Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend

Maybe that’s the same thing as not caring. I’m not sure.

“It also scares me,” she continues. “There are a lot of people out there who prey on those who are grieving. And Rose is now having interactions with people she’s never even heard of before, who claim to know her father. It’s dangerous in many ways, including emotionally.”

“Can you explain to Rose what you mean by that?”

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. That’s Shake-speare for here we go again.

“Rose launched the website on the anniversary of her dad’s death in June. Within a few hours, there were nearly fifty comments on the site about him. Some were nice, some were odd, some were from people who obviously didn’t know Alfonso at all and just wanted to make themselves feel important and involved. It would have been extremely confusing and painful for anyone, but it was especially so for a teenage girl missing her father. Rose didn’t leave her room for three days.”

That’s not entirely true. I left to use the bathroom and to eat occasionally.

“I was just reading the comments and writing back to people,” I say. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

“That’s part of what you were doing, Rose. You were also having an emotional breakdown as a result of being assaulted by all the information that didn’t reflect back to you the person you thought you knew—”

“Kathleen,” says Caron in her special voice. This is some kind of code they’ve established, because every time Caron says her name like that, my mother looks guilty and then stops talking.

So what if I’m in touch with people we don’t know who knew Dad? So what if some guy he knew for, like, two days in Iraq posted about how they’d had a beer together and how he could tell that Dad was the “genuwine article”? Why is that less valid than my story about him showing me his twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary for the first time?

I don’t really know how Kathleen and I got here. I feel like things were fine, and then suddenly they weren’t. We had this heart-to-heart conversation last year on my birthday and it seemed like everything was finally going to be okay between us. She apologized for “abandoning me to my grief,” explained that she needed help and asked if I would come to therapy with her. I said I’d think about it.

What a mistake that was. Two months later, I launched my dad’s site and when I refused to take a shower after sitting in front of the computer for a few days, she practically dragged me by my greasy hair to see Caron for the first time.

“So, Rose, when you hear your mother talk about feeling betrayed by you and scared for you, what do you feel?”

This question has come up before, but I guess I didn’t answer it right. Maybe I’ll try telling the truth today.

“I feel annoyed,” I answer. This is a very different response from my usual I feel bad.

Caron’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Annoyed?” my mother repeats very slowly.

“I don’t understand why we have to keep talking about this. It’s starting to get annoying.”

“We have to keep talking about it because you refuse to take the site down, even though you are unable to explain why you want to keep working on it when it clearly upsets you to be in touch with those people.”

Those people. She means Vicky.

I just got an email from Vicky this morning, reminding me to have fun on my last free weekend before school starts on Tuesday. Vicky checks in on me from time to time, emailing me little inspirational sayings or pictures that she’s scanned as part of her ongoing project to scan every photo she ever took with a pre-digital camera. She only sends me funny photos of herself, like from Halloween or from some party where she did something big and crazy with her hair. Vicky is from Texas, and she’s a hairdresser, so she’s had a lot of practice making big hair. Every time she sends me a new photo, it’s the biggest hair I’ve ever seen. When I told her I had the lamest, flattest, straightest, most boring-est hair in the history of humankind, she said I needed to “hightail it on down” to Texas and let her take a crack at it. “When I’m done with you, honey,” she wrote, “you won’t even recognize yourself.”

Vicky raised her son—the sergeant, Travis—and daughter alone. A “good, single Christian woman” is how she describes herself. She’s never told me anything about the father of her children, although I read a letter Travis’s dad wrote to him that she posted on the website. And she doesn’t say much about her daughter. I kind of get the feeling that she and her daughter don’t talk much. But she loves to write about Travis, and she always ends every email with, Your dad is watching over you, just like my Travis is watching over me. God bless, honey.

I was raised agnostic, bordering on atheist, but there’s something about the way Vicky writes God bless, honey that makes me feel safe from all the awful stuff that goes on inside my head and out. When Vicky says she’s praying for me, I believe it, and even though I don’t think there’s a god who pays attention to us, I like when she says it because I know she does think he’s up there.

Of course I can’t tell any of that to my mother.

“It doesn’t upset me to be in touch with those people. Why do you hate Vicky so much, anyway?” I ask.

Kathleen sighs like she’s the weariest person in history. “I don’t even know Vicky, Rose. I just feel like you give her more than she gives you. And frankly, you don’t need to take care of anyone but yourself right now.”

“Rose, do you feel like you’re taking care of Vicky?” Caron asks me. My mother looks at her sharply. Caron, to her credit, keeps her eyes on me and doesn’t acknowledge the death rays that Kathleen is staring at her.

“We just email about stuff. She sends me funny pictures of her hair. Is that taking care of somebody—sending each other emails?”

“It is when she’s sharing private details regarding how she’s coping with the death of her son,” my mother cuts in, sounding jealous and protective at the same time. “She’s a grown woman. She shouldn’t be burdening a child with her feelings under the guise of helping her.”

“I’m not a child, Kathleen,” I say.

I clamp my hand over my mouth. I had no intention of calling my mother “Kathleen” to her face. Well, no conscious intention, anyway. I can’t imagine that it’s going to go over well.

My mother’s face changes color several times and I feel like steam is about to come out of her ears but she’s doing her best not to lose it. I actually feel bad. I didn’t do it on purpose. It just came out.

It probably hurts to hear your child call you by your first name, although I can’t really say why.

But why do I have to worry about her feelings?

Because there’s such a thing as basic human kindness, says one of the voices in my head.

Caron is watching my mother to see if she wants to address what just happened. When it’s clear that my mother is taking the high road, Caron asks, “Is it easy to write to Vicky about how you’re feeling, Rose?”

I don’t like having to talk about Vicky in here like she’s an issue. “I don’t think about it—I just do it. She asks me questions and I answer them, and then I ask her questions. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. She’s just a sad woman with a dead son. And I’m a ‘depressed’ girl with a dead dad.”

My mother closes her eyes and twists her wedding ring on her finger. Then she finally says, “Please don’t talk about your father that way.”

“What way? He’s dead, so I get to say that he’s dead. Isn’t the whole reason we’re here so we can say whatever we want out loud?”

“It’s the way you’re saying it, Rose. You’re saying it in a way that is disrespectful to your father and designed to shock and hurt me. And I know why you’re doing it—”

“Kathleen,” Caron says again, with a little more force than before.

This time my mother is the one to roll her eyes, which I think is pretty funny. I guess she’s sick of Caron telling her what she can and can’t say. She stares out the window into the backyard and looks…hopeless.

“Why do you keep stopping her from talking if we’re supposed to be so open?” I ask Caron. Mom looks at me.

“Sometimes it’s difficult for your mother to be a patient, which means things get a little uneven—”

“Rose, just tell me why it’s important to you to keep that website up, even though it could send you into a tailspin at any moment,” my mother interrupts, obviously not liking where Caron is going. I see a flicker of annoyance on Caron’s face.

I know it seems to my mom and to Caron that I’m keeping this information from them, but I just haven’t come up with the right way to tell the truth yet. For example, if I said, “Sometimes the site feels like my only connection to Dad,” Kathleen might ask why she isn’t that connection for me. I don’t know how to answer that without hurting her. Also, when I was building the website, I liked that it was a way for me to connect with Dad directly, not through her or anyone else. And when I launched it and all those people started posting things, it became my favorite way to connect to him. And I definitely can’t say that.

So I go with the easiest answer. “It’s important to me to keep the site up because I’m learning things about Dad that I didn’t know before.”

My mother is so frustrated by this that she can barely stay seated on the couch. “What could you possibly learn about your father from people who barely knew him?” she snaps.

I snap right back. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that he was going to stay in Iraq for a whole year.”

Her irritation turns to shock. She shakes her head and then says to Caron, “See? This is exactly the kind of information Rose shouldn’t be getting out of context.”

“Kathleen, you’re shutting Rose out of the conversation. Tell her, not me.”

Mom stares at the ceiling for a few seconds before she turns to me and tries to ask very calmly, “Who told you that?”

“Not you. And not him,” I mutter. “He told me he was only staying for six months.”

“There wasn’t time to tell you,” Mom says, tears filling her eyes. “He made the decision right before it happened. Who told you?” she asks again.

“One of the guys he worked with. He wrote that he was glad when Dad said he’d signed up to stay for more time because playing chess with Dad was one of the only things that made life there bearable.”

My mother starts shaking her head again. “He felt like it was worth it financially, Rose. Adults have to take all sorts of factors into consideration when making decisions.”

I know that my mother feels guilty about encouraging my dad to take the contractor job in Iraq. And I also know that she encouraged him to do it because he’d lost his job as an engineer, the money in Iraq was really good and she’d been freaking out about their finances because of college tuition. The nice and smart and generous thing to do would be to let the matter drop.

But I can’t. I just can’t. I have to pour some salt in the wound. Actually, I have to pick up the saltshaker, take off the top and dump the whole thing on her raw soul.

“He felt it was worth it? Or you did?”

The tears that have pooled in her eyes spill down her cheeks and she stands up, pulling down the hem of her brown pencil skirt and straightening her peach silk shirt. It’s the outfit Tracy always compliments her on, and which she wears whenever she needs help feeling good.

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