Harder (30 page)

Caroline slides down next to me. Touches my arm. “You are.”

“She won’t even let me in the fucking
room
.”

“It’s just the holiday,” Caroline says. “Talking to your mom. Her feelings are running high, but she’s going to come around.”

“She’s pissed at me for taking that top away from her.”

“It was the right thing to do.”

The top was from Mom, low-cut and completely wrong for a ten-year-old.

We sent Mom a photo book. It was Caroline’s idea. We picked out the best snapshots of Frankie and took some more of Iowa, the farm and the sculptures, me with Laurie, Caroline with Frankie, and put them together in an album.

So she’ll see what she’s missing
, Frankie said.

When I asked if she got it, Mom said, “It’s nice,” then changed the subject.

She’s back with Bo, fighting with my uncle Jack, on the outs with most of the Leavitts. She told me Leavitts have no loyalty.

I guess she forgot I’m a Leavitt. That her daughter is, too.

I just don’t want her in my life anymore—for my own sake and for Frankie’s. I don’t want her carelessness, her gusts of passion, her brief forays into thoughtfulness that leave you feeling like shit when she forgets all about you. I want Frankie to have more.

Through the door, I can hear the soft sound of her crying.

I stand up. Tap the door again. “Frankie, look. I need you to open this door. I’m going to count to ten. That’s all you get. Ready? Ten—”

Caroline interrupts, “Are you sure you don’t want me to try?”

“Nine.”

“West?”

“I’m sure. Eight. Seven.”

“Can I do anything?” Caroline asks.

“Yeah. Go get me the screwdriver out of the junk drawer in the kitchen. Six.”

“Flathead or Phillips?”

“Five. Phillips.”

She rises to her toes, presses her lips against mine, and says, “I love you.”

“Four. Love you, too, baby. Three.”

Frankie cracks the door open on
two
. Her eyes are red. “What do you
want
?”

“To borrow your new purse. Jesus, Franks, what do you think I want? To talk to you. Let me in.” Gently, I push her shoulder so she’ll move aside, and then I walk into her room and close the door.

There’s a neat pile on her desk of everything she got for Christmas today, stacked up and organized in a kind of display that she’s put on for herself. It’s such a kid thing to do, such a
Frankie
thing, it makes me feel too much at once.

Proud I could give her that stuff so she could have a good Christmas, the kind of Christmas kids are supposed to have.

Pissed at whatever my mom said to ruin it.

But over all that, just this pure hit of love for my girl.

I sit on the unmade bed.

“What?” she says.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re looking at me funny.”

“I was just thinking how much I love you,” I confess.

Her eyes dart away, guilty.

This is how it is with us now. I keep reaching for her, but I never seem to catch her. She doesn’t want me to. “What’d Mom say?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing. You talked for a long time.”

“We just talked about Christmas and presents and stuff. She’s living with Bo again.”

“I know. She told me.”

“She asked did I want to come home.”

“No.” The word is out of me before I know what’s happening. I’m standing, towering over Frankie. “No fucking way.”

She shrinks back. I have to calm down, I know I do, but what the fucking fuck? What kind of person would do that—just ask Frankie does she want to come home, a casual question dropped into a Christmas phone call without checking with me first, without fucking asking whether I thought it would be a good idea?

Who does she think she is?

That I know the answer only makes me angrier. She’s Frankie’s mom. I’m just a fraud.

“Tell me what she said,” I demand. “Every word.”

Frankie eyes me skittishly. “She said I could come home if I wanted. She said she misses me, and you probably …”

“I probably what?”

Frankie shrugs at the floor. “You have Caroline.”

“And that means what, exactly?”

Another shrug. “You don’t want me anymore.”

“Did I say that? Did I ever fucking say that?”

“No, but you don’t have to. You hate me!”

“I don’t hate you!”

“You’re yelling at me. You’re mad, you get mad, you never used to but you do now, and I hate you! I want to go home. I miss Mom. I miss Dad.”

“You don’t fucking miss Dad.”

“I do, too! He loves me!”

“Loved you,” I say. “He’s dead.”

It’s nasty. Such a nasty thing to say, but he was a bastard
and she wants him more than me. It’s the worst thing she could say, the starkest evidence of my failure.

She wants to go back to Silt, and I would rather die than go with her.

I would rather die than send her.

Her face crumples. “I hate you!”

And then she’s facedown on the bed, crying again.

Caroline’s in the open doorway, saying my name. Her hand lands on my arm. I come back into my body, the aching tension, the bitter taste in my throat.

I hear myself. Everything I said.

I’m not a good parent. Not a good person.

I can’t become one—I don’t know how. Because Caroline’s wrong. It’s not about parenting books, patience, trying harder. It’s about
me
. I’m short-tempered and angry and violent because I was born this way,
born
to it. Fucking cursed from the start.

Both of us. Me and Franks.

When I try to touch my sister, she smacks my hand away. “Leave me alone.”

There’s nothing I can do.

“West,” Caroline says again.

“Can you sit with her?” I ask.

Because at least I can give Frankie that much. Someone who knows how to love her.

Someone who will say the right things when I can’t.

Because of the snowstorm and how everything happened with Christmas, Caroline decides not to stay over at her dad’s even for the few nights of break she’d originally planned. What she really wants, she says, is to drive down for dinner with her family and come back the same night.

She wants me and Frankie to come with her.

I have a feeling she’s scared to leave the two of us alone. She dragged us out the day after Christmas to shop sales and spend gift cards at the mall in Des Moines. Frankie hasn’t said anything more about moving home to Silt.

I’m trying not to think about it.

I’m not even angry. I just feel hollow, knowing I can’t give my sister what I want her to have. Not if she won’t let me.

Not if I don’t know how.

Caroline says I’m overreacting. She says my mom’s trouble, but we already knew that. She says I’m a good father, a good man, that everybody’s got flaws.

Caroline points out that I raised my voice, but I didn’t attack my sister physically, didn’t insult her verbally, didn’t bad-mouth my mother, didn’t hit anyone or throw anything, didn’t get drunk or high or shoot anybody.

This is supposed to help, I guess. Counting all the ways I didn’t fuck up.

It doesn’t help. It makes me grateful she’s willing to talk to me at all when I’m such a truculent pain in the ass, but it doesn’t alter my conviction that I don’t have what it takes to be a parent.

But Caroline gets what Caroline wants, so off we all go two days after Christmas to the Piasecki homestead.

Caroline’s from the kind of family with a dining room, and a dining room table, and a tablecloth that’s old, with a lace strip down the middle and candles and dishes that match.

I get through dinner by saying either
please
or
thank you
at the end of every sentence and otherwise keeping my mouth shut.

Frankie does good. She’s completely baffled by the gravy boat, and she drops cranberry sauce on her lap, but she’s ten,
so nobody minds. Caroline braided her hair and picked out her clothes. She’s shiny and bright in the candlelight, pretty as a picture in a book.

When Caroline sits beside her sisters and her dad, I can see her face reflected in theirs—her eyes from her dad, nose and chin probably her mother’s legacy.

Janelle is the loudest, and kind of bossy. Alison’s just home from a stint in the Peace Corps. She’s thin and quiet, overwhelmed-looking.

Caroline’s dad is like a band director at the top of the table, big gestures and big hands waving around, jowls and disapproving eyebrows that would be intimidating except that when he smiles at his girls, he looks like Santa Claus—all soft belly and sparkling eyes.

He smiles at Frankie that way, too, so I can’t make myself dislike him no matter how many suspicious looks he sends my way.

I’ve met him exactly twice. The first time, I did the best I could to come across as a moronic horndog. The second time, I was in jail. If it takes him a decade to warm up to me, it’s no worse than I deserve.

Caroline doesn’t like it, though. Every time he gives me some tiny measure of shit, she gives it right back to him, and the conversational temperature rises degree by degree, until the both of them are a little hot.

Everywhere I look, I see something to remind me what kind of childhood Caroline had. School pictures on the wall. Framed kid drawings. A bedraggled brown paper football-looking thing in the center of the table that Caroline says is supposed to be a turkey Janelle made in kindergarten.

I can’t get worked up about her dad’s disapproval because I’m too busy looking around this place, thinking,
This is what safe looks like
.

Not the size of the house. Not the neighborhood or the leather sectional sofa or the turkey on the table, but the way these people
are
together, familiar and affectionate, tuned in to one another, telling Frankie funny stories from when the three girls were little whose punchlines don’t depend on anybody getting hurt or humiliated.

I can’t send my sister back to Silt.

I won’t. Not if there’s any chance she could have this instead.

After dinner, everybody’s got presents to exchange, which is awkward because Frankie and I didn’t have enough warning to buy anything, but they’ve got stuff for us. Nice stuff—a pair of leather gloves with fur in them for me, a set of birthstone earrings and a cashmere scarf for Frankie.

I can’t sit still through it. I end up ducking out to use the bathroom, then pass by the kitchen, where all that dirty china’s stacked up by the sink just begging to be washed.

I’m about halfway through the dishes when Caroline comes in, picks up a towel, and gets to work drying.

“You okay?” she asks.

“Yeah. Frankie being good?”

“She’s great. She went out with Janelle to get butter so they can make Christmas shortbread.”

“She wasn’t begging, was she?”

“It was Janelle’s idea. And you know it’s fine if she’s not perfectly polite. Everybody understands.”

Caroline’s dad comes in. He stops short when he sees us by the sink.

“Coffee?” Caroline asks.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll make it,” she says. “You can dry the dishes.”

To me, she notes, “It’s actually his job. I’m usually the one
who washes. I can’t get the dishes dried well enough to meet his exacting specifications.”

So then it’s me and Mr. Piasecki, side by side at the sink, and Caroline bustling around the kitchen grinding beans and measuring.

“When are you going back?” her dad asks her.

“Probably in a few hours. After the shortbread, if that’s okay with West.”

“Why wouldn’t it be okay?” I ask.

“If we stay that long, Frankie will be up past her bedtime.”

“It’s fine. She’ll fall asleep in the car.”

“You could stay over,” her dad says. “We’ve got two rooms empty upstairs even with Alison here, and that air mattress we could put up in the finished part of the basement—”

“Three rooms, Dad?” Caroline asks. “Really? You’re going to go with that?” She hops up on the countertop next to my left elbow, putting me right in the line of fire between the two of them.

Her dad glances at me. “Is this how it is, West?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“She’s living with you, taking care of your sister for you, and now you won’t even let her visit overnight for Christmas unless I let you share a room?”

“No, sir,” I say. “That’s not how it is.”

“That’s sure what it sounds like.”

I clear my throat. Try to think of some way to say it that’s tactful, but fuck it. I’m not tactful. “Caroline’s in charge. I just go by whatever she wants.”

He looks at me for a minute. Makes this
hmph
kind of noise. “That’s the first intelligent thing I’ve heard you say.”

Caroline reaches across me and punches him in the shoulder, hard.

“Hey,” he says. But it’s mild, and he’s looking at her with affection as he rubs his arm and asks, “What about what
I
want?”

“You’re not the one who has to sleep in the bed,” she says.

“I’m not talking about beds anymore.”

“Fine, then let’s talk about what you’re really talking about—you’re not the one who has to live with it, Dad. I am. So I’m going to make the decisions, and you get to decide whether you support them or don’t, but that’s the extent of it.”

“When you’re making decisions with my money, going to school on my dime, it’s not the extent of it. I get a say. You owe me a real conversation, not just this garbage about I support it or not but that’s all. I’m already living with it. I didn’t get a choice on that, but we’ve got a choice on this lawsuit.”

“You don’t have to live with it the way
I
do,” Caroline says. “You’re not getting deposed. You’re not taking calls from the state senate and telling them,
Yeah, you’re right, I
could
help you, but I won’t, because I’ve got this vendetta I’m in the middle of, so no
.”

“We talked about this. We knew it was going to be hard, that’s just the way these things go. It’s normal to get discouraged at this point in the proceedings, but when you start something, you see it through—that’s what I taught you.”

“I’m not quitting, Dad.”