Free The Secret Life of Prince Charming by Deb Caletti Page A

way.
    “I’ve got to tell you, though, my philosophy on this. A person’s education, well, I think they should own it, you know? Feel a sense of responsibility toward it. You see?”
    I nodded. I wasn’t sure I did.
    “It’s fine if that gets handed to you, but who cares about it then? Why do you need to work hard in school if someone just gives you a blank check? I just got to tell you, I don’t believe in that. I won’t participate in teaching those sorts of values.”
    I didn’t understand where he was going with this, and then suddenly I did. “I don’t have to go to Yale. I can go somewhere less expensive.”
    “It’s not about the money ,” he said. “It’s not about not having the money. I’m talking about appreciating your education.”
    “But of course I’d appreciate my education.”
    “You’ll appreciate it more when you’re the one who has to pay for it,” he said. “We just need to get straight right now about what I’m willing to do and what I’m not willing to do.”
    His point was becoming clearer and clearer. I felt creeping, growing dread. In terms of college, I’d heard Your dad and I will work it out enough times to know that Mom was expecting his help. I pictured Mom writing checks, big checks, checks weighty enough to make her shoulders hunch. “What are you willing to do?” I asked.
    “I’m not willing to pay for your own higher education, and I’m not trying to be the bad guy here, it’s a matter of principles. It’s a matter of raising you to be the kind of person you should be.” He was still standing there with that fork. But then he turned back around, conversation over. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I hate to cry. But my chest seized up in some hot, heavy pain. I don’t know what I was feeling, only that it was too much.
    The words that came next—they were out before I even realized it. They shoved forward, rode a wave of what might have been anger. “Did Brie give you that statue?” I whispered.
    “What statue?” He plopped the batter into the pan. Scraped, scraped the last gooey bits in.
    “In the living room. The glass one. It wasn’t there before.”
    He didn’t look at me. He focused on that pan, opened the oven door. “Right. The glass one? She gave me that a long time ago. Long time. I never put it out before. It’s kind of gaudy.” Hisback was curved, bent over. His hand was in an oven mitt. But his back was a liar’s back—I could see the lie in that curve, I could see deception in the slope of his shoulders. I could feel it in the place between us—the lie filled the kitchen, all the air, squeezed at my own air in my lungs.
    “Gaudy, don’t you think? Little like Brie herself,” he said. “Let me tell you one thing about your good old Dad. He’s got a knack for finding crazy women.” I felt an internal slap of injustice at those words. My mother, sane, measured, practical. He finally turned, and right then I felt something else between us. That lie about the statue—he knew that I knew. He was inviting me to it. He was asking me to join him in it.
    After all these years of separation, there was nothing more that I wanted than that—to be one with him about something, to be let in and allowed to stay. I wanted that so much.
    I felt the open door, the chance to have permanent membership in the club that was my father. And maybe it really was “parental alienation” in action then, maybe something entirely complicated as loyalty. Or maybe it was something much simpler, my own caution, that kept me at the threshold.
    “You’re lying,” I said. The words felt brave. Maybe more brave than any words I’d spoken before.
    “I always tell the truth to the best of my ability,” he said.
    J OELLE G IOFRANCO :
    My feelings for Steven Devlin were a strange recipe—the wild, the tumbling, the dark and forbidden, folded in with my desire to nurture and make him muffins and have his babies and live in a cabin somewhere. The thought