He nodded slowly. “We did it a lot before Becca got sick. It was our thing.”
“Then you just ended up going on our vacation rental beach holidays. Which must have been very not what you enjoyed.”
“It was different,” he said. “For a while that was what I needed. We got back into camping when Chloe was in high school.”
He was giving to his daughter what he hadn’t had. Something he’d imagined a good father would do. She hadn’t appreciated until this moment just how much weight was on this man’s shoulders. He wasn’t just trying to be the mother Becca would’ve been, he was trying to be the father his own had never tried to be.
He had no guidebook for the past he’d been forced to walk.
“Logan, I don’t think that I fully appreciated the work that you put into giving both Becca and Chloe what you didn’t have. You are an incredible man. You weren’t just there for them. The way that you were there for me after my mom died was so needed. Desperately. I don’t know where you got the strength to do all of that.”
“You remember when you told me that loss was just shitty sometimes? I needed that. You didn’t give me platitudes or try to cheer me up. Try to tell me she was in a better place or that it was some divine plan. That I must be strong to have been given so much to carry.”
She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “I would love to believe that that didn’t happen, and that those things weren’t said to you. But I of course know they were. I can even imagine which people said them.”
“It’s well-meaning. But it’s pointless. It isn’t pointless to sit there and acknowledge how hard something is. To support somebody like that. Will… He was the best friend I ever had, but things like that make him uncomfortable. Whether it’s grappling with mortality, or just the fact that you can’t always shape life into what you wanted it to be, I don’t know. He was happy to have a drink with me. But he couldn’t give me that. That acknowledgment that it was just bad. But you did.”
“A couple of years after the fact, if I remember correctly,” she said.
“It was almost more important to get it then. Because at that point, people have stopped bringing you casseroles and sympathy.” He laughed. “At that point, people think that maybe you’ve moved on, and they don’t realize that you having to live your life is not an indication that you’ve let anything go.”
“It must be hard. Because I understand that even with my mom, I don’t want to forget. You want your grief to be less sharp, but you don’t want to forget the person that you loved. And sometimes it feels like pain is the tribute.”
“Sometimes it does.”
She remembered the women at Orcas Island, and Will’s commentary on Logan’s sex life. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Considering the amount of personal things that we’ve done, sure.”
“Okay. Point taken. But sometimes I think this is maybe more personal.”
“This? This topic of conversation? Yeah. I guess it is.”
“How long did you wait? To…to sleep with somebody else.”
He looked out the windshield, and she thought she saw something like shame in his eyes. “Not as long as I should have. Probably. Because there’s a point where you’re not thinking clearly, and everybody walks away feeling used.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t turn me into a paragon. I really don’t deserve it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever considered you a paragon. I think you’re a good man. That doesn’t mean I think you aren’t a man.”
“Well, sooner than I would like to admit, there were times when you or my former in-laws would have Chloe, and I would just go and lose myself for a couple of hours. With a woman I didn’t know. It was a way to forget.”
She didn’t say it, not right then, but she had a feeling it was a way for him to hate himself too.
“I don’t judge you for that. Hell, life is a lot more complicated than I ever give it credit for. I don’t care if you did it the night after the funeral.”
“It wasn’t quite that quick. But I barely made it a month. I told you, I did a lot of things she wouldn’t approve of.”
“Maybe that’s why you had to do it. It makes sense.”
He nodded slowly. “Thank you. For understanding that too.”
“It makes sense if you were angry. About a lot of things.”
“I was. But maybe not quite in the way you think. But behaving well… I couldn’t really see the point to it. As far as I could tell, there was no reward.”
