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He locks the door behind him and walks over to me, worry in his tone. “Landon? What’s the matter, son?”
My eyes are dry again, but I’m sniffling. I scrub at my jaw with my knuckles and rasp, “I’m falling apart.”
He drops his keys onto the bar and sits on the stool to my left. “Yeah, no shit. I could hear it over the phone. Talk to me.”
At the invitation, everything comes pouring out of me. Well, almost everything with Liv-Andria. But definitely everything with Lolly and how upset I am with it all, withher.Everything with my dad. How absolutely terrible I feel after getting wasted last night.
“I’m drowning,” I say, my voice hoarse and cracking after fifteen solid minutes of talking. I look at him pleadingly. “What am I supposed to do? Idon’t knowwhat to do!”
Sadness and sympathy are on his face. “The first thing you need to do is breathe, Landon. Work on that for a second.”
I try, but God, my lungs hurt as much as the rest of me.
“Let’s talk about your dad first.” He shakes his head, anger glinting in his eyes. “Dude is a sorry bastard. I can’t fucking believe he’d handle seeing you like that. I’m mad as hell about that and you’re fine to be upset about it, too, as long as you know it ain’t your fault. His choices ain’t a reflection of what you deserve.”
Honestly, I knew that already. It’s the conclusion I managed to come to in the days after all that happened.
I nod very slightly as I rub at my aching temples. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Mmhmm.”
“All right. Now, about your grandmother….” He sighs heavily. “Absolutely no easy way to handle that one, man. You just gotta do the best you can, and it may not be a lot, but that’s okay because no one—no one—expects you to take it all in stride.” His sadness deepens. “That woman and Dr. Wintermute loved you to the ends of this universe, and losing them was nothing you could’ve been prepared for. If you’re pissed at her for being someone else, if you’ve got a broken heart about it, that’s natural. Things like this gotta be taken a day at a time. I think you know that.”
I nod again, sorrow over her disease panging through me.
“Be patient with yourself,” he goes on. “Give yourself some space to be human. Just ‘cause you love her doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to be frustrated with her.”
“But it’s not her fault,” I say weakly.
“No, it ain’t, but it also ain’t realistic to expect loved ones of sick people not to be angry. You know there’s a process to grieving. Acceptance is at the end of it all, son, not in the thick of it.”
Damn. Utter truth right there. I nod more emphatically, beyond grateful for that.
But I can’t help thinking it sounds like something Liv would say, and I crumple up on the inside at the thought of her.
I don’t know how; I thought I was already as withered as I could get.
I hang my head, cover my eyes with one hand, cross my other arm over my chest. I’m back to not breathing worth a fuck.
Bill is quiet for several seconds before he states gently, “So you’re in love with a girl who’s afraid to love you back.”
The words sound even sadder out loud than they do in my head.
“Yeah,” I whisper. My eyes ache and burn, but tears don’t come. I’m glad because I feel shitty enough without crying in front of Bill.
I hear him blow out a breath, then suck on his teeth, then clear his throat. “You still want her after what she said there at the end about her niece?”
He doesn’t know the details of Liv’s childhood hell, but I told him enough for him to understand how much her shout hurt me at the time.
“Yeah,” I say again. “She didn’t mean it.”
“You truly believe that?” He isn’t skeptical, just double-checking.
I remember the night she showed me the flyer for Rae’s dance—how openly she spoke with me, how earnestly she looked at me.‘You’re her hero,’she had told me.
As I nod, I assure Bill, “I believe it.”
