The Belle and the Beard by Kate Canterbary (carter reed TXT) 📗

I gave her hand a squeeze but I wanted to scoop her out of that chair and gather her up in my arms because the next portion of this story was going to be rough. Whatever it was, was going to hurt and I couldn't just sit here while she shared that hurt. I could have her wrapped up like a burrito and perched on my lap in one minute. I'd do it too—the second she gave me the signal.

Not that Jasper was one for broadcasting all her signals but I had a good idea after two months of close study. Enough to know she didn't want me swooping in just yet.

"He ended his life that summer. I didn't understand but there was no time to deal with it because my father's family blamed my mom for his death and said all kinds of horrendous things about suicide. They made her pay them the full amount of his pension for us to continue living in the little one-room cabin that had neither kitchen nor heating. Of course, that request was bananas and she shouldn't have agreed to it but no one makes good choices when their world has fallen apart. They just don't. That's how we ended up living in that cabin with no money and nowhere to go, and I don't remember celebrating Halloween again after that."

Okay, I didn't care if she gave me the signal or not, I needed to hug this girl until the broken pieces fit back together again. I threw off my blanket and shifted toward her but Jasper held up a hand.

"No. Please, don't. Thank you. I'm fine right here. By myself."

It was almost the same thing she'd said to me when I told her she couldn't stay in Midge's cottage. She'd told me she'd seen worse. Fuck, I hadn't believed her. How could anyone believe there was worse than a house previously occupied by bats?

I hated this. All of it.

"Did it get better?" I asked.

She bobbed her head as she resumed opening and closing her bottle. "Yeah. Things always get better if you wait long enough. Eventually, my mom found work with an international airline. She'd learned Japanese while we were overseas and…yeah. That helped. But it meant I had to stay with my father's family—god, I get so angry when I think about them—and they were the worst. Old-fashioned in a horse-and-buggy sort of way but only when it suited them, you know? They loved diesel trucks and big TVs but were conveniently suspicious of pop music and anything with bright colors."

"Bright…colors," I repeated.

"Not really but at the same time, yeah. Totally. Anything neon was out of the question for them. The basic primary colors were the only ones anyone needed. Everything else was some kind of devilry. Obviously, it had nothing to do with actual colors but what color represented. They didn't want to hear about new things or variations. Differences were a waste of their time. Same with mental health. They just didn't buy into it. There was no such thing as depression or PTSD. Those were new inventions and if they were new, that meant they didn't exist before. If they didn't exist before, they couldn't be real, you know?"

"I think I follow you," I said.

"They liked their fire and brimstone, their traditional gender roles. It took me forever to figure it out but eventually I realized they blamed my mom for the suicide because she didn't pledge allegiance to the typical housewife routine. She also owned more than a few hot pink items of clothing and pushed my father to get treatment for his depression, all of which added up to her being the problem, not the disease."

"I am so sorry."

She shook her head in a way that said it's fucked-up, right? But then she said, "It's fine." It wasn't fine. "I ended up living with my aunts and uncles, and their kids, in the main house when my mother started regularly flying on international flights. It was a giant old plantation house but it was in the worst shape. Everything was falling apart. It hadn't been maintained or updated but they were fierce about that place. Like their heritage was baked right into the walls and I guess it was, when you really think about it. But it's not Georgia or the South. That sort of thing is baked in everywhere. It's here just as much as it is on the pecan plantation where I grew up."

I didn't know what to say to that. I didn't know what to say about any of this but I definitely wanted to break something. At the minimum, chop the shit out of some wood. And I wanted my mother to fawn over Jasper some more. I wanted her to have the oppressively loving family experience she'd lost as a kid.

"My mom was gone four nights out of the week, and staying alone in the cabin was only a slight improvement over staying with people who wanted to groom me to serve the needs of men."

"Jasper—" I didn't know what I was going to say next but I couldn't say nothing. I wanted to haul off and find the people who put her through that—while she was grieving the loss of her father—and teach them a lesson or two. What the actual fuck was wrong with people? What the actual fuck.

"It's fine. It is." She patted my hand like I was the one in need of comfort. "They were terrible people but they never hurt me. Not in any way that left marks." She shot a rueful grin at her bottle. "They were never more than an errant thought or one too many belts of moonshine away from it but I learned quick enough to stay quiet and stay out of the way. They didn't like listening to