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Her mom shooed her away, and her face filled Allison’s phone again. “You have a tendency to get comfortable with things and not branch out. That’s all. Same friends, same town, same neighborhood…”
“New house, new school, new responsibilities…” Allison’s heart sang an angry beat. Sophie said the same thing to her a lot, and, quite frankly, it was more than a little irritating. Allison took plenty of risks. Just because they weren’t always the ones her mother and friends thought she should take didn’t make them any less risky.
Her mother offered a wry smile. “Well, now that I’ve gotten you sufficiently aggravated, I should probably tell you about your father.”
Allison’s whole body clenched. “What about Jed?”
“He’s got a… heart thing.”
“What does that mean?”
Her mom’s lips disappeared into a straight line for moment before she responded. “He’s been to the ER a few times over the last three months because his heart keeps slipping into AFib.”
“Like a heart attack?” This news should have summoned some emotion in Allison, but there was only a chilly numbness.
“More like heart failure.”
“Is it bad?”
“It’s something to keep a close eye on.”
Allison’s foot ground harder into the carpet. “Why are you telling me this?”
Her mother frowned. “He’s your father.”
“Only in the most technical of senses.”
“Sickness can change that.” Her mother spoke the words carefully.
“Fuck that. He doesn’t get a pass just because he’s sick. How do you know this, anyway?”
Her mom’s eyes shifted away from the camera.
Allison groaned. “Are you seriously still talking to him?”
“He calls sometimes—”
“Ma.”
“Honey, I know you’re an adult now and you’ve learned a lot about the world but marriage is complicated. Once you’ve been tied to someone—once you’ve had a child with them, shared a life—you’re tied forever, even if you split.”
A million terrible words made their way to Allison’s tongue but she swallowed them back. Instead, she and her mother said goodbye with lots ofI love yous as they blew kisses at each other’s dogs.
Allison set her phone on the coffee table and dragged her copy ofNicholas Nicklebyback across her legs. Monty tackled her hand as she tried to reach for her pencil.
She sighed into the pages. Reminding her mother how little her father cared for either of them was not going to make anyone feelbetter or change the way Allison’s mother handled people. Cassandra Avery would always be too kind, always give away pieces of herself until there was nothing left but dust.
And Allison would keep collecting the dust, keep holding her mom together, because that’s what daughters did.
Chapter 6
Recitation for British Literature’s Greatest Hits was held in a closet-sized room in the Fyler library.
A conference table that barely fit sixteen chairs clogged most of the space, and their backs and legs knocked against windows and walls as the students settled in. Too many years of school emergency drills made Allison acutely aware of what a deathtrap she’d be stuck in for the next two hours.
Three chairs were still empty, but her phone said it was ten, so she turned to the whiteboard.
Thank god she’d brought her own markers and eraser because the tray stood empty. The room wasn’t even equipped for projection. They’d be doing this old school, which, to be honest, Allison rather enjoyed. She was a pen-on-paper, marker-on-board, hard-copies-of-books kind of person. She had an expensive desktop computer for writing and research, but if she could have gotten away with it, she probably would have scribed her papers by hand and used only the library stacks for research. Obviously, that wasn’t the way of things these days, but it felt so anachronistic to study medieval literature on the internet. She didn’t want to see photos of the Nowell Codex (the manuscript holding the oldest version ofBeowulf). She wanted to bestaring down at it through the glass of the display case at the British Library, wanted to study every burn mark and tear, every ink-scratched thorn and rune.
