Page 86 of Cash
She scoffs again, this one louder, harsher. “I’m jealous of you. Your support system. Your sense of conviction. You know who you are. You’re chasing the right things. You love the right things.”
“You don’t?”
“Honestly?” I hear her let out a breath. “I’m not sure. All I do know…” Her voice trails off.
“What?” I ask softly.
“I wish I had what you do. The chaos is real, sure, but so is the joy.”
I chuckle. “Take some for yourself, then. You’re welcome to it.”
“You mean that?” Her voice is soft now too.
“I mean that, Mollie.”
Scary part is, I reallydomean it. She’s welcome to stay. Welcome to take whatever she wants. She’s lonely, and I know how awful loneliness is.
Right now, though, I don’t feel lonely at all.
I like the idea that she doesn’t either.
“Tell me about your mom,” I say, clearing my throat.
“Oh, my mother. I admire her for raising me on her own while building this, like, insanely successful real estate brokerage empire. There’s not a person in Dallas she doesn’tknow. She’s got tons of friends, she plays golf, she gambles. True Renaissance woman.”
“She and Wyatt would get along.”
“She’d take Wyatt for a ride. I’m serious. She wins every round of poker she plays.”
“I like her already.”
“I love her. Dearly. But being the only child of divorced parents—I don’t think she meant to do this, but she kinda put me in the middle of her and Dad.”
“How so?”
“She wasn’t shy about sharing her less than stellar opinions of him with me. And it was from a young age too. I clearly remember her calling my dad a dickweed for the first time.”
I chuckle. “Dickweed?”
“She gets an A-plus for curse-word creativity. But I was ten at that point, so?—”
“Not cool. Explains why you’d cut off contact with him. You only had your mom’s side of the story. She was the one raising you.”
“Right. I could see how stressed out she was, trying to juggle being a parent with everything else. She did it on her own, and that’s not fucking easy.”
“Sawyer will always say he’s never worked harder in his life than he has as a single parent.”
“So, yeah, I sympathized with Mom. I trusted her judgment, so I knew there had to be a good reason why she felt the way she did about Dad. She thought he was an asshole, so I thought he was an asshole too. And some of the things he did really were shitty. As I’ve gotten older, though—now that I’m here?—”
“You’re seeing the other side of the story.”
“Exactly.” Her voice gets thick again. “I’m seeingyourstory. And it’s making me really rethink things.”
I let my head fall back against the door and look at the ceiling beams that run the length of the hall.
My chest feels full. So full, it aches.
But the feeling is somehow light, too; the elephant on my sternum disappeared somewhere around the time Mollie asked me about my parents.