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.Suddenly I was a crier.If I could go back in time and slow myself down from the insane drive to grow up at that age, I would.I’m not sure why my mother didn’t.If I’d had a little more childhood, I believe I would have been a lot less wobbly in my adulthood.Particularly my young adulthood.“I never want to be a desperate older woman, looking at creepy guys through new glasses and saying maybe they’re not so bad after all,” she said.Wow.I didn’t either.“Well, how about you wait and see what happens?” I suggested.“I promise you, you’re not going to lose anything by playing it cool with guys in high school.” The chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset” swelled in the back of my mind.I ruffled her hair.“You are a prize.You need to be won, not hand yourself over.Never forget that!”“Jeez, Mom, it’s not like I’m going to do it with anyone right now!”She might have been me, trying to sell my mother the same lie, even while I was Nate’s personal amusement park at night after she went to sleep.Not that Camilla didn’t mean what she was saying now.I would have said and meant the same thing at her age.She just didn’t know how quickly her hormones were going to change her mind.Especially after a few well-placed strokes from a boy she thought she loved.I sighed.“Trust me, honey,” I said, wishing she never had to learn anything the hard way.“If you want so much as a good kiss good night, he has to feel like he pursued you, not the other way around.”Cam shrugged.“Is that how it was with that guy and you?” she gestured toward the box of Nate’s letters.I nodded.The desperation to get away from this conversation was intense, but this was one of those defining moments in a mother-daughter relationship and I couldn’t let the ball drop just because I’d been stupid enough to sleep with the guy again without knowing all the facts.“At first.He did all the traditional boy stuff he was supposed to.He called me, he asked me to do things with him and his friends, kissed me good night, the whole nine yards.”She narrowed her eyes.“Only at first?”“Well, then we were going out, so we were equal.He didn’t always have to court me.We talked all the time, all night long, we saw each other every day before and after school, but we never really had the thing where the boy calls and asks the girl on a date.It was all just…” I shrugged.“Hanging out.”“That seems okay to me,” she said.“It would be weird if, after all that time, you had to wait for him to call you every time.”“True.” And that wasn’t the problem.The problem was that he’d never done anything that made me feel like he really wanted me.In some way, deep down, I had thought he had.I thought I’d known that was how he really felt about me, and the truth was he’d done a thousand little things to prove it—a thousand little things that would have been more than enough for the adult woman I’d become—but somehow they’d never added up, in my teenage mind, to mean the same as one single grand gesture.“So why’d you break up?” Cam asked, leveling what may as well have been a loaded gun at me.Ugh.I’d totally set myself up for this.I wasn’t ready to tell her that particular story and she seriously didn’t need a mental image of her mother sobbing on some guy’s front step for days and weeks on end.So I employed the old rule about answering kids’ questions exactly and not overexplaining.It had worked when she was six and asked where puppies came from (“The mama dog carries them inside of her until they’re ready to come out and live in the world”), so I hoped it would work now.“We grew apart,” I hedged.“He finished high school and went off to college and I, of course, had to stay in school, so…” I gave an airy wave of the hand like, It was just one of those things.And like, I absolutely never called him, sobbing, forty-one times in one day.And I categorically deny having jumped into bed with him the other day without saying so much as hello first.“Aw.So can I read the rest of the letters?” She reached toward the box.A few things flashed into my mind.Intimate references she didn’t need to see.“No,” I said.“You’ll get bored and leave them lying all over the place and I need to clean up.”“But—” she began, but then the Black Eyed Peas started wailing in the other room.Her phone ringer.Thank God.“Gotta go!” She didn’t wait for an answer, just ran for it.It’s exactly what I would have done at the same age.I started to put the box back on the shelf, but then thought better of it.She might get bored at some point and remember it was there.Instead, I put it in the one place I knew she’d never look—on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the cleaning supplies.Later, when I went to check my e-mail—again to keep my mind off of what had happened—I was shocked to see something there from Nate.I know you don’t believe it, he wrote simply, but I never wanted to hurt you.I would have asked how he got my e-mail address, but Theresa had already said my mother had given it to her.I could imagine it tacked to some twee suburban bulletin board in their suburban country kitchen.When? I typed back.High school? College? Yesterday?The answer came later in the day.Ever.I sighed.The I-never-meant-to-hurt-you cop-out has always been weak for me.I never meant to hurt you means but that was a by-product of whatever I was actually doing and I was doing it because I wanted to.In other words, Sorry if you got hurt, but I wasn’t really even thinking about you.I certainly wasn’t thinking about you enough to try not to hurt you.It would have been more gratifying, in some perverse way, if he actually had been trying to hurt me.That’s what you do when you love someone so much and you’re in a lot of pain—you try and strike back.Hurting someone inadvertently is like tripping over a cat you didn’t see darting out from under the sofa.But there was no way to say all of that.No reason to.The problem was that now I didn’t know how he’d ever felt about me [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]