“Oh, Abby.” He leaned forward until their foreheads were touching, their breaths mingling.
Abby closed her eyes, squeezed them shut tight, but a tear stupidly slipped out anyway.
“It’s not as if I’ve wanted this to wreck my life,” she told him in a suffocated whisper. “You know I’ve actually done my best to forgive and heal and all the rest of it. I really have, but I guess it wasn’t very much.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not as if I haven’t been happy,” she felt compelled to say, although she knew that in saying it at all, she was indicating the opposite. “I really do like working at Willow Tree. And my dad…” She stopped then, because she did not know how to begin to explain her dad, even to herself.
Simon eased back, forcing Abby to open her eyes and stare at him unhappily. He was going to ask questions, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for them.
“What about your dad?”
Abby shrugged, opened her mouth, closed it again. A tug-of-war was taking place in her head. “He blames me,” she said at last, and then she felt guilty for saying even that.
Simon’s eyebrows rose. “He doesn’t…”
“He does. At least, he did. After.” Another memory reel spun out: her father in the hallway, a policeman in the kitchen, Abby blurting out her guilt, seeking absolution even then. She asked me to drive her… I should have been there… The look on his face; she’d felt as if she were watching him age in seconds. Oh Abby, what have you done?
Six little words that had absolutely felled her. Six words she had never been able to forget. He’d turned away from her then, talked to the policeman in a monotone. Abby had hovered in the kitchen doorway; she had no real memory of that conversation, or even that whole afternoon, except her father’s silence.
After the policeman had left, her father had walked past as if she didn’t exist. He hadn’t so much as turned his head. Abby had stood there, feeling as if she were the ghost, rather than her mother or Luke, and then she’d gone up to her bedroom and curled up on her bed, hugging a pillow to her chest, sobbing silently until she’d felt as if she’d been turned inside out.
“He didn’t speak to me for a week,” she told Simon matter-of-factly. “While we were getting ready for the funeral, accepting a million casseroles, people in and out of the house all the time. He didn’t say a single word to me.”
Simon looked torn; he wanted to comfort her but he’d met her father. “He was grieving,” he said at last.
“Yes. I know. And after a week, after the funeral, when everyone had gone back to their homes and it was just the two of us, he spoke to me. Well, I spoke first. I said I wouldn’t go to college, I’d stay and help, and he just said ‘All right’. That was it.” She shrugged, amazed that the memory could still hurt so much, all these years later. The finality of that moment, of realizing this, and only this, was what her future was going to look like, and it was no more than she deserved. “And then we carried on as we have been ever since.” She held up a hand to stem the response she expected him to give. “Look, I know it’s dysfunctional, okay? But it’s a functioning dysfunction, if I can put it that way. My dad was never a chatterbox, and so it didn’t feel all that different. We’ve talked about the farm and the weather—”
“The weather?”
“I just mean, it’s been normal,” she clarified. “Mostly. Sometimes.”
“Which is it?”
“A bit of both.” Abby sighed, grateful that the threat of tears seemed to have passed. Maybe she wouldn’t cry, after all. “It hasn’t been great, I can admit that, but it hasn’t been terrible, either. At least, not all the time. Not even a lot of the time.” She caught Simon’s eye, jolted by the look of utter, s
orrowful sympathy on his face, and somehow it made the thin veneer of matter-of-fact acceptance she’d just about managed to cover herself with crack right through. “It has…” she began, but her voice wobbled all over the place. And then, to her own amazement and shock, she was crying—not a few trickly tears to dab from the corner of her eye, but from-the-gut sobs she was horrified to hear coming from herself—and even more so that she couldn’t stop.
“Abby,” Simon said, and then his arms were around her, her head against his chest, and still the sobs kept coming, right from the bottom of her, deep down, the ones he hadn’t even realized she’d been suppressing.
But I’ve cried, she thought, even as she continued to soak Simon’s shirt right through. I cried so much, back at the beginning.
But she hadn’t cried like this—in someone’s arms, offering her comfort, understanding her pain, giving her the acceptance and understanding she had never found before, not in fifteen years of both suppressing and searching. Before, she’d always cried alone, and she realized now that it wasn’t the same thing at all.
“I’m disgusting,” she choked out after what could have been five minutes or an hour. “I’m all snotty.”
“I don’t care.” There was a smile in Simon’s voice, even though his tone was serious.
“You should.” Urgh, she really was gross. Abby wiped her eyes and felt her nose running, but she didn’t really want to wipe that, at least not without a tissue. Simon was going to have to change his shirt.
“Here.” He scooted off the bed and went to the bathroom, returning with a bunch of scrunched-up toilet paper.
Abby managed a wobbly laugh.
“Thank you,” she said, taking it, and then she blew her nose heartily.
A silence stretched between them, and she didn’t know how to fill it.