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She came and stood beside me, just to link her hand through the fingers of my free palm. She didn’t say anything.
But I knew she was listening.
“I didn’t know if I could do it for a while there. Being a single dad, no job because I was still clearing some exams... it was chaos there for a while. But Sally, honestly, she was my cheerleader all along. She made me believe I could and would do it. For her. Us.”
“She sounds like an absolute champ.”
“She is. She’s my heart and soul and the blood in my veins. Everything I am, I am because of her.”
My voice broke. I looked outside, afraid I’d shared too much.
“You know,” Rory said after a quiet pause, “I never met my dad. He left before I could make any memories of him. Mom pretty much destroyed herself later on. I grew up on the charity of kind neighbors, my grandparents who visited occasionally, and my friend Chels.”
Her eyes followed mine.
“I didn’t know what it was like to have a mother or a father. Because when the other couldn’t show up, the former just decided she couldn’t either. But look at you. It’s not easy. It’s never easy. But here you are. Doing it. Making shit happen for her.”
Where had this girl been all my life?
How could she be so young and sound so... old? Okay, not the right word. Mature. No. Comforting. Better.
It was like she’d slipped a cardigan over my bare shoulders on a December night.
I cocked my head to the side and gave her a wan smile.
“You’re something else, Rory Sullivan.”
She winked at me. “I totally expect you to remember that when you read my essay on Shakespeare.”
I groaned. “Don’t tell me. Did you choose him too?”
She laughed.
“No. No. I actually thought you’d get enough people who’d talk about him, and about the conventionality in trying to separate the art from the artist.”
“What do you feel about it, by the way? Do you think it’s possible?”
“Separating the art from its creator? Hmm.” Rory narrowed her eyes.
“No. It’s not possible. We could hate on the creator and shun their works for their political and sociological views—but it wouldn’t take us anywhere. We’d be left with nothing to read, actually.”
“Interesting.” I nodded my head, encouraging her to go on.
“Some of the best authors were... well, problematic is praising them, actually. Salinger was a pedophile. T. S. Eliot was a voracious anti-Semite. Woolf, whose work I adore, was also the same. Look at Hemingway. He wrote magic. He was also a misogynist, an ableist, and another anti-Semite.”
“So, you’re saying it is an impossible thing to do?”
She grinned.
“No, it's not impossible. I think writers have changed a lot right now. I recently came across a lovely set of books where the author began with a foreword on emotional abuse and hoped she’d addressed it gently, for the sake of the readers.”
“So, how would you classify the ones who came before?”
“I’d look at the times they wrote in, and I’d study their text and evaluate what made it great, what made it last through the ages. I’d scrutinize the work and love how it made me feel without necessarily singing the praises of the author to the world.”
She drummed her fingers on my palm as she spoke, her eyes animated.
“I guess what I’m saying is, I would form my opinions in the privacy of my home, and out in the world, I’d share what made the writing great—not the writer, if they were problematic.”
