Benny, this is what I wanted to say to you in person, only I can’t afford to wait anymore. When your father and I hesitated to embrace you as you were, to show you immediate acceptance, you ran. Of course, I wish that you had been more patient with us, but you were hurt and you were willing to walk away in order to protect yourself. I was deeply disappointed but over time, I realized that I could identify with what you’d done. I hope that you won’t be afraid to make the same kind of choice again, if you feel that this is what you need to do to survive. Question yourself, yes, but don’t doubt yourself. There’s a difference.
Just don’t go thinking that this is all there is to succeeding in life, this picking up and walking away from people. It should never be an easy answer to your troubles. I have lived long enough to see that my life has been determined not only by the meanness of others but also by the kindness of others, and their willingness to listen. And this is where your father and I failed you. You didn’t find enough reassurance of that, in our own home, to dare to stick around.
Benny and Steve
Each time there has come a moment when, against her better judgment, Benny has answered Steve’s phone calls, when he has made her laugh, when she has agreed to meet him. But this time, as Benny feels her phone buzzing inside her handbag, as she looks down to see that it’s Steve calling again, she decides that she won’t answer. Not this time. Or the next.
“I think that’s your phone,” Byron says.
“Yes, it is,” Benny says. She taps on the screen to end the call and looks at the time. Mr. Mitch is talking to someone on his laptop, out on the patio. Benny still has time to speak to Byron. She turns to face him.
“Byron, there’s something I need to tell you,” she says.
Benny talks. She tells Byron about being bullied in college. She tells him about Steve. How Steve was good with everything, at first, until they ran into a former girlfriend of Benny’s.
“But we’ve already talked about this, Steve,” Benny said, as they argued afterward.
“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “But I just can’t get used to this.” This, apparently, being Benny, the way Benny was. Confused is what Steve called her, but Benny couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt particularly confused. She could only remember feeling rejected.
They argued. Benny yelled. Steve hit her. Said he was sorry, begged her not to leave.
“We kept trying,” Benny says, now. “I kept seeing Steve, on and off,” Benny says. “But it wasn’t working. And Steve was getting more aggressive.” She bows her head, puts a hand on her forehead. “Byron, Steve was the reason why you didn’t see me at Daddy’s funeral.” She feels Byron take her hand and exhale slowly as she tells him about that night, six years ago.
What Steve said to her that night, before he pushed her against the pine table, was an ugly thing. What he said—before she grabbed at the tablecloth, dragging dishes and silverware and glasses and candles to the ground, before he shoved her face against the floor and into a shard of blue pottery, before she heard the snap of her left arm—was a word she never thought she’d hear from a man who had made love to her.
Because it was love they had made, she was sure of it, and Leonard Cohen was singing on the speakers as she tried to get up from the floor, and they both loved Leonard Cohen and Mary J. Blige and René Pape at the opera, they were both eclectic with music that way, and even though she had explained herself to Steve, over and over again, how she was with him because she wanted to be with him, simple as that, he still freaked, because, once again, they had run into Joanie. What was Benny supposed to do, she asked Steve, if Joanie happened to live in the same neighborhood?
At first, Steve was just irritable. He wouldn’t finish the dinner that Benny had chopped and sautéed for him, he wouldn’t even taste the sweet potato pie. It was her new recipe, she told him. He was supposed to be her taste tester, she said, forcing a smile. But then Steve raised his voice and said that word, and Benny was still trying to recover from the sound of it in his throat when he yanked her by the hair until the clip in her braids popped out.
Then the table.
Then the floor.
Then the blood.
And that was it. Benny decided to end the relationship then and there, only she needed an ambulance to do it. She had just gotten back from spending the night in the ER when Byron called to tell her that their father had died.
“The worst part is,” she tells Byron, “I swore that it would be the last time I’d see Steve, only it wasn’t. I kept thinking, he’ll come around, he just needs time, he’ll accept me for who I am.”