She's a student teacher and he's her mentor for her senior year internship. She's ready to learn and he, to teach. But are they ready for the consequences of blurred lines?
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“Honey, can I come in?” Linda asked with a soft knock on the door that I’d been lying again the past hour, unsure of what to do or what to say.
“Please just go away. I can’t handle any of this right now.”
There was a twist on the handle and the door pushed forward against my body.
“Kendall, please…” Linda begged with her own fear emitting from her whispered tone. “I know what I did was wrong, and there’s no way to make up for all the lost time.”
“How could you leave us?” I cried. As much as I didn’t want to give that woman any leverage over my emotions, I couldn’t help it. I felt like the eight-year old girl that watched as her mother left her alone to navigate into a life void of a mother’s touch. Void of the safety of a mother’s gentle, safe embrace.
I stood to my feet and jerked the door open the rest of the way. “How, Linda? How could you just walk away?”
Linda lowered her head, wiping away her own flowing tears. “I’m so sorry, Kendall. If I had any other options, I would’ve—”
“You could’ve stayed,” I answered sternly. “You could’ve stayed with your family and leaned on your family to get your mother through her illness. It’s not like Dad couldn’t have paid for her treatments. You’re making excuses, and I’m through with those. Own up to your damn decisions. You chose to leave. You chose the lesser of two evils, even though that choice had tragic consequences.”
Linda nodded. “There’s so much I’d change if I could, honey. I would’ve never left if I had the choice all over again. I would’ve never left you or your father.”
I walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed. “But you can’t do it over. You may have sealed a financial future for medical treatments for your mother, even though Dad could’ve helped, but you lost your daughter in the process.” I shrugged with a defeated expression. “You lost me, Linda. Was that worth it to make your pain easier?”
I knew it sounded like I didn’t care about my grandmother and her health, and that was not the case at all. She’s acting like my father wasn’t already well-off financially without my grandfather’s help. But he was. And he would’ve taken care of any medical expenses that my grandmother would endure. She took the easy way out of a difficult situation. She chose to not fight for her family.
Linda came over and sat down beside me on the bed, looking straight ahead at the dark television screen bolted to a wall surrounded by more family pictures. Pictures that didn’t involve Linda.
“Alright, I’m going to be completely honest with you,” Linda conceded with a drawn-out sigh.
“I hope so, because I can’t take more secrets and lies.”
“I did take the easy way out. I was a twenty-nine-year-old mother of an eight-year old with a cheating husband. I had no college experience and absolutely no way to take care of you on my own. I couldn’t stay with your father, knowing that he got another woman pregnant and knowing that your grandfather hated the idea of me. I wasn’t the perfect wife for your father in his eyes. All I had to offer was love, and to him, that wasn’t enough.”
