Picking Up the Pieces (11 page)

I detested the man for that alone.

He flew in the face of everything I believed in: hard work, consequences, and justice. Of course, it was because he was my polar opposite my sister was as drawn to him as a fly to honey.

Savannah had been very close to our father, so when he died her sophomore year in high school, she didn’t take it well. Within six months of his death she began to act out—she missed curfews and came home drunk. Her grades plummeted.

My mother was caught up in her own grief. Anyone who’d ever met my parents knew that theirs was a once-in-a-lifetime love. Mom tried to pull herself together for our sake, but she was rudderless without my father. And truth be told, I think part of her felt deserted by the man who had promised to love her forever.

I loved my father too. I’d never met a greater man—either personally or professionally. I was finishing my sophomore year of college at Duke when it happened. I took his loss just as hard as my mother and my sister, but I didn’t have the luxury of being able to dwell on it. For all of my father’s positive traits, he was terrible with money. He was a partner in a law firm, so his estate should have been enough to support my family, but he’d mismanaged his investments and let his life insurance policy lapse. Add on to that the falling markets had wiped out over half of his retirement savings, and we were left with very little. Though we weren’t destitute, we had to change the way we lived.

Savannah saw my father’s death as a betrayal of their close relationship, and the fact that he’d left us struggling financially was the straw that pushed her over the edge.

Mom was at a loss, and I was hundreds of miles away. I suggested Mom put her in counseling, but she was hesitant because of the money and the stigma. But Savannah was getting more and more out of control in her junior year, and her private high school was less lenient now that our usual donation of fundraising money had slowed to a trickle.

The summer between my junior and senior year, I was offered the chance to work in a friend’s father’s law firm in Nashville. But my family was imploding. I had to put their needs above my own, so I turned it down and returned home to work at an office supplies store.

Savannah and I clashed the second night I was home.

I was reading in the living room when she passed through. She was about to head out the door wearing a dress that was too tight and short, with enough eye makeup to risk being mistaken for a hooker.

“Are you going to a costume party?” I asked. “Because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why you look like a prostitute.”

Savannah gasped in shock.

Mom, who was in the kitchen, stepped into the doorway. “Mason!”

I stood and moved toward my sister. “Do you have any idea how you look?”

She gave me a sneer that was probably supposed to look worldly, but it came across as the very opposite. “Guys like it.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “I’m sure they do. But those aren’t the type of guys you want, Savannah.”

“What the hell do you know about what I want, Mason? You’re never here! You don’t know what we’ve been going through! You left us, just like he did!”

“Left you? Is that what you think I did?” I asked, my pain leaking through my words. “You know how much I hate being this far from you and Mom, especially now.”

“Then come home, Mason,” she begged, tears making thick lines of mascara run down her cheeks. “We need you.”

Her request was a stab in my heart. She was right. They did need me, and the fact that she had pulled an abrupt change from her behavior moments ago only drove the knife deeper.

“We all have our places in this world,” Mom said, stepping into the room. “Mason’s place right now is at Duke, finishing his degree. It’s what Dad would have wanted.”

Savannah’s lip curled in disgust. “Well Dad’s not here, so screw him.” And with that, she burst out of the front door, slamming it behind her.

Part of me wondered if I should follow after her, but I’d already handled the entire incident badly. Anything else I did that night was bound to just make it worse. “She’s right,” is all I said. “I should come back.”

Mom sighed. “Are we going to discuss this
again?
”

We’d played out this conversation countless times. Me suggesting I come home and go to the university in Little Rock, Mom insisting against it.

“Your father went to Duke. He was so proud that you were following in his footsteps. You’re about to start your final year, Mason. You’d have to repeat too many classes. You need to stay.”

“You need me. Savannah needs me.”

“I need you to finish what you set out to do. We’ll make do. I promise.”

I spent the next week observing Savannah and her friends. She clung to her boyfriend like a vine to a tree, and it was obvious that she was trying to make up for the loss of our father by attaching herself to a boy, but I was at a loss as to what to do about it. I’d tried talking to her twice—both times with far less hostility—but she wouldn’t listen.

“We need to get away,” I said one night a few weeks later after she’d left to meet some friends. I’d pushed Mom to set more boundaries with her, so she’d started to dress more conservatively, but I knew she was drinking and smoking pot. I smelled it on her every time she came home at two or three in the morning.

“You don’t have to wait up for me,” she’d say almost every time she came home.

“I know,” I’d say in response. Of course, I still would. Each time she went out, I’d set up a vigil on the couch.

My mom’s eyes widened at my suggestion.

“Mom, she’s about to start her senior year in high school. She has to pull herself together or she’s going to screw up her future.”

“I know,” she said, but I heard the defeat in her voice.

“How about we go to Uncle Ted’s lake house up in the Ozarks for a couple of weeks?”

“The
cabin?
” Mom asked in surprise. “You used to hate it. Why would you want to go there?”

I grinned. “I was thirteen. I hated it because I couldn’t play video games there. Savannah loved it.”

A soft smile lit up her face. “She loved paddling the canoe around the cove.” Her smile fell. “But she’s not nine years old anymore, Mason. Her priorities have changed just like yours did. A canoe ride isn’t going to entice her to go.”

“With all due respect, Mom, she’s a minor and you’re the parent. You’re in charge. You need to tell her that we’re going, not give her the option.”

“You’re right.” She looked hurt. “Your father was the disciplinarian.”

I wasn’t so sure that was true, especially in regard to Savannah. She’d had him wrapped around her pinky finger. But I’d followed the straight-and-narrow path, so other than a few adolescent transgressions, my parents hadn’t needed to exercise their disciplinary skills much. But I didn’t see how pointing that out would help anything. “But Dad’s gone now, and Savannah needs you to be stricter.”

“It’s just that she’s been through so much…”

“Let’s just go away for a bit and see if we can get her to see reason.”

“Okay.”

Savannah didn’t take the news too well, screaming and crying, shouting that I had single-handedly ruined her life.

My boss at the supplies store took it slightly less well, saying that if I left for two weeks I shouldn’t bother coming back.

Mom’s boss—my father’s partner in the law firm—was much more agreeable. He’d hired her to help out at the law firm after becoming aware of our financial situation. I couldn’t help but wonder if he had partially done it to save face: It was bound to reflect badly on an estate planning law firm if one of the former partners left his family financially bereft. The evidence for my supposition was the fact that my mother had a floating job that she could take off from at a moment’s notice. Not that I’d ever point it out to her. She seemed to love the job, especially when she was asked to talk to the newly bereaved families who walked in lost and forlorn.

My mother was a collector of lost souls. Only she was too close to the lost soul in her own home to know what to do.

***

Uncle Ted hadn’t been to the cabin in years and the neglect was apparent as we pulled into the drive. The front steps creaked under our weight and the bushes were overgrown. Part of the kitchen floor sagged from a leak in the roof and some rodent had made a nest behind the refrigerator, leaving a terrible smell. Savannah complained bitterly and I could tell my mother was beginning to second-guess our decision.

“So it needs a little TLC,” I said. “It’ll be fine after we clean it up.”

“You’re deluded,” Savannah said in her most icy tone.

We just needed to give it a few days and things would get better, I just knew it.

But ten days into our fourteen-day stay, things still hadn’t improved. If anything, they’d gotten worse. Savannah had moved past petulant to hostile and my mother was constantly in tears.

“This isn’t helping, Mason,” my mother said one night. “Maybe we should just go home.”

“No.” I was too stubborn to admit defeat. I’d given up two jobs this summer for Savannah—one of them a position most pre-law students would throw their best friend under the bus to get. I wasn’t about to give up now. “I was thinking about going on a hike tomorrow. I’ll take Savannah with me.”

“She’ll hate that.”

“Too bad. I’m taking her anyway.”

Truth be told, I was bored to tears at the lake house. I was used to being on the go, constantly working on something, and all the down time was making me anxious. I needed the hike. Bringing Savannah was an afterthought.

Mom was right. Savannah flipped out the next morning when I told her she was going with me. “You can’t make me!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “You’re not the boss of me!”

Even with all of Savannah’s theatrics, it wasn’t hard to see that her outburst was motivated by a deep hurt. “Savannah, if you come with me on this hike, we can go home tomorrow,” I said, more worried about her than ever. “Two days early.”

That caught her attention. “Is this some kind of trick?”

“No. I swear. And you know I don’t swear lightly.”

A grin started to lift the corners of her mouth, but it disappeared almost before it began, as though she’d realized she was about to shift out of her character as the sour teenage girl. “You don’t swear at all. You say promises are too easily broken.”

“While you swear to everything and then renege on it all.”

A real smile broke loose and then faded. It was a familiar childhood spat, rehashed a million different ways, but the fact that she’d instigated it renewed my hope that I could get through to her.

“Okay,” she said. “But I don’t want to get sweaty and dirty.”

“But getting sweaty and dirty are the best parts,” I teased.

Mom’s eyes filled with tears as Savannah went to grab her backpack. “Thank you, Mason. That exchange was the first glimpse of our Savannah that I’ve seen in months.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” I muttered as Savannah entered the kitchen. I’d traded away two days in exchange for one afternoon. I wasn’t so sure it was a good barter.

We packed bottled water and protein bars and got in my car to drive the short distance to the trailhead. We hiked in silence for the first ten minutes, but it wasn’t filled with the usual hostile tension that rolled off my sister. The silence was more tentative, as though she was open to accepting my help. But I was terrified. Each time I’d tried to talk reason into her before, I’d only made matters worse. Maybe that was my problem. I needed to stop lecturing her.

About an hour into the hike, we stopped at the edge of a small bluff overlooking the lake. “Let’s take a short break and enjoy the view for a minute,” I said, pulling out my water bottle and sitting on a large rock.

“We
have
a view at that shack you’re making us sleep in. Let’s just get this hike over with so I can go home.”

“Okay,
I’m
tired and need a break.”

“Perfect Mason needs a break?” she asked, a razor in her voice.

“Is that what you think?” I asked without recrimination. “You think I’m perfect?”

She spun around, ready for battle. “Well, aren’t you?
Mason graduated with a 4.2 GPA
,” she sing-songed. “
Mason got nearly perfect scores on his PSA. Mason never caused any trouble in high school.
How the hell am I supposed to live up to that?”

“Savannah, I’m far from perfect. And I caused plenty of trouble in high school.” I grinned at her. “I just hung around with kids who were smart and sneaky enough not to get caught.” I tossed her a protein bar, which she caught with two hands. “You just need to find new friends.”

Her mouth dropped open, then her eyes narrowed. “What are you up to?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. I’m just tired of fighting with you. If you want to cause hell, more power to you. But find a group that’s gonna do it right. The fun part of causing trouble is getting away with it. You get caught almost every time.”

She relaxed a little, opening the protein bar package. “You’re lying. I don’t believe you ever caused any trouble.”

“Goes to show how much you know me,” I laughed and took a swig of water. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the senior prank the year I graduated?”

“The goat on the football field?” she asked guardedly. “Anyone could do that.”

“Not the goat on the field. Do you take me for an amateur?”

“Yes, because there’s no way you could have pulled off the infamous one.”

“What’s so hard about putting a slip-and-slide covered in shaving cream in a hallway?” I asked.

“Not just the slip-and-slide, Mason,” she said, getting excited. “It was set up between classes and no one saw it happen, and as soon as the janitor cleaned it up another one was set up in a different hallway. The principal had teachers walking the halls by the end of the day to keep it from happening again, but a third one still showed up—on the stage in the theater.”

“The location was unfortunate,” I conceded. “We were determined to set up the last one, but you’re right, all the halls were too well guarded. Zack Batoully had a key, so we used the stage. We used shaving cream instead of water partly to avoid ruining the floors, but we didn’t think about the wood floor on the stage.”