20 Million Tiny Particles

25. Coming Home

We busied ourselves the next day as if nothing ever happened. Sheridan met back up with her new friends and flitted through the sessions and dinner and after-hours with no acknowledgement of what we'd shared on the floor of the hotel room. What I had shared. I wanted to ask if she remembered, but I didn't want to know the answer.

The next morning, we packed our things and dropped our keys at the front desk. Sheridan flashed a bright smile and said "wonderful" when the front desk clerk asked how our stay was.

"I think I'm going to sleep most of the way home," she commented shortly after we got onto the highway.

"Okay," I said, my eyes on the road. Quiet was all that came after. I would turn up the radio, drown out the awkward silence. But first.

"Is everything okay?" I had to know.

"Yeah," she answered, wadding up a sweatshirt to create a makeshift pillow between her head and the window. "It's all good. Just tired."

I knew the lie well, but I knew just as well not to fight it. It was easier that way. We drove home with no words between us, only the mask of the radio coming in and out as we passed over state lines.

Some hours later, I dropped Sheridan off at her house and found my way back to mine. It was Sunday, so the shop was closed, and Dad was laying on the couch with the golf network playing half-heartedly on the living room television.

He looked surprised when I pushed the door open. "Hey, Jule."

Maybe I was surprised to see him too, or maybe we were realizing it was the first time we'd looked each other in the eyes in God knows when.

"Hey, Dad."

"You have fun?"

I couldn't even remember if I'd explained to him where I was going, or if he'd asked. So I nodded and said, "Yeah."

We looked at each other. Taking note of the silence between us, he asked, "You doing okay, Julie?"

It was close to the question I'd asked Sheridan in the car. Close too to the question Cary Pritchett asked me that day in the shop, her twangy voice still ringing in my ears if I closed my eyes.

When do you decide not to stop covering up the truth? When do we push past the elephant and say, "I'm not doing well"?

When do you move on from all the moving and settle into what your life is?

I shrugged instead and reused Sheridan's line. "I guess so. I'm tired."

There it was -- the casual lie. The covering up. I think we both knew it.

He said, "Okay."

I turned to walk to my room, dragging my suitcase alongside me. When I heard the sound of Dad adjusting pillows to sit back and resume his lazy Sunday, I felt myself turning on my heel to face him again. His eyes were toward the screen, so I had to use my voice to get his attention. "Hey, Dad," I said, the words catching in my throat.

He leaned forward again to return my attention.

With no pill in my system to simulate adrenaline, and the knowledge that whatever was said would still be remembered in the morning, I had to pull up my courage from somewhere else, somewhere I hadn't been in a while.

I cleared my throat and crossed an arm across my chest, pinching the skin of my arm to keep my eyes from welling with tears.

"Do you think you're gonna sell the store?"

He didn't answer for a moment, pulled himself up to sit up straight on the couch. He looked down at his fingers, picked at the skin on the side of one nail. The same fidgeting I resorted to when there was nothing else in my power to control.

"It's not an easy decision, Jule." He looked up to meet my eyes. He could see that I was fighting not to cry. We didn't know each other, not really, not anymore. But some fatherly part of him recognized the little girl in me, begging for solace in the dark of everything. "But I know it's what we need to do."

We. We. didn't have the choice, he did. She did. But I was here as an innocent third party pulled behind in the wagon for the long and miserable ride.

"What if we don't want to?" I said softly, my voice cracking again under the weight of all of it.

"Believe me Jule," he said, his voice sturdy but soft, too, "I don't want to either. But the math is simple. It's the right decision."

"How can you say it's simple? How can you think this is easy?" I was fighting with myself and I knew it.

He smiled a little, in a sad way. He answered like she would have, "Simple and easy aren't always the same thing, Jule."

It was making biscuits in the kitchen all over again, my hands smeared with flour, my jeans dotted with dust, buttermilk spilled on the counter.

You'll know when it's right.

For me, nothing was simple -- life was twenty million tiny particles shattered out on the floor of my bedroom, fighting hard to stick together when they knew damn well there's no diamond on the other side.

But I had to hope that in all her messiness, she was right about something.