Page 68 of Tell Me Softly
For a moment, I forgot all our problems and enjoyed being there with them. We had toast and bacon with our eggs. I squeezed orange juice; my brother set the table. It was so nice to see Cameron smiling. The night before, when he came to my room, I’d noticed his eyes were red from crying. I told myself I needed to pay closer attention to him. Everything at home was affecting him more than the rest of us.
Because it was Sunday, Dad said we could go to the park when we were done. But before we left, Dad and Cameron said they had a surprise for me.
“Close your eyes, OK?” Dad said as I walked out on the porch, and he disappeared inside to do whatever it was he had planned.
“All right… Three, two…”
“One!” Cameron finished impatiently.
I opened my eyes to see what they’d both been hiding: a white bicycle with a wicker basket painted with daisies. It was shiny and new and just waiting for someone to take it out.
I smiled. “Is that for me?” I asked.
“It sure is!” Cameron said. “Now we can go racing, Kami! A bike’s way more fun than a car!”
My father smiled at me, but his eyes were sad.
“I love it, Dad,” I said, and gave him a big hug.
“We’ll get you your car back, I promise,” he said softly.
“I don’t even need it. With the bike, at least I’ll get some exercise!”
Dad smiled. Around three, we rode to the park: Dad on thegiant mountain bike he often took out on Sundays and Cameron on his tiny one covered in a million stickers. We spent the whole day out, just being together, eating our sandwiches on the banks of Lake Carsville. It was perfect. My mother had no idea what she was missing. She was so frivolous, she had never understood what really mattered.
I didn’t miss her the entire week she was gone. I didn’t miss my friends, either. For some reason, they were upset with me. I didn’t understand, and honestly, I couldn’t worry about it. It was getting to be that time of year when I shut down and spent whole days all by myself drawing and lost in thought.
There were times when I couldn’t help beating myself up. Times when every single detail of the past few days came back to me. I was sure Mom had left because she didn’t want to be in Carsville on that date, especially not with the Di Biancos back. It happened every year: one time she needed to visit our grandparents, another time it was a spa, another time it was a vacation with the women from the tennis club…
In the days following the competition, Ellie tried to talk to me, to ask me why I was standoffish with the girls and why I hadn’t shown up to cheerleading practice. She told me they all wished I’d be captain again, but they didn’t want to say it aloud because they were scared of how Kate would react.
Scared of how Kate would react…I kept repeating those words in my head, trying to figure out what they could possibly mean. Since when was a friend someone who inspired fear?
“Please, Kami… Come back to us,” she insisted, sitting down by me one day in the cafeteria at a table by the window on the far end of the room, where the rest of the team couldn’t hear us.
“Ellie, I just don’t see it right now. I’m sorry,” I said, picking away at my food. She was sad, but I could tell she was frustrated with me too.
“Oh, but you don’t have any problem hanging out with Taylor, right? You can spend all day with him. Is that what you are now, one of those girls who abandons all her friends for her boyfriend?”
My boyfriend?Was Taylor my boyfriend?
Speak of the devil… There he was.
“What’s up, Ellie?” he asked with a friendly smile. That smile that transmitted infinite calm.
Instead of saying anything, she looked back and forth at us and walked away to rejoin our friends.
“Is she still pissed off?” Taylor asked, tossing an apple up in the air and catching it.
I shrugged. “She doesn’t understand that I just need some distance from everyone right now.”
Taylor grabbed my hand to stop me from playing with my food.
“Hey, Kami…are you going to tell me what’s going on or what?”
For some strange reason, I didn’t want to. Maybe it was just looking out for Dad, but I couldn’t stand anyone knowing that he was practically bankrupt. It was enough having to listen to him arguing with his lawyers and clients. He’d been working from home lately. He’d closed his office in downtown Carsville and had even put our beach house up for sale.
I knew none of that mattered, it was just stuff, but still. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Dad. Everything he’d achieved in life was crumbling, and my mother wouldn’t even lend him a hand or be there to support him. I’d had to step up, and there I was walking around the house pretending everything was OK, smiling even though I was torn apart inside so my father and brother could feel that things were still normal.
