Page 75 of The Fall Back Plan
She hesitates, like she’s thinking hard about this. “No. Pardon me for saying so, but it doesn’t seem like a healthy thing for you to do.”
“So you would have said no to protect me?” I can’t believe she’s saying this with a straight face.
“Yes.” It’s simple. And it makes me believe her, but it also makes me angrier.
“Why start now?” I snap. “That would have been helpful when I was seven. Or twelve. Or seventeen.”
“I know it doesn’t seem like it, Jolie, but I tried then too.”
I can only give her an incredulous laugh. “Fetching my dad home from your bar was always the worst part of my day.”
“I know it. And believe it or not, I did what I could. Your dad was—”
“He was a drunk.”
“Yes.” She acknowledges. “One of the worst cases I’ve seen.”
“But you kept serving him.”
She sighs. “Maybe you haven’t owned your place long enough to understand this, but there are some cases where all you can do is keep a person where you can keep an eye on them.”
“So you’re the patron saint of alcoholics now?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if I banned your father, Jolie. He would have found somewhere else to drink. Somewhere farther from your place, where he could get into more trouble trying to get home. Somewhere no one was keeping an eye on him, just taking his money until he was too drunk to pay and then they’d pitch him outside. I hoped keeping him at the bar until he was drunk enough not to resist would keep him out of trouble. Tom took him home any chance he could, but sometimes it was too busy, and then we’d call you.”
She looks down at her hands. “I’m ashamed of that. In my mind, I was doing something good. I told myself it was more than anyone else would have done for him. But I should have cut him off. Or done more for you.”
Unbelievable. “I have no absolution for you.”
She nods. “I understand. I want you to know I’m sorry all the same. I cared about both of you. I’d have gone to his funeral if I’d known about it. I visit him sometimes.” She glances toward the columbarium. It gives off a muted glow from the landscape lights trained on it. “I’ve told him I’m sorry many times. I’m glad I get to say it to you now.”
My flashlight catches the glint of tears in her eyes as she turns back toward me, and I’m shocked at the sight of them. I think she’s trying to hide them from me, and that more than anything convinces me that she means it.
“What do you want from me?” I sound tired to my own ears. “Forgiveness?”
She shakes her head and stays silent for a long time, staring into the dark in the direction of Tom’s grave. “You know the Harvest Hollow Library Distinguished Scholarship award you won?”
“The scholar . . . yes?” It closed the gap on a few things my university-sponsored financial aid package didn’t cover. Books every semester, because the total always exceeded the stipend the school gave me. A warm jacket when mine tore my sophomore year. A new pair of rain boots. A new pair of glasses when my prescription changed. The kinds of things that I would have had to do without if I didn’t have that award renew every year.
“That was your dad.”
“What do you mean? My dad never had an extra dollar he didn’t drink away.”
“You’re right,” she said. “But from the time he complained about you one night when you were a junior and you’d asked to go look at a few colleges in driving distance, I started setting aside every cent he spent on drinking. Tom and I figured that money should have been going to you, so we made sure it did. We kept it after you graduated until he passed. I have a couple thousand more to give you when you want it.”
I can’t process what she’s saying. “That scholarship was from the library.”
She sighs. “I knew you wouldn’t take it if you knew where it was coming from. Roberta Herring worked with us to set that up. You were its one and only winner.”
I remember Mrs. Herring urging me to apply for it, telling me that no one deserved it more.
“So I never earned that?”
She makes a sharp, impatient sound. “Of course you did. You’d have won it if it had been a real one too. It was money your dad should have been putting toward your education the whole time. You did the work. You made the grades. You got yourself into college. We just made sure he did his part.”
I sit beside her on the bench, stunned into silence. “Mrs. Herring never breathed a word about it.”
“Of course not. She knew you would have turned it down if you knew. And we never told your father what we were up to. He would have gone down to Durham and insisted you owed it to him.”
