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“Your car needed repairs,” she says mildly. “How do you think I managed to help?”
I remember the car, or at least my dread. “I thought you’d saved,” I reply, not really convinced. I can’t swear to a timeline or a reason. Things are mostly a blur.
“From what?” she asks with a laugh.
“I don’t fucking know,” I mutter, defensive.
Her reprimand comes in the form of silence.
“Ana aasef,” I say quietly. I’m sorry.
“Perhaps,” my mother begins, equally as soft, “I didn’t tell you where I thought the money came from because you couldn’t bear to hear her name spoken. Sometimes need overrules feelings.”
“Do you think,” I begin, then halt as I try to reconcile the pieces of Clara. The girl I thought she was, the woman she’s shown me she is. And now this, a blast from the past, courtesy of my mother’s vault. And she wonders where I get it from.
“I think,” she says when I don’t continue, “well, I know, that money came from somewhere.”
“Right.” Clear as mud, then.
“I know it was hard. That what happened was hard for you to swallow. And then you had more of the same when you went back to college, worrying for me. But I think that scared girl did the only thing she could at that time to survive. And then later maybe, she tried in her own way to put it right.”
My throat tightens uncomfortably. “There was no putting it right.”
“You don’t think so? Perhaps you’re rubbing the scars too hard.” I find myself thinking of my stupid tattoo. “Look how well your life had turned out.”
In spite of her or because of her? I push the question away.
“She was something, Clara.” Her voice is full of fondness. “Beautiful. Loud and vivacious. Is she still the same?”
“In some ways. In others I think she’s changed.”
“She was loud to cover the pain sometimes, I think. Because if you listened in between the moments, you could almost hear the eggshells she was trying not to step on.” My mother sighs. “I know that sound. I’ve lived it myself.”
Fuck, I don’t know what to do with that. I know her father was an asshole, but to hear my mother equate Clara’s experiences with her own is a total head fuck.
“You think he was abusive.” I keep my voice even, like it means nothing. Like I don’t know the truth already, like it’s not stored in some part of me. Maybe I’ve been ignoring it as part of my own fucking narrative.
“I think there are many ways a man can hurt a woman,” she answers simply. “But I trust you. In whatever your plans are. I always have.”
I close my eyes, the phone still pressed to my ear, the weight of those years shifting uncomfortably once more. Taking a new form. Maybe a new reality.
“Thanks, Mom,” I murmur over the ache in the back of my throat.
“Sometimes it’s not that people are trying to hurt you. They’re just trying not to be hurt themselves.”
And with that, we say our goodbyes.
My chest rises, then falls once, twice. I put down my phone and scrub both hands down my face. Then I just stare—stare at nothing, my thoughts in disarray.
The story I’ve been telling myself all these years? Maybe it had a missing chapter.
Chapter 36
Clara
Days pass before I’m brave enough to bring up the topic of our sex schedule again. It’s not even a schedule. Just a . . . I don’t know what the heck it is.
But in those few days, Troy does his best to sway my resolve. Oh, he thinks I don’t notice, but the number of times he’s walked around the apartment shirtless, sometimes after having worked up a sweat in the gym. Sometimes not. I know what he’s up to. Those thin blue shorts seem to get a lot of wear time, and there’s even been a couple of incidents involving a slipped towel.
