cup a little tighter, eyes shifting in his direction. She was the best cheerleader for me, but she’d always deferred to him. If he wanted to say something that would break my spirits, the most I could expect from her was a soft, “Oh, Howard. Go easy on her.” And of course he’d simply grumble for her to be quiet and continue on.
“So he just broke things off?” My dad asked, gesturing to the apartment, eyebrows raised. My dad was thickly built with a large belly, a floppy dyed brown hair-style, and a fleshy face. When things were good, I thought of him as a comforting rock in my life. When they were bad, I saw him as more of a caricature of the run-down suburban dad. “You didn’t push him to do this?”
“Howard,” my mom said. “She’s still hurting. Don’t–”
“I’m not blaming anyone.” My dad raised his hands, shaking his head. “I’m only asking. It looks like she had quite the thing going here with this guy. An apartment like this would easily be north of ten, maybe twenty thousand a month. And this is just his extra place out of town? We’re talking real money here.”
“Dad… For once can we not make this about the money?”
“That’s the problem, Lola. You want to live in this fantasyland where money doesn’t matter. But that’s not the real world. In the real world, money is everything. It’s power. It’s status. It’s…” he waved his hands around, as if I should’ve been able to look at the apartment and understand without his explanation.
“Money is fine, dad. But I’ve never been in danger of not having a roof over my head, okay? I don’t care about all this. I never did. That’s what you didn’t understand. Brian’s family had money and status but Brian was a cheating asshole. That is what mattered. I needed you to understand that but all you did was make me feel like some stupid child for caring that he cheated on me. That’s why it took me so long to talk to you guys again.”
My dad opened his mouth to speak, and to my utter surprise, my mom actually cut him off. “Howard,” she said, holding up a warning finger. “I’ve stood by while you said all sorts of things to Lola in the past. That’s because I believed what I was raised on–that a good family is about strong leadership and a commitment to that leadership. But I’m not going to sit by this time, not if it means watching you make our daughter pull away from us. Again. Lola is right. She was right to leave Brian and you were wrong to make her feel like it was a mistake.”
