Yours to Keep by Claudia Burgoa
Chapter Ten
Vance
As promised,on Friday, I go to Dr. Sanders’s house. I arrive around noon and bring a couple of casseroles. Since Hayes had the baby, everyone in town has been dropping off food. No, that’s a lie. The dishes have been coming in since Beacon’s studio exploded. It’s not a daily occurrence, but they do it often enough that there are times we don’t have the space to put them in the refrigerator.
When I knock on the door, the good doctor opens it. His blue eyes glance at the dishes I carry and then at me. “You showed up.”
“Why do you think that I’m not going to turn up?”
“You don’t like to be confronted with emotions. In my experience, those who are faced with the thing they hate, quit. They leave things unfinished.”
“I’m not a quitter.”
“Is that why you’re back?” He gives me a challenging look. “Or is it because I’m in H.I.B.’s approved list of counselors?”
I frown. What is he talking about? “H.I.B?”
“The Organization is a subsidiary of H.I.B.,” he answers.
I knew that, I think. “So, how did they find you here?”
“They didn’t,” he answers. “When I got a call asking if I was available to take you in, I decided to come over instead.”
“This isn’t your house?”
“It belonged to my grandparents.”
“You seem like a man who knows a lot about the town. I just assumed you were from here.”
He shakes his head. “I grew up in Happy Springs. My parents worked in the factory for a long time. I stopped visiting the area after I graduated from college,” he answers.
“Well, that explains why I haven’t seen you before. I appreciate you coming over, but you didn’t have to uproot your life.”
“I’ve been thinking about visiting for the past couple of years. The day I received the call I thought it was a sign. The perfect excuse to take some time off and do something I’ve meant to do for years. Do you want me to take that off your hands?” He grabs the dishes I carry and walks toward the kitchen, setting them in the fridge. “Shall we go to the backyard?”
“Sure,” I say, instead of asking him when he lived here and how well did he know my father. He mentioned that Grandmother called him Billy. What if he has the answers we’ve been looking for? I choose not to do it. Getting the green light to work for The Organization is more important.
Mason Bradley agreed to give me a chance to work for him, but only if I got this guy to sign off that I’m mentally stable to be part of the team.
How do I convince this man that I’m qualified to do the job I was born for when he keeps talking about his family and making me do chores around the house?
He should call one of his children so they can help him. He said he had six, or was it thirteen? How can he have that many kids? I shouldn’t judge him. My father had seven. At least seven that we know about. Beacon, who has been digging into Dad’s past, confirmed there’s no other known person attached to William Aldridge.
What changed? After fathering seven children, suddenly he remembered how to use a condom? Doubtful. Something must’ve happened that he stopped. Maybe he was a sex addict who got help after six of his women discovered the truth. As soon as Beac is back, we should start investigating our father, find other clues.
“What are you thinking?” Dr. Sanders asks.
I blink a couple of times and look at him. “Nothing in particular.”
“Did a memory snatch your attention?”
“Is that even a term, memory snatchers?”
“Ha,” he chuckles. “That’s a good one. You can be funny.”
Remembering what Darren told me the other day, I ask, “You think so?” I pause, thinking about Beacon. “My youngest brother is the funny one of the six. Carter was just as funny. I guess, if he hadn’t died, he’d be the funniest of us. Maybe not. Living here reminds me a lot of him.”
“You miss him.”
“The few times I was seriously injured, I dreamt of him. He gave me hope. I want to think he was there for me. The same happened to Beacon,” I say, not sure if I’m ignoring his question or expanding the answer.
“How did you deal with his loss?”
I didn’t deal.
I look at him and finally unglue my feet from the floor and walk outside. How are all these questions related to my current issue? Aren’t we supposed to discuss why I killed men from my former unit without giving a fuck?
The planks of wood are on the ground. I realize I’m going to need a table saw or something to cut them with.
“Where are your power tools?” I ask.
He gives me an innocent look. “I assumed you had some at home, and you’d bring them over.”
“We have some, but it’ll be weird to bring them over.” I sigh. “Do you own any tools?”
“Not at the moment. I’ve been moving around for the past few years,” he mentions.
“How about your children?” I look at him, horrified. “Shouldn’t you be close to them instead of here?”
He laughs. “They’re old enough,” he assures me. “The two youngest are twenty-seven. They’re pretty independent.”
I nod, wondering about him. He seems like a guy who doesn’t have roots. Maybe he has foster children. What if, after the last children left his house, he and his wife felt so lonely they began to travel. Where is his wife? And maybe he’s drifting because he lost her and doesn’t have a place to call home.
“This isn’t about me, but you. I feel like you like to run in circles, avoiding the answers that might help you find what you’re looking for.”
“I’m not looking for anything.”
“So then, why are you here?”
“You already know. If you don’t give the okay that I’m capable of working for The Organization, I’m stuck in limbo.”
He taps his chin. “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“Either you’re having trouble picturing your future, or…”
“Or?”
He shrugs a shoulder. “I’m expecting you to answer that. Why is it that you can only see yourself as a soldier, a security agent…a protector? There has to be more to Vance Aldridge.”
His question floods my brain with more questions. Have I ever seen myself as anything else? I was told by no one else but my grandfather that I should be like him. More so when my father stopped visiting me. I am who he wanted me to be, but what is it that I want to be? Who do I want to be?
“I want to be anything but my father,” I mumble.
“Why is that?”
“Never mind,” I say.
“What is it that you hate about your father?”
I’m about to say he left us, but he didn’t. We’ve been learning that he wanted us. Dad tried to take us away from our mothers and raise us himself. Why did he give up? I have the gut feeling that he loved us enough to let us go before the custody battles scarred us for life. But he abandoned us. Yet, I know he didn’t. He just couldn’t continue seeing us except for that week over the summer when we all had to come to Baker’s Creek.
“I’m not sure,” I answer. “We had this idea of who he was, but now…there’s another side to every story. In our case, there are about seven sides. He cheated on his wife with five women. I want to know the reason he dragged us to this corner of the world. There’s a lot more to what happened between him and our mothers. He could’ve reached out when we turned eighteen and say, hey, I give a fuck about you. When Carter was dying he…”
Recalling those days, it’s painful. I hate that I have to bring back the memories . My father fought to get him back into chemotherapy. The lawyers tried to annul his marriage to Blaire, and Carter moved from one state to another to complicate the legal case. Hayes and Carter’s mom pushed our father to do something, to care for his son, to save him because that’s the least he could do after ruining our lives.
“Dad couldn’t be with his son in his last moments,” I mumble. “He had to fight a battle to make up for his mistakes.”
I lean against a tree and sit down as the overwhelming memories I put away continue popping out of a box. “Carter’s mom never allowed Dad to get close to Cart. She only tried to use Dad to push Blaire away and get him back into treatment.” I look up at Dr. Sanders. “The doctor already said Carter only had weeks or months left. Cart wanted to enjoy his last days, and maybe he would’ve been happier if, instead of bringing lawyers and chasing him to the next state, Dad would’ve been there, with him.”
“It must have been painful for both of them,” Dr. Sanders agrees with a sorrowful voice. “And maybe it’s not that you hate him, just that you don’t want to repeat your parents’ mistakes, but you don’t know why.”
I look up. He’s staring at the cloudy sky. The overcast settles on my shoulders, weighing me down. I saw and judged everything from my mother and grandfather’s perspective. After Carter died, his mother blamed Blaire and my father. Neither one of them was to blame. I never accused Blaire, but I never forgave my father. I had been conditioned to hate him, the same way my grandfather programmed me to hate anything related to him.
“My grandfather doesn’t know much about me,” I confess.
Dr. Sanders turns to look at me. “How so?”
“There’s something I haven’t told you. Bennett—”
“You two were lovers. We covered that,” he says.
“No. He’s obviously not the first guy I was with. I’m thirty-three. There have been other men and women. I just never told my grandfather. I’ve never been genuine with him. If he knew…”
He shakes his head. “He wouldn’t accept you.”
“No, he wouldn’t, and maybe he’d shoot me. I’ve never introduced anyone to my family. I had a few relationships in high school. My first one was Kristal. We were friends while growing up, and it seemed like a natural progression to kiss and fool around. When my grandfather found out about her, he grounded me. He said I shouldn’t be wasting my time with women.”
“So after that, you just hid everything from him?”
I nod and sigh. “Exactly. After her, it just seemed better to stick to the kissing, fooling around, and…fucking. Casual meant things could end without any big consequences.”
“You weren’t allowed to fall in love. He never allowed you to feel anything but a sense of responsibility for what he believed was important.” He exhales harshly, and there’s a bright flame burning in his brown eyes that extinguishes just as fast as it appeared. “It’s so difficult to be a parent. You don’t know when it’s best to let things go. But what if you do and you wreck their future?”
I snort. “Are you asking me? Because I’m not a therapist.”
He gives me a fatherly look. “You’re allowed to feel, and maybe that’s your homework for the weekend.”
“I thought it was finding your power tools to start your project.”
“Why don’t we go inside the house?” he suggests, walking away.
When I step inside his home, he’s opening his laptop. I get a glance at what I think is his family. I don’t get a chance to see it well since he opens an internet browser right away.
“I’m sending you an email and a text with this wheel.”
“A wheel?”
“An emotional wheel,” he rephrases. “Every time you get frustrated because something is upsetting you, I want you to look at it. There are as many emotions in the world as there are colors. Anger isn’t the only one.”
When I open my phone, there are three pictures in the text. “What’s with the emojis wheel?”
“Start with the basics.”
“Is this what you did with all your children while they were growing up?”
“Only a couple of them.”
“So half of them are fucked up, and the other half are well-adjusted adults?”
He laughs and shakes his head. “Why don’t we schedule our next appointment two weeks from now?”
“How about your garden?”
“You can come and work whenever,” he says. “On Wednesday, I’m leaving town.”
“Visiting your family?”
He nods. “If you need to talk, call me.”
I’m pretty sure I can manage a week without him. I’ve managed all my adult life without having a person holding my hand while I deal with my issues.
Because you don’t deal with them.
“See you around, doc,” I say, leaving his house.
I make my way toward the mansion, and it occurs to me that maybe moving to Baker’s Creek was Dad’s secret way to redeem himself. If only I can figure out why he lived the way he did.
