Another week passes. By day I spend time with Steve, doing everyday things around the house. We watch TV, finding out that we have the same sense of humor. I help him in the backyard, learning about how to maintain a lawn and which plants are weeds. I even cook with him to give poor Amber a rest from the continuous catering required for such a large family.
We prepare a huge pot of chili, Steve chopping the onions while I fry off the ground beef. He tells me the secret ingredient his family uses and swears me to secrecy.
“My momma would have loved you,” he says. “You have a spirit just like hers. Mischief in your eyes and purpose in your hands.”
“I wish I could have met her.”
Steve pauses, the knife poised over the chopping board. “I know that having regrets is foolish. I can’t go back to change anything. I can’t go back to be a different person than I was or to make a different decision.”
“I’m not asking you to,” I say softly.
“But I do wish you could have met. I wish she could have passed on her words of wisdom to you. Her recipes, how to crochet. All the things that made her smile. She would have loved that.”
“Well, you still can,” I say. “I guess, maybe not the crochet unless you know how, but everything else.”
Steve laughs and carries on chopping. “She always told me to turn my wounds into wisdom. When I was younger, I didn’t get what she meant. Maybe that’s because it’s hard to see past the hurt when it’s fresh, but now I get it. We can focus on the past and on the things that we did wrong, and the wrongs that others did to us, or we can find the lesson there. Sometimes it’s a lesson about other people. Sometimes it’s a lesson about ourselves.”
“So, what did you learn when I was born?”
Steve takes the chopping board and scrapes the onion into the steaming pan and places it back on the counter. “I learned that I was a coward, and I learned that you can’t change people. You just have to work with them the way they are.”
I stir the onions into the beef, trying to focus on what I’m doing and not on what I’m hearing. Steve called himself a coward for walking away. A coward for not facing up to what had happened in his life.
That’s brave, in my book. It’s brave to face your failings and own what you did. It’s brave to understand that you could have done better.
“But you’re not a coward now.”
He starts to sprinkle in herbs and spices to the pan like a wizard over a steaming potion. “I see clearly now,” he says. “I’ve been blessed to see clearly…and that’s why you’re here…because you’re braver than I ever was at your age.”
“I’m not brave,” I say. “Not at all.”
“You’ve traveled halfway across this country to start a new school without knowing a single person. You’ve persevered in your life when most would have given up. You accepted me and came to stay when most people would have pushed me away. You’re brave, Sara, and I’m so proud of you.” Steve rests his hand on my arm, and it’s the first time he’s touched me at all. I know he wants to emphasize his point, but just like when my stepbrother’s touch me gently, it makes my throat burn. Why is it so much harder for me to accept kindness than pain? I’m not brave. I’m fucked up, through and through.
“I was curious,” I say. “It was a selfish decision. I could have stayed at college this summer or come to stay in a lovely house with a pool. This was definitely the better option.” I don’t tell him about my plans to go to Egypt because that might lead to questions about how I could afford such an extravagant trip.
Steve smiles, but there is something behind it that I don’t like. He’s watching me, observing not only what I say but why I say it. He just said he’s been blessed to be able to see clearly. What is he seeing in me?
“So what else would your mom have told me?”
“To make your bed every morning without fail. She had a theory that putting your covers right was like putting away the restful part of your day. It makes you ready to start to be productive, and she was a big one for productivity.”
“That one makes sense,” I say. “I can’t rest until I’ve done that myself.”
“You see. You are just like her.”
“What else?”
“A woman should never go out without lipstick. I think that one was more about letting the world know that you were put together.”
“I can see sense in that one too.”
“She always said that the heart should be an open thing and that the greatest pleasure in life is love.”
Steve adds the tomato sauce and beans, and I stir, thinking about Brayson and Jefferson’s tattoos. What would my grandma have thought of them? And what can I say to Steve about this one? He’s waiting to know if I agree, and I should. It makes total sense in theory. It’s not things that make us happy, it’s time spent with people, and it’s not just the people who make life special, it’s the way we feel about those people that color the rainbow of life. I’ve felt this in the stories of other people—the novels I’ve read for pleasure and school—but I’ve never felt it myself. Not really.
“Did she have a good marriage?” I ask, not looking at my dad for fear of him seeing me more clearly than I want him to.
“She was happy with my dad…your grandad. I won’t say they had the perfect marriage because that doesn’t exist, but they knew how to make it work, and that’s just about all anyone can do.”
“Do you agree with what she said?”
Steve nods. He’s resting against the counter now, watching me with an interest that feels deep and intense. “I didn’t always. I was hurt once. I thought I was in love, but it turned out I was in love with the idea of being in love, and when all that fell apart, I didn’t trust myself anymore. I didn’t believe that I could open up my heart again and not go through the same thing.”
“But you did.”
“Amber is a patient woman. I guess she’d had her own difficult situations. We learned together.”
“That’s good.”
“And you will too,” Steve says.
My instinct is to shake my head. Every part of me that has ever been disappointed, every part of me that has ever hoped to find love and affection denies that what he’s saying could be true. I’m done with opening my heart. I’m done with believing that love is the key to my life.
I know what I need to do to get through. I need to focus on my studies and find a job that will suck up all my time and energy. I want to travel the world and see all the places I could only dream about through the books I read as a child. I want to keep finding men who are happy to give me what I want when I want and how I want, no strings attached.
I like to have control because it’s the only way to stop me from ever having to feel what I did as a child.
“This chili looks amazing,” I say brightly. “You are definitely going to have to write down the recipe for me.”
“I will,” Steve says, but I don’t miss the look of concern that passes over his face. I don’t miss how he watches me carefully that night as we all dig into the meal we’ve prepared as a family.
It should be odd to sit at a table with four men I’m secretly fucking, and our parents. It should be, but it isn’t. I’m a master of compartmentalization. Everything in its place. Nothing overlapping. By day, I’m Sara, the stepsister. I have fun with my new family. I pretend that everything is innocent, and by night, well, that’s a whole other ball game.
Jefferson is excellent at it too. He sits next to me for most meals and barely looks at me. He grunts at his brothers and replies politely but distantly to Amber and Steve’s questions. He’s himself through and through.
His brothers, well, they’re not as good at keeping everything separate. I catch them looking at me across the table or in the car. I don’t miss the look in their eyes that tells me that they still don’t understand why I want our arrangement. They’re cautious in the way they talk to me and considerate in the way they approach me. I try to keep them all at arm’s length, but it’s hard when they slip into my room at night and treat me like a princess. It’s hard when they share their feelings after, and I don’t have the heart to tell them to go.
Everything continues like this until one night, none of the Bennett brothers comes to my room, and I go downstairs for a glass of water.
