Oranges & Roses

Different, Part One

Unedited.

Chapter Forty

“You ok?”

All morning Lan was asking me that and every time I would give her the same answer.

“Fine.”

At the present moment, I was helping her finish up the laundry she hadn’t gotten to the day before. She was folding and I was emptying the washer into the dryer. Granted, I might’ve been handling her scrubs not as gently as one might expect but…

“You’ve been quiet.”

“Nothing much to say.”

“Ronnie’s been quiet too. Did you have a fight?”

“You could say that.” I balled up a pair of pink scrub bottoms and slammed them into the dryer. “He’s just so…”

“Irritating?”

“That doesn’t cover it really. It’s lacking.” The last person I should be talking to about him would be his sister but maybe she knew something I didn’t. “Sometimes I just…I get in my own way, I question everything. It’s a habit that I don’t think I can break and he doesn’t exactly help…”

“Hey…”

“But that’s what we do, right? We get in our own way. We’re supposed to assess the situation, see if it’s safe, if it’s high stress. If there’s anything about it that would tempt you to take up the habit again, you’re supposed to turn around and run for the hills…”

“Em…”

I turned and looked at her with desperate eyes. “But what happens if the situation you now find yourself in is all of that but you can’t run away? What if the situation is actually where you’ve placed yourself after getting out of another unstable situation but is better than the one before? What if you have no control over what happens to you next and the one person who holds all the answers, won’t give them to you?”

Lan was calm, composed, the only sign that my little tirade had any effect on her was the grip she had on her son’s shirt that she was previously trying to fold. She was watching me with keen eyes but I didn’t think she would say more than she needed in order to get me to figure this out on my own.

“You trust that they are doing it for the right reasons.”

“But what if you’re not sure you trust them? What if you don’t know them enough to trust them…? What if you trust them anyways and you don’t understand why?”

There was something to say about the Reyes family, they were good at hiding how they were really feeling. It was the only similarity I was able to pick out between the two and for a second it felt like it was Rey sitting there instead of Lan. But then she dropped her eyes first, something Rey never did, and sighed.

“It’s not them you don’t trust, it’s yourself. You know that. Taking risks is part of the process and from the way you’re talking, the biggest risk you have left to take is on yourself. It has nothing to do with them. It’s not going to be easy, Em. Nothing ever is. Nothing is ever going to be a hundred percent. Sometimes you just have to freefall for a little before you find your feet.”

“And what if I never find my feet?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted her to tell me everything would be fine and I would find some ground to stand on eventually but Lan wasn’t into bullshit. She wasn’t going to tell me what I wanted to hear. Honesty was the best policy and it was a rule she was bond to live by, especially with her kids. She wasn’t going to treat me any differently.