MCSKSG Seven point two.
End of chapter 7. 2,380 words.
"Honey?" I glanced up from my desk. Mom was standing in the doorway, shoulder against the doorjamb, hands in the pockets of her apron. "Can we talk for a minute?"
"I can try."
She smiled, making an amused noise. "I know you want to go to Greenwood Lake University, but do you know what you want to study there?"
It...it was stupid, really. I looked down at the pictures in my hands, the various pictures Dad had sent me over the years with his letters. "Archaeology."
"Are you sure about that?"
"...I don't know." I wanted to. When he talked about it, it was so interesting, and I...I really wanted to have something in common with him...
"Have you thought about a business degree?"
I looked up to her, confused. "Business? Why?"
Her eyes moved away and she pulled her hands out of her pockets to smooth them over her apron. It looked like this was a really hard topic for her to bring up. "You'll be sixteen in less than a month. You really should start thinking about whether or not you'll pick up the family business."
"I, wh--" I cleared my throat, "what?"
"It's about time I started teaching you. So, you need to decide if you want to be taught."
The family business? I hadn't even thought about this at all. I guess, technically, I am heir to Mom's position, but... Wow. That was a hell of a decision. "I don't think I can decide that right now, Mom."
"Hmm? Oh, honey, of course. I'm not asking you to decide today, I just want you to give it some thought, alright?"
But I wanted to go into archaeology, not business. I looked back down at my father's photos, at the picture of the Sphinx he'd sent from his trip to Morroc. Greenwood Lake. I wanted to go to Greenwood Lake. Britoniah University in Geffen was the choice for a business degree, but I didn't want to go to Geffen. I didn't want to study business. I didn't--I just wanted to study archaeology, damn it. I wanted to go back to Payon, I wanted to take after my father. "I've got the name for it, at least." I didn't mean to sound so bitter, but I was.
"I wanted to name you Julius." My eyes snapped back to her; she was no longer leaning against the doorframe, with one hand now on the doorknob. "It was your father who named you Guido."
She shut the door on herself, vanishing; the pictures fell out of my hands, scattering over my desk.
She'd never--never told me that before. It was the most information I'd ever gotten out of her mouth about my father. He'd named me? Really? I'd always thought-- Did he...did he know? Why? Why, then? If it had been Mom it made sense, but now that it wasn't--
Family business. Archaeology. It was your father who named you Guido. Did he expect me to go into Mom's business? Did he think it was funny, it was fitting? But...archaeology...
I just...I didn't know, anymore. I didn't know.
* * *
"Hey man you been quiet all day, something up?"
I pointed silently to my throat. Chris rolled his eyes with a sigh. "No dude besides that. You look like something's wrong."
I shook my head, gaze focused on the sidewalk as we made our way to his apartment.
"C'mon dude, just say something."
"Something."
"I can barely hear you, G."
"I have no voice, Chris. What do you want from me?"
"I want you to tell me what's bothering you, dude."
"I really can't."
"What?"
"I really can't, Chris. See?"
"Okay, point, I guess. But I can still understand like half of it and just uhhh assume the rest, come on, try. Something's eating you, I can tell."
"I found out yesterday that Dad named me."
"So? My dad named me. Course Mom got her way with the brats, but still. That's not so weird."
"Yeah but you actually know your dad, Chris."
"Dude I totally could not hear any of that."
"Maybe you shouldn't--shouldn't ask me to talk when I can't talk."
"Speak up."
"I can't!" I never really thought I talked much in the first place, but it's funny how frustrating your life becomes when you lose your only means of communication, no matter how infrequently you normally use it.
"How is it the angrier you get, the quieter you sound?"
I don't know why that comment in particular made me so angry. I was just--I was frustrated. Confused about my conversation with Mom yesterday, frustrated I couldn't speak to express any of it to Chris, and aggravated because he had to make a big deal out of it and probably wouldn't have understood why I was upset about it anyway even if I had been able to express it properly. It happened every time I got sick! He should have known how it worked by now! What the hell was his problem?
"Ow! Dude, what the hell! What was that for!"
I left him there, holding his kicked shin, and turned around to walk back to my own house instead.
"Don't be such a fucking chick about shit!"
I would have shouted a retort back at him, but, well.
* * *
I spent Wednesday avoiding Chris and social contact in general. I didn't even go over to Rayu's after school. It's hard to explain why that one sentence messed me up so badly. Mom never mentioned my father unless I brought him up first. When he sent things for me, she'd just leave them on my desk without a word to me about it. She wouldn't even say, "You got something from your father today." He may as well have not existed in her book. So for her to say anything unprompted, it was a big deal. She said it for a reason.
She said it because she wanted me to take over for her. If I thought my name was appropriate for her business, she wanted me to know that it was his idea. She knew I respected him, thought the world of him really. So she wanted me to know that he named me for the family business so I'd think of it as approval and stop wanting to follow his footsteps with archaeology and start following what she'd laid out as his plan for me by telling me that one thing.
Manipulative. She excels at that. I don't think about it much because she never uses it on me, but god damn it, Mom. Manipulation. It pissed me off. It pissed me off more because it was working, even though I knew exactly what she was up to with it.
I was confused. I didn't know how far to think to out-think her. If he named me to take over Mom's job, if that was what he really wanted, I felt like it was what I should do. But I wanted to study archaeology because--because it was what I wanted to do, even if it was only because of my father that I wanted to do it. But if he wanted me to--...
Complicated. It was too complicated. Why couldn't she have just not said it at all and let me think about it without all this extra stuff attached to the idea?
I spent Thursday avoiding social contact too, but Lacy came up to me after English class to ask why I wasn't talking to anybody. I didn't have the excuse of voice loss for not talking anymore, because now I was just hoarse but audible. I told her that I didn't want to talk about it and I needed to get to my next class now, sorry.
She found me again after school to ask if I was okay. I just sighed, realizing she wasn't going to leave me alone if she was tracking me down like this, and told her I just had a lot on my mind.
"Well...do you wanna talk about it?" she asked me, with an almost-smile, like she was trying to be comforting but came off instead as hopeful or anxious.
"Not really, no."
"Oh... Well... Do you wanna...talk about something else, then?"
"... Lacy."
"I just want to help, Guido. You seem really upset."
"Mom..." I sighed, looking down at the floor between us. "Mom told me something. About my father. I'm not sure what to think of it."
"Umm..." I could tell she was thinking of something to respond with. I think she could tell that I wasn't going to elaborate on what it was, so she was trying to come up with something that wasn't asking me to. "Have you talked to her about it?"
I shook my head.
"Well... Maybe you should try. Ask...ask her what you should think of it?"
"...Maybe." Maybe. I didn't think she'd explain it as succinctly as I understood it, but there was something else I could ask her, and maybe the circumstance was right this time for her to actually tell me. "...Thanks."
She smiled and gave a shrug in reply.
* * *
When I got home, I dropped my backpack at the front door and stormed into the kitchen where Mom was sitting at the table, counting zeny. I slammed my hands down on the table, standing across from her, leaning over her neat stacks of money. She stopped counting, looking up at me expectantly.
I'd talked myself up during the walk home. I was mad right now, and she was going to tell me what I wanted to know or else. It wasn't fair of her to do this to me, to expect this of me, to try and manipulate me like she did with her underlings. I wasn't, I was her son, I deserved something for that. I deserved more than to be told things like my father named me for the family business without any elaboration.
"Tell me about my father." I think, for once, I actually managed to sound menacing. The leftover hoarseness worked in my favour today.
"Honey, sit down, calm down--"
"Tell me about my father!"
"Guido--"
I lashed out, like a tornado, scattering her neat stacks of paper bills. She sighed, laying what was in her hands down on top of the rest. "Tell me. About. My father."
She set her arm on the table, pressing a hand to her forehead. "Sit down." I sat. "Your father is--he was--a friend of mine. We knew each other, through a mutual friend." I leaned forward, listening intently, hanging on every word. This was the most I'd ever heard about my father from her, and I didn't think I'd ever be hearing it again. "We weren't...together, long. He left. He was...lost, I suppose, lost. Even then, he wanted to stay, for you, but..."
"But?"
"I didn't." She looked up at me, smiling. It was a humourless kind of smile. "I didn't want him there, because I wanted you to myself."
I just stared at her. It kind of hurt, being told that. She didn't want my father around because she was selfish.
"Don't look at me like that, Guido. He wasn't ready, either. He loved you, but he didn't know how to handle the responsibility. He was in high school, Guido, he wanted to try but he wasn't ready for it. Even if I'd wanted him to stay, things would have just been awkward between us. We didn't exactly get along by the time you came around. It's better, this way."
"Better? Better growing up without a father? Mom." Thin ice. How many times had I heard that when I was in trouble? She was on thin ice with me now. "Give me one good reason why I should go into the family business for you. I want to be an archaeologist, so give me one good reason why I shouldn't just do that instead."
"Because your father isn't an archaeologist."
But.
...But...
"Wh..."
She just bent down to gather up the zeny that had fallen off the table while I stared, dumbfounded.
But he was. His letters, he--he always--
I pushed myself to my feet and ran up to my room. I dug out the box full of his letters from under the bed and I went through them, one by one, looking for it, looking for the words, looking for a direct reference to his occupation.
It didn't say it. I couldn't find it. He talked about digs, about going with his friend Rick, always with Rick, he talked about archaeology but he never... He never said it outright...
"He was a musician."
I looked up from the floor to see Mom in the doorway again. "Wh--...what?"
"Musician. He was in a band. Broke them up after you were born. His friend, one of the boys in the band, actually, was studying archaeology."
I looked back down at the letters. Rick. He was the archaeologist, and Dad was just...what? An assistant? Tagging along? He hadn't... He hadn't lied, not really, but I still felt betrayed. "But..."
"You wanted me to tell you about your father, there you go."
I stared down at the letter in my hands, feeling like tearing it up but knowing I'd regret it if I did. "Who--who is he? What's his name?"
"You can ask him yourself when he comes to see you in April."
The door clicked shut. I looked up to see her gone again, leaving me alone with the letters and the half-truths and the unanswered questions. I didn't know what to do with them, I didn't know, I felt like I didn't know anything anymore.
A musician.
High school. He was in high school, how old had he been when I was born? Mom was so much older than he was, I knew the math, I knew she was forty-five, she was thirty when I was born. High school. Had he been my age? Junior? Senior? No wonder--no wonder they'd never gotten married.
He had a band, he wasn't...wasn't an archaeologist. Was he anything I thought he was?
I really...didn't know anything about my father after all, did I?
"Honey?" I glanced up from my desk. Mom was standing in the doorway, shoulder against the doorjamb, hands in the pockets of her apron. "Can we talk for a minute?"
"I can try."
She smiled, making an amused noise. "I know you want to go to Greenwood Lake University, but do you know what you want to study there?"
It...it was stupid, really. I looked down at the pictures in my hands, the various pictures Dad had sent me over the years with his letters. "Archaeology."
"Are you sure about that?"
"...I don't know." I wanted to. When he talked about it, it was so interesting, and I...I really wanted to have something in common with him...
"Have you thought about a business degree?"
I looked up to her, confused. "Business? Why?"
Her eyes moved away and she pulled her hands out of her pockets to smooth them over her apron. It looked like this was a really hard topic for her to bring up. "You'll be sixteen in less than a month. You really should start thinking about whether or not you'll pick up the family business."
"I, wh--" I cleared my throat, "what?"
"It's about time I started teaching you. So, you need to decide if you want to be taught."
The family business? I hadn't even thought about this at all. I guess, technically, I am heir to Mom's position, but... Wow. That was a hell of a decision. "I don't think I can decide that right now, Mom."
"Hmm? Oh, honey, of course. I'm not asking you to decide today, I just want you to give it some thought, alright?"
But I wanted to go into archaeology, not business. I looked back down at my father's photos, at the picture of the Sphinx he'd sent from his trip to Morroc. Greenwood Lake. I wanted to go to Greenwood Lake. Britoniah University in Geffen was the choice for a business degree, but I didn't want to go to Geffen. I didn't want to study business. I didn't--I just wanted to study archaeology, damn it. I wanted to go back to Payon, I wanted to take after my father. "I've got the name for it, at least." I didn't mean to sound so bitter, but I was.
"I wanted to name you Julius." My eyes snapped back to her; she was no longer leaning against the doorframe, with one hand now on the doorknob. "It was your father who named you Guido."
She shut the door on herself, vanishing; the pictures fell out of my hands, scattering over my desk.
She'd never--never told me that before. It was the most information I'd ever gotten out of her mouth about my father. He'd named me? Really? I'd always thought-- Did he...did he know? Why? Why, then? If it had been Mom it made sense, but now that it wasn't--
Family business. Archaeology. It was your father who named you Guido. Did he expect me to go into Mom's business? Did he think it was funny, it was fitting? But...archaeology...
I just...I didn't know, anymore. I didn't know.
* * *
"Hey man you been quiet all day, something up?"
I pointed silently to my throat. Chris rolled his eyes with a sigh. "No dude besides that. You look like something's wrong."
I shook my head, gaze focused on the sidewalk as we made our way to his apartment.
"C'mon dude, just say something."
"Something."
"I can barely hear you, G."
"I have no voice, Chris. What do you want from me?"
"I want you to tell me what's bothering you, dude."
"I really can't."
"What?"
"I really can't, Chris. See?"
"Okay, point, I guess. But I can still understand like half of it and just uhhh assume the rest, come on, try. Something's eating you, I can tell."
"I found out yesterday that Dad named me."
"So? My dad named me. Course Mom got her way with the brats, but still. That's not so weird."
"Yeah but you actually know your dad, Chris."
"Dude I totally could not hear any of that."
"Maybe you shouldn't--shouldn't ask me to talk when I can't talk."
"Speak up."
"I can't!" I never really thought I talked much in the first place, but it's funny how frustrating your life becomes when you lose your only means of communication, no matter how infrequently you normally use it.
"How is it the angrier you get, the quieter you sound?"
I don't know why that comment in particular made me so angry. I was just--I was frustrated. Confused about my conversation with Mom yesterday, frustrated I couldn't speak to express any of it to Chris, and aggravated because he had to make a big deal out of it and probably wouldn't have understood why I was upset about it anyway even if I had been able to express it properly. It happened every time I got sick! He should have known how it worked by now! What the hell was his problem?
"Ow! Dude, what the hell! What was that for!"
I left him there, holding his kicked shin, and turned around to walk back to my own house instead.
"Don't be such a fucking chick about shit!"
I would have shouted a retort back at him, but, well.
* * *
I spent Wednesday avoiding Chris and social contact in general. I didn't even go over to Rayu's after school. It's hard to explain why that one sentence messed me up so badly. Mom never mentioned my father unless I brought him up first. When he sent things for me, she'd just leave them on my desk without a word to me about it. She wouldn't even say, "You got something from your father today." He may as well have not existed in her book. So for her to say anything unprompted, it was a big deal. She said it for a reason.
She said it because she wanted me to take over for her. If I thought my name was appropriate for her business, she wanted me to know that it was his idea. She knew I respected him, thought the world of him really. So she wanted me to know that he named me for the family business so I'd think of it as approval and stop wanting to follow his footsteps with archaeology and start following what she'd laid out as his plan for me by telling me that one thing.
Manipulative. She excels at that. I don't think about it much because she never uses it on me, but god damn it, Mom. Manipulation. It pissed me off. It pissed me off more because it was working, even though I knew exactly what she was up to with it.
I was confused. I didn't know how far to think to out-think her. If he named me to take over Mom's job, if that was what he really wanted, I felt like it was what I should do. But I wanted to study archaeology because--because it was what I wanted to do, even if it was only because of my father that I wanted to do it. But if he wanted me to--...
Complicated. It was too complicated. Why couldn't she have just not said it at all and let me think about it without all this extra stuff attached to the idea?
I spent Thursday avoiding social contact too, but Lacy came up to me after English class to ask why I wasn't talking to anybody. I didn't have the excuse of voice loss for not talking anymore, because now I was just hoarse but audible. I told her that I didn't want to talk about it and I needed to get to my next class now, sorry.
She found me again after school to ask if I was okay. I just sighed, realizing she wasn't going to leave me alone if she was tracking me down like this, and told her I just had a lot on my mind.
"Well...do you wanna talk about it?" she asked me, with an almost-smile, like she was trying to be comforting but came off instead as hopeful or anxious.
"Not really, no."
"Oh... Well... Do you wanna...talk about something else, then?"
"... Lacy."
"I just want to help, Guido. You seem really upset."
"Mom..." I sighed, looking down at the floor between us. "Mom told me something. About my father. I'm not sure what to think of it."
"Umm..." I could tell she was thinking of something to respond with. I think she could tell that I wasn't going to elaborate on what it was, so she was trying to come up with something that wasn't asking me to. "Have you talked to her about it?"
I shook my head.
"Well... Maybe you should try. Ask...ask her what you should think of it?"
"...Maybe." Maybe. I didn't think she'd explain it as succinctly as I understood it, but there was something else I could ask her, and maybe the circumstance was right this time for her to actually tell me. "...Thanks."
She smiled and gave a shrug in reply.
* * *
When I got home, I dropped my backpack at the front door and stormed into the kitchen where Mom was sitting at the table, counting zeny. I slammed my hands down on the table, standing across from her, leaning over her neat stacks of money. She stopped counting, looking up at me expectantly.
I'd talked myself up during the walk home. I was mad right now, and she was going to tell me what I wanted to know or else. It wasn't fair of her to do this to me, to expect this of me, to try and manipulate me like she did with her underlings. I wasn't, I was her son, I deserved something for that. I deserved more than to be told things like my father named me for the family business without any elaboration.
"Tell me about my father." I think, for once, I actually managed to sound menacing. The leftover hoarseness worked in my favour today.
"Honey, sit down, calm down--"
"Tell me about my father!"
"Guido--"
I lashed out, like a tornado, scattering her neat stacks of paper bills. She sighed, laying what was in her hands down on top of the rest. "Tell me. About. My father."
She set her arm on the table, pressing a hand to her forehead. "Sit down." I sat. "Your father is--he was--a friend of mine. We knew each other, through a mutual friend." I leaned forward, listening intently, hanging on every word. This was the most I'd ever heard about my father from her, and I didn't think I'd ever be hearing it again. "We weren't...together, long. He left. He was...lost, I suppose, lost. Even then, he wanted to stay, for you, but..."
"But?"
"I didn't." She looked up at me, smiling. It was a humourless kind of smile. "I didn't want him there, because I wanted you to myself."
I just stared at her. It kind of hurt, being told that. She didn't want my father around because she was selfish.
"Don't look at me like that, Guido. He wasn't ready, either. He loved you, but he didn't know how to handle the responsibility. He was in high school, Guido, he wanted to try but he wasn't ready for it. Even if I'd wanted him to stay, things would have just been awkward between us. We didn't exactly get along by the time you came around. It's better, this way."
"Better? Better growing up without a father? Mom." Thin ice. How many times had I heard that when I was in trouble? She was on thin ice with me now. "Give me one good reason why I should go into the family business for you. I want to be an archaeologist, so give me one good reason why I shouldn't just do that instead."
"Because your father isn't an archaeologist."
But.
...But...
"Wh..."
She just bent down to gather up the zeny that had fallen off the table while I stared, dumbfounded.
But he was. His letters, he--he always--
I pushed myself to my feet and ran up to my room. I dug out the box full of his letters from under the bed and I went through them, one by one, looking for it, looking for the words, looking for a direct reference to his occupation.
It didn't say it. I couldn't find it. He talked about digs, about going with his friend Rick, always with Rick, he talked about archaeology but he never... He never said it outright...
"He was a musician."
I looked up from the floor to see Mom in the doorway again. "Wh--...what?"
"Musician. He was in a band. Broke them up after you were born. His friend, one of the boys in the band, actually, was studying archaeology."
I looked back down at the letters. Rick. He was the archaeologist, and Dad was just...what? An assistant? Tagging along? He hadn't... He hadn't lied, not really, but I still felt betrayed. "But..."
"You wanted me to tell you about your father, there you go."
I stared down at the letter in my hands, feeling like tearing it up but knowing I'd regret it if I did. "Who--who is he? What's his name?"
"You can ask him yourself when he comes to see you in April."
The door clicked shut. I looked up to see her gone again, leaving me alone with the letters and the half-truths and the unanswered questions. I didn't know what to do with them, I didn't know, I felt like I didn't know anything anymore.
A musician.
High school. He was in high school, how old had he been when I was born? Mom was so much older than he was, I knew the math, I knew she was forty-five, she was thirty when I was born. High school. Had he been my age? Junior? Senior? No wonder--no wonder they'd never gotten married.
He had a band, he wasn't...wasn't an archaeologist. Was he anything I thought he was?
I really...didn't know anything about my father after all, did I?