Page 82 of Eleanor & Grey
“Thank you,” I said, taking the mug from his hands.
“No, thank you. I know I can...” He paused and released a weighted breath. “I know I’m hard to be around.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not. I’ve never been the best at this stuff—being a father. I work hard, and long, and whenever I come home, I’m checked out. It was like that before the accident, but at least then, I had Nicole there to balance me, to be the calmness to my storm. Now... without her...” He brushed his thumb against his nose. “It’s just that I don’t know how to do this,” he confessed.
“Do what?”
He lowered his head, and when he looked back up, I witnessed the saddest expression I’d ever seen in all my life. His face was as pale as if all life had been sucked out of him. He parted his lips and softly spoke. “Live in a world where she doesn’t exist.” His eyes looked as if his whole world was set on fire. They watered over, and he shook his head once, trying to pull his emotions back together. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. What you went through—what you’re going through is one of the hardest things anyone ever has to deal with. And it’s still so fresh, Greyson. Those hurts are still so new. It’s not shocking that you feel completely lost,” I said, reaching out to him. I placed my hand on his forearm, and I felt his body slightly shaking from his nerves. He was so far from OK, and I was almost certain he wouldn’t be all right for a very long time.
“It’s fine, I’m fine,” he lied as he removed my hand from his arm. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I just wanted to say sorry for being so rude toward you. You don’t deserve it, Ellie, not at all.”
He’d called me Ellie, and I didn’t think he’d even noticed the slip of his tongue.
I smiled. “It’s OK, really. I get it.”
“Even though you get it, you don’t deserve it.”
I didn’t know what else to say, and it seemed neither did he.
He turned to walk into the house, then paused for a moment before turning back toward me. “Every single day... I worry about Karla every single day of my life.”
* * *
That morning, everything went back to the normal routine, except this time, I personally walked Karla into the school building. She definitely wasn’t thrilled about the idea, that was for sure.
“This is humiliating,” Karla whispered, hunched over, trying her best to make herself disappear.
“Yeah, well, you should’ve thought about this before planning a make-believe trip,” I replied as we stepped through the front doors.
“Yeah, whatever. Can you go now?” she muttered, grumbling under her breath. “This is so uncool, Eleanor.”
I’d never been happier to be labeled as uncool in my life. “No. First we are going to stop by the front office to clear up a few things.”
“Everything has been cleared up,” a voice said, making us both look up to see Greyson walking out of the main office.
“Dad,” Karla groaned, slapping her hand to her forehead. “What are you doing here?”
“Doing my job as a parent,” he commented back to her.
“That’s a first,” Karla sassed.
Harsh, yet perhaps true...
“Everything’s in order. Plus, I signed you up for some extra credit in every class,” he told her, standing tall.
“Extra credit?!” she hissed, her nose flaring wide. “But I did the homework!”
“Yes, you did—after lying for weeks to do God knows what on your own time. You made a choice the moment you forged that paperwork, Karla. Now I’m making a choice to keep you from thinking about ever doing something like this again. Unless...”
“Unless what?” she asked.
“Unless you tell me where you’ve been going every day,” Greyson said.
Karla’s eyes watered over, and she shook her head. “This is bullshit!” she shouted.
