Chapter 42

Food for Thought

Saturday morning, while Heather’s mother met with a client from work—or said she was meeting a client from work—Heather’s father took his daughters to breakfast. It was a little diner they used to frequent when he lived with them. They sat at their favorite booth, the one in the corner, and indulged in a hearty breakfast.

For Heather, it was nice to go somewhere and get to be a kid again—to let her father pay for breakfast, to let her father be responsible for Ruby. Living with their mother, the girls were largely left to themselves, and the responsibility was taxing. Such a relief was it for Heather to be a kid again, that she ordered the diner’s famous Pancake Party, a stack of pancakes decorated with a goofy clown face of chocolate chips and whipped cream. It was meant for kids, but she just couldn’t resist. She felt a thousand times lighter and wished she never had to leave the diner.

But at the end of breakfast, her father got serious again. “Girls,” he said after the waiter cleared their plates, “I have to talk to you about what’s happening between me and your mother.”

The girls struggled to make eye contact. Here they had been so happy, and their father had to ruin it again by talking about the real world. Why couldn’t they just stay in that diner forever and just ignore everything else in the universe? But their father continued to speak:

“I’ve never really come out and said this to you, so I’ll say it now. I made a mistake. I made a mistake. I was stupid and arrogant, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I let the power of my promotion at work go to my head, and I did some stupid things. I’ve stopped, though. I want to come back home to be with you. You know that, don’t you?”

Both girls were on the verge of tears, but they tried to hold out. Heather grasped her sister’s hand under the table. For so many months, their mother had tried to harden them against their father. She tried to make him out to be a terrible villain who had abandoned them all, and any time the girls tried to talk about it, Mother would change the subject or resort to anger.

Father paused. “I do want to come home.”

Ruby was crying now, and Father held out his arms to her. She released Heather’s hand and crawled onto his lap, burying her face in his chest and trying to control her irregular breathing.

“The thing is, when someone makes a mistake, they need to fess up about it. That’s part of why I came back this weekend. I can’t live without the two of you. I can’t live without you. You’re my daughters. Now your mother is still angry with me, and that’s her right. It takes time to process things. But in the end, when something needs to be said, we shouldn’t wait to say it. And that’s why I came back.”

The table sat in silence, and soon Ruby had succeeded in lulling herself to sleep. Father sat stone-still, not wanting to wake the girl. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Heather?”

Heather nodded. “I think so.”

He looked right in her eyes. “I mean, do you really understand?”

Heather nodded. “You’re not just talking about you and Mom, are you?”

He smiled. “That’s my girl. You leave the two of us to work out our relationship. Being a teenager is hard enough. You don’t need to worry about your two idiot parents.” He laughed. “But I can’t help thinking about the last time I was here. It was just a few months ago, but you and Adam were the two happiest people on earth. And now I come back, and this has happened.” He motioned with his eyes to her scar. “When something needs to be said, one shouldn’t wait to say it. I think maybe there are things that need to be said between you and Adam.”

Heather’s eyes bulged. “Dad!” She lowered her voice. “No one knows about it here. No one knows it was him. You’re the only one I told about it. You can’t say that out loud!”

Her father bit his lip. “Is that really the Heather I raised? Does my daughter really hide from the truth now? Are you really going to tiptoe around for the rest of your life to protect someone just because he doesn’t want to face the truth? Are you really going to be happy at Hawthorne with him, knowing this is how he left things at Orchard Valley?”

Heather had no answer, and Ruby awoke soon after, so the three of them returned home. But Heather couldn’t help replaying her father’s advice over and over in her mind. Something was going to have to happen at that dance tonight. Her father was right: Heather couldn’t keep hiding from the truth. And wasn’t that just what her plan for Hawthorne Academy was? Wasn’t it hiding from the truth?

Evening couldn’t come fast enough. Heather’s mother had returned by the time Heather and her father got back, and she knew her parents would start arguing again soon. Heather hurried to her room. Behind her, she could already hear her parents starting up, and she closed her door against the noise. She turned on some music as she laid out her outfit for the dance.

She had the dress she’d picked out over the summer. It was a scarlet red, and Heather had hoped to add embellishments of her own, but circumstances had prevented her from doing so. She spent the day contemplating her father’s advice. She wanted to write about it in her unpublished blog, and she tried a dozen times, but each time she deleted her entry. There were things that needed to be said, but an unpublished blog was not the way to say them.

The long hours finally passed, and Heather slipped on her dress and brushed her hair. She looked flawless, everything but her face. Then she sat staring in the mirror, wondering whether to cover her scar.

A gentle knock broke her trance.

“Come in.”

Ruby snuck in quietly, closing the door behind her. “Heather, can—” But Ruby stopped long enough to admire her sister’s outfit. Her worried lips curled into a smile. “Heather, you look beautiful! Adam’s gonna fall in love with you!”

Heather frowned. “I’m not going with Adam.”

Ruby squinted her eyes. “Then who—” But by the look on Ruby’s face, Heather could tell Ruby had already guessed. “Why, Heather? Why the bad man? Why in the world would you want to go with someone so yucky?”

Heather shook her head. “It’s complicated, Rue. I don’t want to go with him. I really can’t explain.” An angry bout of yelling from the kitchen silenced her.

“I don’t want to stay here while they’re fighting like this,” Ruby said. “I thought I was glad Daddy was home, but I forgot how bad they fight.”

Heather shook her head. “There are just things they need to say to each other.” But even as she said it, Heather was glad for the dance, too—even despite Burton—because it saved her from listening to her parents fight all night.

Ruby softened her eyes, making them wide and watery. “Take me with you, pleeease!”

“Rue, you know little kids aren’t allowed at high school dances.”

“Please, Heather! I’ll be sooo good. I’ll wait in the car, even.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“No it’s not! I’ll lock the doors, and I’ll wait all night, and I won’t let anyone in except for you. Pleeease!”

Heather thought for just another moment before another explosion of yelling answered for her. “Okay, but you’ve got to be good.”

Heather and Ruby made a Ruby-sized lump out of pillows and blankets and covered it with the comforter on Ruby’s bed. Their parents were so distracted, they wouldn’t know the difference. When the doorbell rang, Heather answered it. Burton was dressed even more impressively than Heather in a handsome black tuxedo, his hair brushed carefully over his half-ear. His boutonniere was a red carnation—the exact red to match Heather’s dress even though the two had not coordinated it. At least not to Heather’s knowledge.

Heather’s parents, unable to see beyond Burton’s pristine exterior, stopped fighting long enough to snap picture after picture—as if this moment would be one Heather would not want to forget. Heather already started repressing the memory, although she allowed her parents to stall for time—for Ruby’s sake. By the time they had snapped the requisite number of pictures, Ruby’s bedroom window had carefully opened and closed again.

Burton opened the car door for Heather and offered her his hand, which she promptly refused. He came around to the driver’s side and, once seated, reached over to her side of the car.

In the back seat, a tiny voice cleared its throat. Burton looked in the rear view mirror to confront a tiny silhouette. It startled Burton, one of the only times Heather had seen him surprised. It was the first time all was not going according to his plans.

“What’s she doing here?” he asked, barely able to contain the resentment in his voice.

“Our parents are fighting. I told her she could come along. She’s going to stay in the car the whole time. She’ll probably just fall asleep.”

“In the car?” Burton asked. He said it as if the car were the crux of some great plan without which the scheme would not work.

Heather nodded and smiled to herself as Burton drove toward the school. She hadn’t thought of it before, but Ruby’s presence had the added benefit of keeping Heather from having to spend time alone with Burton. Brilliant! “I couldn’t leave her to be subjected to my parents’ arguments all night.”

Burton’s scowl softened. “I guess in a way I do owe your father. We all do, in a way.”

“What way is that?”

“I think our dear friend Adam was about to do something stupid on the podium yesterday evening. It seemed like he was getting ready to do something very stupid indeed.”

Heather frowned. “What’s it to you?”

Burton took his eyes off the road long enough to stare her down. “You know what it is to me.” It came out too bitterly, and he tried to soften his face. After a few minutes of awkward silence he cleared his throat and made his voice as amenable as he could. “You look—very nice.”

But it was too late. Heather was already having a miserable time, and nothing Burton could say could redeem him.