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“How am I inconsistent?” he asked. “And you see what we’re doing here? We’re discussing a hard subject openly, even though it’s embarrassing, because it’s necessary, and it’s what people do who trust each other. That’s the way you’ll want to be talking to a boy—a man—someday, when you’re ready to be more … more intimate.” He sounded like an advert, or possibly a pamphlet for teens.Am I Ready?
“You’re inconsistent,” Janey said, not taking the convenient off-ramp he’d provided, “because you’re talking about only having sex if you’re in love, and then saying it’s OK if Alexis’s mum has sex with all different men, and ifyouhave sex with some random person. That’s having double standards.”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “It is. Having sex when you’re a teenager is different from having it when you’re an adult and can manage your feelings better, so you can put it in more of a … different category.”
“So youdon’thave to love somebody to have sex,” she said.
“Well, no.” Wait, wrong message. “But when you’re a teenager, you should,” he hurried to add. “Because of those feelings. Though you won’t know as well what love means, either. Like I said—confusing.”
“You’re very weird,” she said. “For a dad.”
He laughed. “How?”
“You’re meant to be, like, threatening the guy. Telling me I need to wait until I get engaged or something. Telling me I shouldn’t even be thinking about this yet. That’s what dads do, if they talk about it at all. Which theydon’t.At least, that’s what happens in books, and what Alexis’s dad told her. I don’t know what Violet’s dad told her, because I didn’t ask, but I’ll bet it’s the same thing.”
“Well, since I didn’t wait until I was engaged myself,” he said, “that’d be pretty stupid. And clearly, youarethinking about it. Seems to me it works better for dads to just go on and tell the truth.”
“Especially if your mum’s dead,” she said, and there was a weight to the words. “So you can’t ask her. I just wish I—"
He said, “Yeah. Sucks.”
She nodded and hauled in a breath, and he put out his arms. She moved into them, and he held her, plaster-caked jeans, drywall knives, and all, rocked a bit from side to side, and didn’t say anything, because he couldn’t think of anything to say.
She finally said, against his chest, “I don’t want Quinn to think she’s our mum.”
“I’m pretty sure she knows that,” he said.
“Troy seems like he wants her to be, though,” she said.
“Yeah. He does, a bit. Why do you think that is?”
“Because he was little. He says he doesn’t remember Mum. Like, atall.How can he not remember?”
“What do you remember,” he asked, “from when you were three?”
A silence, then, “I guess I don’t.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t love her,” Beckett said. “Could be you feel the love, uh, later. In your … your body, or something, even if your mind doesn’t remember it.”
“I remember her,” Janey said. “But I forget some things. I can’t remember how she smelled, or her face, exactly. When I think about her face, I remember it from photos, not her real face. I try, but I can’t. I only remember how I felt.”
“Me, too,” he said, and his throat closed up despite himself.
“It was justnormalthen,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “It was.”
“And we didn’t have to live in Montana. Why did we have to come here?”
He kept his arms around her. Another time when he needed to be honest. “I told myself it was for the job. It was a brilliant opportunity, and it didn’t have to be forever. And maybe I did it because it was hard to stay there.”
“In Aussie?” Janey asked. “Why? It was so mucheasier.”She stepped back and looked straight into his face.
“Too much Mum everywhere, I guess,” he said. “In the house we bought when she fell pregnant with Troy. The first day we used our key and walked through the door and knew it was ours. All the plans we made there.”And her family blaming me,he didn’t say.The way they looked at me, until I had to take my kids away from their grandparents, because I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to that guilt.
“You really loved her a lot,” Janey said.
His throat was so tight now, it was hard to get the words out. “Yeah. I did.”
