Brooke and their mother Connie overheard Tara on the phone. “I’m not going anywhere with you, Pop. Come over if you want. But you won’t change my mind.”
“About what?” Connie asked when Tara hung up.
“About God. He can’t force me into church.”
Brooke said, “See ya.” She wasn’t hanging around for this.
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Connie knew, however, that she had better hang around, and called a friend to work at the Trinity Gallery, which sold arts and crafts made by local artists and crafters.
When Jim, who legally was still her husband, drove over from New Paltz, Connie kissed his cheek and offered him a beer. And she warned him, “Tara’s not a child. Don’t lose your head.”
“She needs to listen to me. That’s all—listen.”
So Tara sat at the kitchen table and listened to her father, who lived forty miles away and didn’t have girlfriends.
“Women friends—big difference. The big thing in our faith, Tara, is that your mother and I aren’t divorced. God forgives the rest.”
“That’s what you believe. Not me. If you can’t accept that, I have nothing to say.”
Jim was in mid-sentence, countering Tara’s assertion when she walked out.
Connie set a platter of cheese and apple slices on the table. “When Tara announces that she has nothing more to say, it means she’s not going to talk to you unless you respect her choice.”
Jim shook his head. “Another beer?”
“One for you and one for me.”
Together they recalled Brooke’s religious crisis last year. Brooke being Brooke had lots to say—about her father’s delusion, the church’s enshrined hypocrisy, and so on. Until Jim had lost his temper and smacked the left side of her head. For which he apologized.
Neither Brooke nor Connie intended to tell him about the bruises. So Tara had emailed him: “No hospital, of course. So who knows about concussion? But Brooke has been hearing a terrible ringing in her ear for two days.”
Alarmed and ashamed, Jim phoned and then immediately drove over there. Her headphones on, Brooke was dancing around in her nightgown. Her black eye made him feel like a monster. Not to worry, she said, and accompanied him that same week to Sunday Mass. Afterward however, she had asked the priest such embarrassing questions that Jim decided Christmas and Easter would suffice.
But now level-headed Tara was insisting even that equaled oppression.
“Girls will break their father’s heart,” Jim said.
“You don’t have a heart to break.” Connie’s patience, derived through meditation, was spent.
Jim stood up, walked out, and drove away.
Thereafter, he sent the girls’ money, as required by law, and phoned his wife occasionally. His daughters didn’t miss him. Not a bit.
Brooke spent her sophomore year dating a conceited senior boy, who refused to acknowledge her in public. He invited her to watch DVDs and ride in his car so long as nobody else knew. So Brooke loved him in secret. Really in secret: Nothing turned him off, he said, like a girl in heat. Struggling to prove she wasn’t that, she tried to hide her physical excitement.
When winter turned to spring, he rented “Palimony.” Brooke didn’t say it used to be her favorite movie. Just before the credits rolled, her boyfriend said, “Christ, that Matthew King’s a real jag-off.”
Brooke said she wanted to go home. He wanted to chill. So Brooke walked home. After which, the boyfriend acted as if he had no idea who she was. Brooke tried once to text him and found proof that he knew her well enough to block her name and number..
One evening when their mother was meditating with her jewelry group, Tara told Brooke she had been standing behind the ex-boyfriend after an assembly, and: “When he turned his head and noticed me, he told his friends, louder than he needed to, ‘You know that girl Brooke Logan? She’s a cold fish.’”
“Why tell me that, Tara? You think I’m not sorry enough?”
“Brooke, I told him you might be a lot of things but you are not—like so totally not—a cold fish. The problem was him.”
Brooke stared at Tara, not caring about tears, and said, “Don’t talk about me. Don’t ever.”
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