Page 35 of Monk
“I haven’t killed anybody since I rotated home.”
“Gold star for you.”
She scrubs her face with her hands, taking a moment to gather herself. Apparently, to somebody who has no urge to kill another human being, the idea that somebody else might relish the opportunity is monstrous. I don’t want her to see me as a monster, but that’s out of my hands now. She wanted answers, and there’s nothing I can do about how she reacts to the ones I’m giving her.
“You hurt me, Jacob. You’ll never know how badly you hurt me.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know. How could you? You were the one who left, not the other way around.”
Though she isn’t screaming, her voice is a bit louder than normal. Loud enough to draw the eyes of a few people sitting at a nearby table. I give them my best biker face and they quickly turn away, deciding that minding their own business is probably the better idea.
“You’re right. I’ll never know. If you want an apology, I’m sorry, Kasey. I’m sorry I hurt you. But I had reasons.”
“Yeah, you couldn’t trust me to share what happened with your dad. Instead, you ran away from me and from everything we were building together.”
“It’s not that I ran from you,” I try to explain. “I was running away from everything bad in my life. Unfortunately, you got caught up in that.”
She shakes her head. Obviously, my answer hasn’t mollified her in the least.
“I didn’t tell you, because I knew if I called you before I left, you would have talked me out of it. And I needed to go. I needed to enlist because I can guarantee you that if I hadn’t, I’d be sitting in prison right now. If I hadn’t left, I would have killed my father at some point. In which case, I would have had to leave you anyway,” I explain to her.
“At least I would have known what happened.”
“Yeah, I could have told you all about it when you came to visit me in San Quentin,” I explain. “You deserved better than that, Kasey. You deserved better than me.”
“Don’t you think that was my decision to make?”
“No. It wasn’t.”
Her mouth falls open and she stares at me. “How dare you, you arrogant, presumptuous asshole.”
“That can’t come as a surprise to you.”
She looks about ready to pounce. “No. It doesn’t. It pretty much lines up with everything I’ve thought about you for the last ten years or so.”
She rolls her eyes and lets out a low, grumble, her frustration with me evident. The one thing I can say, is that my story seems to have taken a bit of the wind out her sails. She doesn’t have quite as much bite as she did when she walked in here. Kasey’s still pissed, but she’s tempering it.
That isn’t what I want. It’s not my goal to tell her what happened the night I left. I don’t want her pity. I don’t want anybody’s pity. I take ownership for my life—and that includes owning up to my own fuckups. I am simply trying to give her the answers she wants.
“I didn’t know things with your dad were that bad. I mean, I knew your home life was rough, but I didn’t know what happened or why you left.”
“How could you? I didn’t tell you,” I say. “And I’m not looking for your sympathy. I just want you to understand that it had nothing to do with you, or with anything you did or didn’t do.”
“Yeah that might have been nice to hear a while back. I spent a long time thinking I’d done something to drive you off.”
“You should have known better than that. You were the only good thing in my life. You were the only thing about my life that was good.”
“Yeah, well, how could I? As you so astutely pointed out, you didn’t tell me.”
“Touché.”
A long moment of silence descends over the table. I take a drink of my coffee and watch her closely. Kasey’s grappling with everything I’ve told her tonight, and I can tell she’s not sure what to make of any of it. She’s obviously had one image and one construct in her mind about me all these years. And it’s just as obvious everything I’ve told her has destroyed that same image and construct.
I don’t know what I can do for her now. I’ve told her everything. Given her all the answers she was looking for. Whether she chooses to accept them is up to her. So is what she chooses to do about them. My only hope is that it brings her some sense of peace.
For me, it’s stirred up a lot of shit. All of the old ghosts I’ve worked so hard to stuff down and snuff out of existence have come crawling back. Feelings I thought I’d abandoned long ago are now rushing back to the surface. Truth be told, my feelings for Kasey have never dissipated. Not completely. But that’s my cross to bear. That’s something I’ll have to spend the next decade dealing with, I suppose.
