Page 63 of Tap Left
She scoops up a pebble from the sand and smooths it over her palm while she unburdens herself. “He would make me feel guilty. He’d beg and plead and tell me he couldn’t live without me. You saw Ryan when he was drunk, but you’d never seen him at his worst. When he couldn’t get out of my bed for weeks on end. When he was strung out on pills and whatever else made his problems disappear. I was the one who was there for all of that, Daire, not you. And I was the one he treated the worst.”
Her admission surprises me, even though it shouldn’t. Lola has always been good at faking that everything’s okay. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why would I?” Lola answers. “I thought you hated me. I doubted you’d believe me anyway. Ryan didn’t want anyone to know, and it felt like I’d be betraying him if I said something.”
“I never hated you,” I correct her.
“Could have fooled me.” She tosses the rock out into the water. “You wouldn’t even look at me half the time.”
“Because I didn’t want Ryan to get the wrong idea.”
“And what idea is that?” she asks.
My words aren’t coming out the way I want them to, and I know I should quit while I still can. But I’m tired, and I can’t find a single reason not to be honest with her right now.
“What I mean is that I didn’t want Ryan to get the right idea,” I admit. “I didn’t want him to think I had something for his girl.”
Lola is quiet for too long, and I don’t have the guts to look at her. She’s probably doubting my sincerity. Probably questioning everything. But she doesn’t voice it. Instead, she changes gears entirely.
“Will you tell me about your mom?”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because I want to know. You’ve never talked about her. I only ever heard things from Ryan, but I want to hear them from you.”
I want to tell her it’s none of her goddamned business. And then I want to go back to my place and crack open a few bottles of liquor. The ones I keep in the cabinet as a test of my will. That would be the easiest thing to do. But then Lola looks at me, and her eyes are soft, and she looks like a dirty angel right now.
“Fuck it.” I lay back on the beach and close my eyes. “What do you want to know?”
“Why didn’t you get along?”
This shit is so typical of women. Trying to psychoanalyze a man and figure out the root cause for all of his issues. I decide if Lola wants to pin all of my problems on my mother, I’m not going to stop her. So, I let her have it.
“She was a whore. A drunk and sloppy one at that.”
Lola sighs. “Don’t be a dick, Daire.”
When she says dick, it makes my dick hard. “You asked for the truth. And the truth isn’t pretty.”
“Maybe, but that isn’t all there is to it. You can’t hate someone without loving them too.”
“Are you talking about Ryan or my mother now?” Now I am being a dick.
She swallows. “Maybe I’m not talking about anybody. Or maybe not everything is always about Ryan.”
Her words are cryptic, and I’m still trying to figure out the meaning behind them when she lays back beside me and reaches out to touch my arm. It’s a simple gesture, but it tempers the frustration inside of me.
“It’s hard to care about someone who can’t even recognize her own son,” I tell her. “But I guess at the end of the day she was my mother, and that was the only mother I had. The only thing I knew at the time.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You deserved better than that.”
I shrug, but the knot in my chest doesn’t go away. “It is what it is.”
Silence falls between us, and for once, it’s uncomfortable to me. I know I shouldn’t think about it or care, and Lola doesn’t need to know these things, but I start talking for real. The words come out of my mouth, and I can’t stop them once they start.
“The reason I was late yesterday was because I had to go home. Back to the trailer. They are trying to clean up the place, and they wanted it gone.”
“I’m sorry, Daire,” she says again. “I didn’t realize.”
