“I’m withdrawing from our relationship,” I tell him, slowly, each word coming to me as I say it. My voice quavers, dips, comes dangerously close to tears, but I don’t give in.
He’s not going to hear me cry. I’m not going to give him that.
“I don’t want to speak to you for a while,” I say, whispering, unsteady. “When I call home, I don’t want to speak to you. I don’t want you at my graduation. If you’d like to know how I’m doing, please ask Mom.”
“You’re choosing some perverted older man over your own family?” he snaps, finally angry. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that blood is thicker —”
“You turned your own son out onto the streets when he needed your help!” I shout suddenly, violently, the sound of my own voice bouncing from the walls of the conference room a shock.
I take a hard, deep breath but I’m not in time and the tears finally break through. I bite my lips together as I feel my self crumple inward, determined not to let him know.
Keep it together, just for one more minute, please keep it together keep it together…
“Don’t you dare tell me anything about blood,” I go on quiet, strangled. “I’m not choosing him over you, I’m choosing to no longer speak to someone who nearly got me expelled from college and doesn’t seem to consider me a full person with thoughts worth seeking out.”
“What do you mean expelled —”
“Bye, Dad,” I say, softly, and then hang up.
Two seconds later, he calls. I send it to voicemail, then do it again and again, until finally, he stops calling.
Then I sit in a fancy office chair, put my head on the table, and cry.Chapter Forty-NineCaleb“Put this on, you’re making me cold,” Seth says as I glance at my phone again. Nothing.
I open my texts. She hasn’t read any of the five I’ve sent her in the last couple of hours, hasn’t answered any of my calls.
Is she still in the hearing? I wonder, even though she can’t possibly be because it’s been hours, the sun now almost down.
“Earth to Caleb?” he says, and this time I turn. He’s holding out a thick fleece blanket very patiently, his hair still wet from the shower, his feet bare beneath his pants.
“Thanks,” I say, and take it, suddenly realizing that I’m standing on my back porch wearing nothing but a long-sleeved shirt, pants, and slippers, and it can’t be more than forty degrees out here.
It must be over by now. It has to be. The letter must have worked or not, because although I know what’s happened to me — I packed up my office while a security guard watched; my VSU email has already stopped working — no one would say a single word about what’s going to happen to her.
“You’re supposed to put it on,” Seth says, his patience clearly running thin. “That’s the thing about blankets, they reflect back warmth from whatever part you put them on. So if they’re just wadded up in your hands, all they’ll do is warm your hands, while your face falls off from frostbite.”
“Sorry,” I say, and unfurl the blanket, then slowly put it over my shoulders, wrapping it around myself.
He sighs, goes inside, comes back a moment later with a similar blanket wrapped around himself and his shoes on.
“Does your back yard know what the fuck you’re going to do?” he asks, leaning against the wooden railing next to me.
It’s midwinter, and the back yard looks shitty. The grass is dead. There’s a small garden, left by the previous tenant, and that’s dead. The two small trees and the oak on my property line are all leafless, spindly branches reaching into the darkening sky.
“No,” I say.
“Has your back yard spent even a second thinking about it?” he asks.
“No,” I admit, and Seth sighs.
I’ll never teach again. Not at the university level, not community college, not high school. I confessed, in writing, that I used my position to coerce a student into a sexual relationship, and every job I apply to for the rest of my life will find that out with a single phone call.
I lean forward, crack the knuckles on one hand, my fingers freezing.
“I just want it to work,” I say, softly.
“Moron,” Seth says, matching my tone, looking out at my ugly back yard.
“I was getting fired no matter what,” I remind him.
“And if you hadn’t been?” he asks, gravelly, not making eye contact. “If they’d said one of you has to go, you’d have done the same thing, which is ridiculous and you’re ridiculous.”
He’s right, and we both know it.
“You’d have done the same if —”
“Don’t,” he warns me.
I sneak a sideways glance at him.
“Still?”
“Just don’t,” he says, sounding weary, so I don’t.
I already dragged the poor man on a five-mile hike through forty-degree weather today, after I turned in the letter, because I didn’t think I could deal with people any more. At least not regular people, which Seth isn’t.