The Twenty Year Triangle

Chapter Forty-Five

"What 'cha sitting out on the front porch for?"  I look up as the door opens, and my dad steps out. He sits in the rocking chair beside me and lights up a smoke.

"Dad! No smoking near Mama's herb garden!"

"It'll add flavor," he says with a little wink.

"She's going to kill you," I warn.

"Then let's move to the back porch."

The back porch might as well be our living room, where we usually sit, chat, drink, smoke, and everything else. It's always cluttered with magazines, books, forgotten wine glasses or beer bottles, my dad's cigarette and cigar butts, and Daisy's cat toys scattered about. 

The front porch, on the other hand, is mainly for show. The wood porch is stained a dark glossy brown and decorated in a classic way. There are two rockers with an end table between them that Mama keeps fresh flowers in. Her raised planter bed sits off the side of the chairs and is full of lush greens, and a cute gnome sculpture with a crooked smile sits next to it.

It's important that she keeps up appearances for those Amazon drivers, I suppose.

"I'm waiting for Brandi. She's picking me up, and we're heading over to see the duplexes for the last time. Next week, they rebuild them."

I ended up so sore after working Monday and Tuesday that I took the rest of the week off; after all. I couldn't even move without groaning like an old fart when I woke up on Wednesday morning.

"They are handling working together, okay then?" Dad asks.

"I guess so," I say with a shrug. "I was fretting over it, but Hunter says Oliver pops in and out all day and is all business. Oliver says they're getting it done fast since they don't have to waste time talking."

Dad laughs. "Stubborn old fools, both of 'em. They ought to talk. They were friends once. They just had too much in common, is all."

He gives me a pointed look with that. "Still do from the looks of it."

"Cute, Dad."

"You got any idea what you're going to do?" He asks and then sucks in a long drag and blows it out. I wish he'd quit; I nag at him about it all the time but to no avail.

"Not yet," I say slowly. "I have a lot on my mind regarding both of them. With Oliver, I had this idea of what our relationship was, and now I'm seeing I was blind to a lot of our problems. The biggest one- "

"Being Hunter," Dad fills in for me.

"No, actually, he isn't. Oliver may disagree, but he and I talked a lot about the past earlier this week, and I thought a lot about what he said and didn't say," I say thoughtfully and then pause to gather my thoughts.

"The jealousy over Hunter was a  symptom of a bigger problem. A problem we were both too young and naive to understand back then. Oliver was insecure in the relationship partially because of things about Hunter that I didn't know, but that's not the only reason. It was also because he wasn't getting what he needed from me."

"Don't blame yourself," Dad says.

"No, it's okay, Dad, I own my part. It's not a blame thing so much as recognizing what went wrong. Oliver knew I harbored feelings for Hunter and was so jealous about that for good reasons, but if he felt valued in our relationship, that jealousy wouldn't have been so huge," I say slowly. "I didn't always treat Olly that well. I assumed he would just do whatever I wanted, and that usually involved hanging out with Hunter. I didn't plan special one one-on-one dates, those only happened when Olly planned them. I didn't really do anything after he and I got together to show him my love. I didn't appreciate him like I should've, so his insecurities were literally fed rather than eased."