The Precious One by de los Santos Marisa

Author:de los Santos, Marisa
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-03-23T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Taisy

I DIDN’T GIVE HER THE whole story because I didn’t give her the whole why. Despite telling her more than I’d ever told anyone, lighting truth after truth after truth like candles, in the end, I left certain ones standing in the dark, unlit. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hold back much, despite her stubborn jaw and glowering stare. And I did give her the real, overarching why, my most precious thing, which was that Ben Ransom and I were the Dog Star, the brightest, surest light, the one that found me every time I turned my eyes to the sky. You could navigate your life by a light like that. Could? You’d be crazy not to.

No, what I didn’t give her was the rest of the why, the nitty-gritty, why-then, why-so-sudden why. Why didn’t we wait? Why did we decide, on a rainy late September evening, to get secretly married a week later, two days after my eighteenth birthday, at a Clerk of the Peace in Georgetown, Delaware? This why wasn’t precious or pure or so big you could fit an entire life inside of it, like the other one. It was small. It had a name. Two names, really. Three, if you counted Willow, and while she wasn’t even in the world yet, she counted all the same. So there it was, the other why: Wilson, Caro, and Willow.

It was Ben who discovered them. He was on the first field trip of his senior year: a Cezanne exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his French class. His assignment was to find a painting and write an essay in French, analyzing it, so instead of taking a group tour, the students were free to roam around with friends or alone so that, when inspiration struck, they could park themselves in front of a painting to take notes. Which was a good thing because it meant that when Ben came upon my father and his paramour paramouring on a bench in front of The Bathers, he was only with two other guys and so did not have to bear witness to an entire tour group of teenagers gawking at my father’s public display of adultery.

Not that any of them knew my father. They didn’t even know me, since when Ben came to live with his dad (for no other reason than that he liked his dad and wanted to get in a few good years with him before he went off to college), he didn’t transfer, but kept going to his Quaker school in Pennsylvania. Still, if you have to come upon your girlfriend’s father canoodling with his jailbait-looking (Caro was twenty-two), immensely pregnant gal pal in front of a gargantuan painting of naked French people, it’s better not to have an audience.

Later that night, after Ben told me and I was telling Marcus, Marcus cut into my tearful, scattered, raw-throated exposition by saying, “Oh, shit, were they making out? God, don’t tell me that. Because you know what? That’s nauseating.

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