Page 111 of Mortgage of Convenience

I’m so flush with fondness I could kiss her.

“I never thought about what my dream house would look like before, but I don’t think I can imagine anything else now.”

Fuck, I love her.

“I heard you’ve got a pretty green thumb, as well,” Dad adds.

“Yep.”

I don’t offer anything else.

“Look, son,” he says.

My jaw clenches tighter. I’ll be lucky if I can chew without breaking a tooth.

“I appreciate you suggesting this, for your mother’s sake, if anything, but if you really can’t stand being here, then I think we should take a raincheck.”

“No.”

I’m better than this. Stronger. I’ve proven that to myself repeatedly in the last two decades, and it was supposed to mean that I could handle this.

I don’t want him to have this hold on me anymore.

“No,” I repeat. “I, uh…” Finally, I give a little, loosening my jaw. “I guess Mom’s told you about our indoor jungle. She said you’ve gotten pretty handy in the garden yourself.”

He nods. Beside me, Bee shuffles her chair closer, until our hands touch.

“I’m not too bad these days. Started as a calming exercise, but I fell in love with it. Now I tend to a few neighbors’ gardens as a favor. Nothing overly complicated, but it’s keeping me fit, and these days, I need all the exercise I can get.”

Talking with Jonathon is hard. As if it would be anything else.

My body is still conditioned to expect old reactions, and it’s disconcerting to experience something so different.

It’s wrong, like a glitch in reality or chocolate-coated chips.This isn’t my dad, I want to say.Whatever you did with him, he isn’t here.

The man before me is open and apologetic. If it’s an act, it’s the most convincing one I’ve ever seen.

From the way he speaks, it’s clear Mom wasn’t lying about the work he’s done. It’s in the words he uses, words my own therapist has said to me. It’s never been easy to hear about, but Mom’s said enough that I know, logically, Jonathon isn’t the same man. But fuck if that isn’t the hardest damn thing to reconcile right now.

Jonathon clears his throat. “I have something for you,but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.” He pulls a folded square of paper from his pocket and slides it across the table.

I stare at it for a moment, not game to open it yet, especially if it’s what I think it is.

“This isn’t a bribe,” he says, but it sure as fuck feels like one. “When you were born, I put a hundred dollars into a savings account, and I’ve been adding to it ever since. You were supposed to get it on your twenty-first birthday, but…” He lets the sentence finish there. “Anyway, your mother said it was the kind of thing I should do face to face, so I’ve been holding on to it in hopes we could do this.”

The paper is barely bigger than my mug. How can something so small carry so much weight?

The thought that Jonathon has been keeping this, planning it, even while we weren’t speaking, through all the years I wished for terrible things to happen to him…

I swallow back the lump in my throat and look up at him. Now it’s his turn to look away.

Between the brown and green sweater, the downturned slope of his shoulders and the disappearing hairline, he’s nothing like the bogeyman I used to know. At best, they could be cousins. But this isn’t the man who once screamed so hard he spat in my face. Whose stare could freeze the marrow in my bones.

This version of him is world weary, soft-spoken, and, right now, skittish. Because of me.

Christ.

How long have we been afraid of each other?

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