The Book of Matthew (The Alex Chronicles Book 1) (18 page)

On behalf of the entire university, we wish you the best of luck in your collegiate experience. We’re confident that all your educational needs will be met at Kilmore University, and that attendance here will have a positive impact on the quality of your life. We hope to see you in the fall!

Regards,

The Admissions Office

Kilmore University

I folded the letter, stuffed it back inside the envelope, and tossed it on the place mat across the table from me.

“Well? What does the letter say?” my mother asked.

I spoke through a mouthful of meatloaf. “It says I’ve been accepted.”

My mother put down her fork and clasped her hands together. “That’s fantastic, Alex! Congratulations!”

I contained my happiness and anxiety. “Thanks.”

My mother looked down the table at my father. “Isn’t that wonderful, Paul?”

My father’s hand shook slightly as he held the fork. He chewed his food through a closed-lipped grin. He swallowed and then said, “That’s great, honey. Congratulations.”

For the rest of the meal all three of us were silent.

Twenty minutes later our meal was done. My mother jumped up to clear the dishes. My father resumed reading the newspaper. I sat swiveling in my chair, deep in thought, tugging at my bottom lip.

Being accepted to college was a big deal. It meant moving on to a new chapter in my life. Starting over. Experiencing new things. Meeting new people. I should’ve been excited about that.

But college also meant leaving everything and everyone I knew behind. Things I’d grown accustomed to. People I cared about.

You’d think I’d be glad to leave
some
things behind. Like the memory of the pain I felt when my heart was broken for the first time. The remorse that sometimes crept into my brain for giving my virginity to a loser. The waxing and waning anger I didn’t know what to do with for a God I didn’t think existed. The pity I couldn’t help but feel for my parents’ marital struggles.

How could I leave those things behind? Those negative emotions had become a part of me, and I had grown accustomed to the occasional physical implications of their presence—a lump in my throat here, a pit in my stomach there.

I should’ve reveled in the opportunity to lose the baggage and walk away from all that was wrong and bad in my life.

Instead, it scared me to death.

My father poured himself a cup of coffee and rejoined me at the table. He dumped in two spoonfuls of sugar and some milk, stirred quickly and took a sip. My mother stood at the sink with her back to us, loading dishes into the dishwasher.

My father cleared his throat. “Says in the paper it’s going to snow tomorrow.” He took another sip of coffee.

“Just fucking great,” I said. “Now I’ll definitely have to pull my winter stuff out of storage.”

My mother had finished doing the dishes and was giving the table a few swipes with a dishrag. “Alexandra! Watch your language. Is that what you’re learning in school these days?”

“No, she’s learning
stuff
,” my father corrected her. He winked at me again.

That joke had grown cold. I rolled my eyes at him and resisted the urge to rip the cross from around his neck.

“You’re a college girl now,” my mother said. “We have to go shopping. You’ll need a lot of things for your dorm room.”

More sappy mother and daughter bonding moments at the mall? No thanks. I’d had my fill of those. Shopping for college wasn’t on my short-term radar. Something that was on my short-term radar? As in, at that very moment? Sudden anxiety in the pit of my gut churning my stomach into knots. At any moment I thought I might unwillingly regurgitate meatloaf onto the kitchen floor.

“I’m not a college kid yet,” I said.

“You will be soon,” my mother said. “It’ll be here before you know it.”

I sighed. “It’s not that big a deal.”

She finished drying off the table and looked down at me. “Nothing is ever a big deal to you, is it?”

I shrugged. “You make a bigger deal out of everything than is necessary.”

My father buried his face in the newspaper. He must have sensed an argument was brewing.

“I do not,” she said. “All I’m saying is that sooner or later you’re going to need to buy
stuff
for college.” She flashed a look at my father, throwing his joke back in his face.

“Understood. Just let me get through high school first, okay?” I said. “Can I go now? I’ve got homework.”

“Yes, go.”

I stood to leave.

“One last thing,” my mother said. “Stop using such filthy language.”

“Fuck? That’s nothing. Wait until I get to college. That’s what college is all about.”

“Cursing?”

“Yep.”

“I should hope not.”

“Whatever.”

“We’re not spending thousands of dollars just so you can waste four years of your life.”

“Sure you are,” I said, beaming a mischievous grin at her. “You’re paying for college so I can smoke and drink and use filthy language whenever I want.”

“Good grief!”

“What? It’s a joke. Lighten up. Get a grip.”

Her nostrils flared and her face turned pink. “Why do you always…”

My mother didn’t finish her sentence. She threw her towel down on the table and rushed past me out of the kitchen.

I sank back into the kitchen chair. “Just fucking great.”

My father folded up the newspaper again and laid it down in front of him. He peered at me over his glasses and heaved a deep sigh. “I’m sorry, honey.”

“For what?” I pointed in the direction in which my mother had run off. “Her? Don’t apologize for her.”

“No, I’m sorry about…what I did…to this family.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know why I…I mean, I didn’t want…”

I had never seen my father in a position of such weakness. Seeing him squirm, listening to him try to beg for my forgiveness, if that’s what he was attempting to do. It was more than I could handle. I didn’t ever want to see him as anything less than the strong father I knew him to be.

“Dad, don’t. It’s okay.”

“It’s affected you, I know.”

I shrugged.

“And your mother,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Stop. Please.”

“Okay. Just know that I love you and things will get better.”

The relationship a magician has with his assistant is special. It takes courage and faith and trust on the part of the assistant, and the ability, on the part of the magician, to take those three elements and create magic. Sometimes, the magician and the assistant become so in sync with each other that few words are needed. They’ve memorized each other’s role, and know each other so well, that they just know when it is their turn to act.

That’s how I felt about my father, the magic carpenter. All those nights he spent hunched over his workbench while I, his assistant, always stood faithfully beside him. Over time, as I watched him build so many things, I learned to sense and anticipate whatever it was he needed. Eventually, words were unnecessary. When he held out his hand, I knew.

That’s where I was at that moment when my father sat at the kitchen table looking at me. I was down in his workshop, covered in sawdust, clasping tools of his trade for dear life in my dainty, little hands.

When I emerged at the top of the basement steps dirty and happy and laughing, holding the finished piece of magic in my hand, I was no longer five or eight or ten years old. I was suddenly seventeen again. My father was there to greet me. He looked older and wiser, with lines on his face, and he had wood chips in his thinning gray hair.

He hadn’t been ensnared by God after all. He’d been helped by him. My father had been lost and confused like me, searching, like me, for something or someone to believe in. And he had found it in God.

My father was sorry for what he did and the pain his infidelity had caused. In that moment when he sat at the kitchen table looking at me, no words were needed.

I knew.

“Things will get better,” he repeated. “I promise.”

I looked at him. “I know.”

“You know I was just kidding earlier, right? I don’t care what you wind up studying or learning or doing in college. Whatever it is, it will be worth every penny.” He winked at me.

I smiled. “I know.”

As my father smiled at me in return, the anger and pity I had for him suddenly melted away with the realization that no matter what, I’d always have him in my corner. And whether I liked it or not, he believed in the power of prayer. But that was okay because, more importantly, my father believed in me.

And I believed in him.

I.

I sat in the middle of Matt’s bed with my knees curled up to my chest. Matt sat on the floor opposite me, leaning against Ted’s bed. He stared bleary-eyed off into space.

“How’s Christine?” I asked.

“Fine, I guess.”

Our body language was ironic. I was ready to confront our issues, yet there I was huddled up like a wounded, helpless child. And there Matt was, vague and uncommunicative, yet sprawled out on the floor with his legs outstretched as if he was ready to lay it all on the line.

“Fine, you guess? Haven’t you talked to her lately?”

“I talked to her last week. Do we have to talk about her? Why do you always ask about her?”

“Why not talk about her?”

Matt snapped back to attention and looked up at me. “Well, duh. Why do you think?”

I played dumb. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

I looked out the window at the second-story view of the campus. Another month in spring had just turned over. The moon was high and bright, the sky was clear and cloudless, and in a few minutes it would be my nineteenth birthday.

My relationship with Matt was far from cloudless—and far from happy. I had thought that a relationship based on sex was for the best. Our “friends with benefits” status was ideal. Since there was no commitment to deal with, he could continue to be with the woman he loved, I could be free from all love whatsoever, and no one would need to know.

Neither of us was supposed to get hurt.

But as time went on, it started to hurt. I started resenting Christine—a girl I didn’t even know—and Matt, for his inability to leave her. Not that I loved Matt. I didn’t. I just wanted to be the only girl in his life. I started hating the fact that I wasn’t…and hating myself for allowing the relationship to continue anyway.

It was okay at first that I was the other woman because the fact that Matt saw Christine so infrequently made
her
the other woman. She only saw him over the Christmas and Easter breaks; I was seeing him several times a week. I had a larger piece of him than she did. That was enough to sustain me for awhile.

But sometime around mid-April the sex got stale. And since our friendship wasn’t based on much else, so did the relationship itself. I was no longer excited at the thought of an evening alone. The tingle I once felt from his kiss now stung like a slap to the face.

I was once satisfied with the notion that what we were doing was wrong, and I felt remorseless glee that our actions felt forbidden. That had all but disappeared. It was replaced with the notion that the sex Matt and I had meant nothing to him; it served only to hold him over until he got home to Christine.

I didn’t love him, but I was hooked on him—too hooked to walk away.

There was something similar stirring within Matt. Occasionally I’d see a twinkle of passion in his green eyes, but it was joined by a hint of resentment. It reminded me of a quote from the gospel of Matthew:
“No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”

Maybe Matt secretly despised me because my presence served as a constant reminder that he was cheating on the woman he loved. Maybe he hated himself because he was just as hooked on me as I was on him, and he wasn’t able to walk away either.

Our relationship was a vicious cycle we didn’t know how to deal with and couldn’t begin to break.

“I don’t know why you want to know about her so much,” Matt said.

He pulled me away from my thoughts and I turned to look at him. Dark circles ringed the flesh under his lower lids and his green eyes seemed to have sunk into his skull.

“Other than her first name, I don’t know anything about her,” I said.

“Are you trying to torture yourself?”

“No, that’s your job,” I joked.

He didn’t smile. “Isn’t it easier that you don’t know anything about her?”

“Easier than what, Matt?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought it might make you jealous.”

“You could tell me her whole life story or tell me nothing at all. It doesn’t matter. Anything you say or don’t say won’t change the fact that I’m having sex with a guy who’s in love with someone else.”

He slouched down so that his head rested on the edge of the bed. “I didn’t ask you to come here tonight so we could fight—or talk about Christine.”

“Fine.”

“I wanted to see you and be the first to wish you a happy birthday.”

“Liar. You wanted this.” I picked up his take-home final exam paper I had spent the previous night editing and winged it across the room at him. It landed at his feet with a slap.

He smiled, his eyes showing their first sign of life. “Well, yeah. That too.”

I looked for something else to throw at him. He curled up into a ball and covered his head in anticipation. Finding nothing, I threw more words at him.

“Do you really think talking about Christine will make me jealous?”

His shoulders sank when he realized our moment of frivolity was over. “I guess so. I wouldn’t like it if you went on and on about your boyfriend.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend. All I have is you. And I don’t even have you, really—Christine does. Why? Would you be jealous if I did have a boyfriend?”

He stared at me a minute without answering and then said, “Are we going to do something for your birthday or not?”