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“Especially with the full moon. I... I spent more than a few hours just sitting at the window watching the way the moonlight plays on the lake. It’s...enchanting. For me anyway.” She didn’t mean to get so personal. She had to keep reminding herself that this was her boss. The unapproachable and slightly intimidating man that she worked with. He seemed so different now.
Opening the door, she was a little embarrassed to show him how simple it was. Certainly not even as nice as a hotel room. Especially since he had to walk out of it and across the hall to go to the bathroom. It was a lot less than what he was used to.
“This is about as big as the first apartment I remember living in,” he said as he stood in the doorway, looking at the simple bed with one pillow, and the small dresser that sat beside it. That was pretty much all that could fit in the room. Although there was a chair by the window. It was just a hard chair, with no cushion.
“Wasn’t there a kitchen?” Clara asked, and for some reason, she kept her voice soft, as though speaking loud would make him stop sharing whatever it was he was going to share.
“I don’t remember one. Mom had something she plugged into the wall, something a little bit like a Bunsen burner, that she heated water for coffee in. Or she’d use it to boil macaroni and cheese or hot dogs.”
“I see.”
“We didn’t stay there long. We moved around a lot. Sometimes Dad was with us, sometimes it was another guy. But it seemed like Mom would go to someone else, or maybe a couple of someones, then Dad came on the scene again, and Mom would stick with him for a little bit until they couldn’t stand each other anymore, and then they split again.” He still stood in the doorway, but his eyes tracked over to her. “There were a lot of drugs and alcohol. I...probably won’t go into that detail unless you want me to.”
“No. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“It doesn’t really make me uncomfortable. I just don’t usually think about it.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine that you are where you are, coming from that.”
“Maybe it’s harder for me to imagine that I would have been where I am right now if I hadn’t been there. Experiencing that, deciding I wanted to be different, that I was going to be more than someone who lived in the projects all my life. Drugs and alcohol weren’t going to be my life, and they weren’t going to define me.”
She nodded, still feeling like she would never be able to wrap her mind around a childhood like the one that he had experienced. She and her family might have been poor growing up, but she had a solid anchor. She still did. Her mom still lived in the house she grew up in, and had no intentions of leaving. She could come back home anytime she wanted to and knew that she would be welcomed with open arms. Knew her siblings would rally around her, and the only reason she was thinking about quitting her job and trying to make a living with her painting was because she knew her siblings would catch her if she fell.
“It must have been lonely.”
“At times. Sometimes my parents’ friends would bring me out and laugh at me. They liked to get me drunk.”
Her eyes widened. “You were a child!”
He lifted a shoulder. “On the one hand, I liked the attention. You know, positive attention. People looked at me and talked to me. But on the other hand, I figured out that I’d never seen anyone do anything smart while they were drunk. I guess that shaped me as much as anything. Maybe realizing that no one ever did anything smart while they were high, or realizing that after a person had been high, the low was worse than the high had been good, made me decide the drugs were not for me. I wanted something tangible. Something that lasted. Something that didn’t need more and more in order to make you feel good.”
It was the most he said, and she listened to every word. Still unable to think about a childhood like that. Figuring that he probably wasn’t even telling her the worst of it. Maybe she didn’t want to hear.
“In a good way, going to school seemed like an oasis. It was a good thing, because it made me want to work hard, win the approval of my teachers, and I remember more than once begging my mom to get up, even though she was hungover, and take me to school. Sometimes I walked.”
“Wasn’t that...dangerous?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t remember it being dangerous. It was just cold.”
She took that to mean that he didn’t always have the clothes he needed.
“I don’t usually talk about that. And... I guess I don’t want to hear about it at work.”
“I’m a little offended that you think you might.” She lifted her chin and looked at him. She had turned the lights on in the room, and the fading light from the sunset turned the entire area a glowing orange. Because of that, what he was saying felt eerie to her, when the room had always seemed, if not exactly cheerful, cozy.
“Yeah. I knew that you wouldn’t do that. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize. I just... I just wouldn’t dream of talking to anyone about that. I see how it would be very personal to you, and it would be up to you whether or not you wanted someone to know.” It struck her just then how honored she was that she actually did know. As far as she knew, no one knew anything that he just told her. It made her feel special.
“Clara! Are you up there?” a voice called from the bottom of the stairs.
“That’s my mom. Come on. I’ll introduce you to her.”
“I’m a little intimidated. She raised six kids by herself on a farm. That couldn’t have been easy,” he murmured as they walked out of the room, and she shut the door behind them.
“I promise you, my mom is the least intimidating woman you’ll ever meet. In fact, to know her is to love her.”
