Hook, Line, and Sinker (Bellinger Sisters)

On reflex, Fox glanced at the cabinet, as if he might find it there, stuffed full of condom money. Even though he wouldn’t. Even though it wasn’t the same house. “It’s okay, Ma.”

“No, it’s not.” She shook her head. “I needed to explain to you, Fox, that you’re nothing like him. To correct the damaging things you believed about yourself. These misconceptions. But you’d already started doing exactly what we encouraged you to do from the start. When you came back from college, you’d retreated into a hard shell. There was no talking to you then. And here we are now, years later. Here we are.”

Fox ran back through everything she’d said, his deepest insecurities exposed like a raw nerve, but so what. Nothing hurt like Hannah leaving hurt. Not even this. “If you don’t think I’m anything like him, why do you flinch every time you see me?”

Charlene paled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was doing that.” A beat passed. “Some of the time, I can live with the guilt of failing you. When I see you, though, that guilt hits me like a backhand to the cheek. That flinch is for me, not you.”

An unexpected burn started behind his eyes.

Something hard began to erode in the vicinity of his heart.

“I remember some of the things he said to you, all the way back to fourth grade, fifth grade. Which one in the class was your girlfriend? When were you going to start going on dates? Boy, you’ll have your pick of the litter! And I thought it was funny. I even said those things myself once in a while.” She reached for her pack of cigarettes, tapped one out and lit it, blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth. “Should have been encouraging you to do well in class. Or join clubs. Instead, we made life about . . . intimacy for you. From the damn jump. And I don’t have any excuse except to say, your father’s life was women. By default, so was mine. The affairs surrounded us at the time, took up all the air. We let it hurt our son, too. Let it turn into a shadow to follow you around. That’s the real tragedy. Not the marriage.”

Fox had to stand up. Had to move.

He remembered his parents saying those things to him. Of course he did. However, all the way up until this moment, it never once occurred to him that all parents weren’t saying those things to their kids. Never occurred to him that he’d effectively been brainwashed into believing his identity was the sum of his success with women. And . . .

And his mother didn’t wince when she saw him because he reminded her of his father. It was guilt. Fox didn’t like that, either. He owned his actions and didn’t want his mother claiming responsibility for them, because that would be cowardly. But, God, it was a relief. To know his mother didn’t dread seeing his face. To know he wasn’t broken, but maybe, just maybe, he’d been wedged into a category before he even knew what was happening.

More than anything in that moment, he wished for Hannah.

He wished to burrow his face into her neck and tell her everything Charlene had said, so she could sum it up perfectly for him in her Hannah way. So she could kiss the salt from his skin and save him. But Hannah wasn’t there. She’d gone. He’d sent her away. So he had to rescue himself. Had to work this out for himself.

“People will think she’s crazy to take a chance on me. People will assume I’m going to do to her what Dad did to you.”

When no response was forthcoming, Fox looked back over his shoulder to find Charlene aggressively stubbing out her cigarette. “Let me tell you a story. Earl and Georgette have been coming to bingo for over a decade, sitting on opposite sides of the hall. As far away from each other as they can get. They might look like sweet little seniors, but let me tell you, they are stubborn as shit.” Charlene lit another cigarette, comfortable in the middle of her storytelling. “Earl used to be married to Georgette’s sister, right up until she passed. Young. Maybe in her fifties. And, well, through comforting each other, Earl and Georgette got to falling in love, right? Both of them worried about people judging them, so they stopped seeing each other. Cut each other right off. But hell if they didn’t stare at each other across the bingo hall like two lovesick puppies for years.”

“What happened?”

“I’m going to tell you, aren’t I?” She puffed her smoke. “Then Georgette got sick. Same illness as her sister. And there was Earl, not only left to realize he’d missed out on creating a life with the woman he loved, but having no right to help her through the rough time. No right to care for her. Did it matter what other people thought at that point? No. It did not.”