Worth the Seeing Through by Lisa M. Owens

Author:Lisa M. Owens [Owens, Lisa M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub

THE NEXT morning, we went to church. Guy wanted to, and he wanted me to go with him. Walker wasn’t surprised to see us. Several people recognized Guy from when he attended as a kid. They knew about the attack and came up to say how pleased they were that he was recovering. No one seemed surprised to see him with a man, or bothered about it either. Walker preached a sermon on the Prodigal Son, a story I’d heard despite not going to church. You can’t be a lit major without knowing it. But Walker suggested that while we were all sometimes the prodigal, we were also the older brother who didn’t run away. And like him, we weren’t pleased to see the spendthrift, loose-living brother come home or be forgiven, let alone celebrated. Finally, he suggested we could also be like the extravagantly forgiving father—if we wanted to. The interpretation was interesting, and I saw the wisdom in all his points. But as a cop who had seen people escape justice, I could sympathize with the angry older brother.

Guy, on the other hand, thought the sermon was the best he’d ever heard and told Walker that with profuse praise as we ate a lunch of lasagna and green salad at his house. The reverend steered the mealtime conversation to questions about Guy’s background and mine, taking care not to say anything too personal unless we answered his questions first. The man was a skilled interviewer, but I kept my revelations to the minimum that my dad was a cop, Mom was a school secretary, and they were both gone.

Through Walker’s questions, though, I learned more about how Guy felt about his parents—grateful for a good upbringing and finances that comfortably set him up for life, but distressed to the point of bitterness that they didn’t love him. And he had no idea how obvious his feelings were to others, or that he might easily go through the rest of his life with his heart as permanently damaged as his right shoulder was now. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and try to make up for all of it.

Walker had a more practical suggestion. “You know, Guy, I’ve been a psychotherapist for more than a decade. I’m available if you ever want to talk more about this.”

Guy blinked in surprise, like counseling hadn’t occurred to him.

“The offer’s always open,” Walker said conversationally.

The guy was so serene. Had he spent time in a Zen monastery too? But what I asked was where he’d gotten the money for his art collection.

He gave me a “you got me” smile. “Trust fund. My parents are wealthy on both sides for generations. It’s allowed me to do whatever I want all my life. I wish everyone was so lucky.”

With that, he offered to show us the collection. We hadn’t seen much of it yet, since we hadn’t gotten out of the eat-in kitchen.

“I’ve got paintings throughout the place,” he said. “One good thing about being a single guy staying in a house this big is having a lot of wall space.

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