P&P

Chapter Thirteen

Jane left the next morning to prepare for college and find a place of her own while she stayed with our cousins, and we saw her off for the big city. The rest of the day would be uneventful. Especially since Charlotte and I were still on the outs, and she was leaving for Oakland in a week.

"So, any plans for the day?" Lydia asked me.

"I thought I'd read a long, five hundred page novel and spend the day feeling bad about myself." I told her glumly.

"I get it. You're down in the dumps." Lydia said. "You've got no boyfriend, no best friend, and now no Jane. But no worries, you are in good hands, sis." I was highly unsure about that.

"I'm not taking you to a bar." I told her.

"Actually, I had a different idea for what you can do..." She looked up at me slyly, and I raised an eyebrow at her. "And it's so much more up your alley, since you're bookish and nerdy and all that."

"What is it?"

Twenty minutes later, I was reading The Great Gatsby and filling out a worksheet for Lydia's summer project. I had only promised to help Lydia with it, but of course "help" to Lydia means "do for her".

"Lizzie," Lydia said now, coming back into her room where I was doing her homework. "Mom wants you downstairs. And FYI, she looks majorly pissed off."

"Of course she does." I said more to myself. "I turned down my only chance of happiness with Richard Collins."

In the kitchen, my parents seemed to be having a heated argument. My parents fought periodically, as most parents, but my father seemed to be getting angrier and angrier the longer I hid behind the staircase to eavesdrop.

"Why do you feed this stuff to our daughters!?" My father was yelling at her. "You should be teaching them to stand up on their own two feet, not to rely on a man to take care of them!"

"John, you seem to be forgetting how we ended up together." My mother's voice wasn't loud, but it was piercing. What could she mean by that statement?

"That was different, and not by your choice."

"You wouldn't marry me!" My mother screamed. "Did you really think Jane was an accident?"

My father paled and my heart dropped. This really wasn't a conversation I should've been eavesdropping on. Ignorance was bliss. I always thought of my parents as happily married, my father the level-headed one to calm my mother's craziness.

This was too much.

My mother didn't get to lecture me about Richard. She didn't seem to have the heart for it after the fight she got in with my father. That night, my father was sleeping on the couch while my mother was crying not-so-quietly in their bedroom.

"Would you mind heating me up a glass of milk?" My father asked when I came down to the living room.

"Sure." I told him, making my way to the kitchen. "It's a nice night out." I told my father, handing him the milk once it had finished heating up. "We should really go outside on the porch swing."

"I thought that was Jane's and your thing." My father said with a warm smile. "I'm just fine here, darling." It was quiet for a while as I sat down next to him as he sipped his milk. "By the way, you're not as good a sleuth as you think you are."