Page 21 of Irresistible

Chapter 10

The work day ended and Scarlet got in her car to head home, praying that the night would pass as quickly as possible. As she made her usual drive back to her house, she felt too excited to just turn in for the evening. She decided to head to Charlie’s for dinner. Apart from Jim, there was no one at work that she could talk to about this. Everyone else had their own wagers going in the gossip pool. But she could always talk to Charlie. He had an ageless wisdom that only came with life experience. If anyone could help to guide her, it was Charlie.

She turned the car around once she reached her street and headed back out for Charlie’s. Her neighbors, who could usually set their watches by Scarlet’s arrival, looked on as she reversed course. She sped back down the road and hastened toward the restaurant. There was a wellspring of undiscerned emotion inside of her, and she needed to work through this with one of the very few people who truly understood her.

Snow started to fall as she pulled into the restaurant. Scarlet got the feeling that this was going to be a fairly long conversation. Undoubtedly, she would need her snow scraper after all was said and done. She took it out of the trunk and put it in her front seat for easier access.

The bell on the front door clanged as she entered.

“Scarlet! To what do we owe the surprise? We always love seeing you, but you were just here a couple days ago. We can usually only count on you once a week at most. Is everything okay?” Charlie asked, detecting a hint of tension on Scarlet’s face.

“I’m fine,” Scarlet replied as she sauntered to the tall seats near the main counter.

“Oh, come on now. You know you can’t put anything past me. Sit down and tell me what’s bothering you. Get yourself a banana split and a plate of fries. I know that’s your favorite comfort food. It’s on the house,” Charlie said reassuringly.

Charlie was really the strong and comforting father figure that Scarlet sorely lacked. While she seemed to have the idyllic childhood of two parents, two siblings, a dog, and a white picket fence, unspoken dynamics lingered under the surface. Her father had always been a fairly distant person, and usually encouraged her to speak only to her mother about any emotional issues she might have had. One of the byproducts of that was an incredibly tight bond between Scarlet and her mother. But there was a great deal of silent animosity that had festered between her and her father over the years. She had tried to bring up the topic on several occasions.

“Scarlet, you know I’ve never been like that,” he would always say, shrugging off the issue.

“I’m not asking you to be perfect. I’m just asking you to listen to me every once in a while. It seems like you’re completely emotionally absent.”

“Honestly, you sound just like your mother sometimes,” he said, giving Scarlet a glimpse into what must have been a fairly difficult marriage between her parents.

“I’m your daughter. If I can’t come to you with my feelings, who can I go to?”

“You can go to your mother. That’s what women do, right? They talk to their mothers about their feelings while sons learn about cars and such from their dads. It’s how it’s always been. Why do we have to change that? You know how difficult it is for me to talk about certain things,” he would say, getting a more serious look on his face.

“We don’t have to build Rome in a day, Dad. I just want to talk to you about something other than baseball or the the name of my latest boyfriend. This doesn’t have to be a gender thing. We’re two people. We can just talk as adults, even though we didn’t really talk when I was a kid,” she would implore.

“I guess I’m just tired. I work really hard for this family. I spend long hours at work, trying to make sure that this family can make ends meet. At the end of a hard day, all I want to do is turn my mind off. Everything I do, I do so that you, your mother, and your siblings can live a life of relative comfort. I know I’m not perfect, but I always did the best I could in the best way I knew how. I just wish you could appreciate that,” he would say sternly.

That’s where the conversation would always end. The guilt trip would always work, each and every time. She would think back to all those late nights when her father would walk into the house, seeming as though he were on his last steps. Dead tired, he could barely muster a kiss on the forehead for each of his kids before crashing on the couch or going straight to bed. She thought that maybe he was right. Maybe working hard for his family was the way that her dad showed love. He may not have had the capacity to engage with her emotionally in the way she needed. But he always made sure that she and her family never had to go without. Years and years of intense work passed, and they all shared the fruits of his labor. Feeling sufficiently guilty, she would drop the subject, apologize, and give her dad a hug before leaving feeling worse than when she arrived. Her father would then return to the one beer he often had to relax after long days at work. No one learned anything, no one grew, and no one helped anyone to feel any better.

Through the years, Scarlet brought up the subject less and less. It went from a conversation that they would have a few times over a given winter vacation when she would return home from college. Then it would be a week during a summer. It would then become a couple days every year. Now Scarlet was having this conversation with her dad, at most, once every few years. Her mother had encouraged her to just let it go. After all, she was married to the man and had been trying to plow that road for years. If he wasn’t going to change for his wife, Scarlet could be sure that her father wouldn’t change for her.

To make matters worse, her father was getting on in years. As she had noticed, most people got more and more set in their ways as they got older. Now that her dad was in his late sixties, she figured the odds of him changing in any appreciable way were next to zero. But his perpetual emotional absence left her craving a father figure. She had turned, however problematically, to some of her romantic relationships to find this sense of emotional and personal security. That well had inevitably and understandably proved dry. Then she met Charlie, a man who was used to serving as a moral authority and dispenser of sage wisdom. Luckily for Scarlet, Charlie would never turn down a potential protege.

“Scarlet?” Charlie asked, noticing that she remained standing wordlessly at the entrance to the restaurant.

“Yes. Of course. Thanks for the offer, Charlie. I’d love to,” she replied, snapping herself out of her brief daydream and happily accepting the prospect of tasty food.

Charlie met her at the doorway and walked her over to the counter. He could tell that something was weighing her down, and he intended to get to the bottom of it. Rebecca put the order in to the kitchen and assured Scarlet that it would be ready as soon as they could get the fries made. Since Rebecca generally made most of the desserts herself, she got started on making the banana split. It was almost done by the time that the two reached the counter.

“Scarlet! Sit down, honey. You don’t look too good. Is something on your mind. Talk to us,” she said quickly, getting the last scoop of ice cream into the dish.

“Thanks, Rebecca. I’m okay, really.”

“Physically, sure. But we can tell when something’s not quite right in your mind. Tell us all about it. Here’s your banana split, and the fries should be up in just a second,” she said, pushing the cold dish of ice cream, whipped cream, bananas, and cherries toward Scarlet.

“I honestly should feel fine. Everything’s going great. I have a good job, fantastic friends, a good family. I’m still young. But there’s just something I can’t shake,” Scarlet said nervously.

She had no idea why her emotions were all over the place. Everything had lined up perfectly for her. Jim was now encouraging her to pursue Richard, at least as much as he could without making it seem like he was okay with putting his job on the line to do it.

“What’s going on? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this before,” Charlie said, carrying over the plate of fries from the kitchen.

“There’s this guy I’m interest in,” Scarlet started.

“Is this the guy you went to Café Hilario with. I heard you two seemed somewhat smitten. I didn’t want to say anything, because I know he’s your boss. But you’re kind of bad at hiding your feelings, even with Roberto,” Charlie snickered.