Free Riding Curves by Christa Wick Page A

Daddy might want to discuss his conversation
with Pamela, and my mother might ask me whatever became of the
weekend at the lake house. So I mostly stuck to email and kept any
calls short.
    Three weeks after the surgery, just as
I had foolishly started thinking I might get over Aiden and
relented to a third date with Harold, my mom called with bad news.
Money had been embezzled from the shop.
    A lot of money. More money than we
could afford to lose.
    "Who did this, mom?" I asked, trying
to process the information. All the operating capital was gone and
a large portion of my father's retirement account.
    "That bimbo your fa--" She interrupted
herself with a slight cough and I guessed that my dad was in the
room with her. "But don't worry about tuition or anything,
sweetie."
    "I can take a student loan until you
get the money back." A dreadful thought popped into my head. "You
will be able to get it back, right?"
    "We hope, but Aiden doesn't want you
taking out a loan." A quiver ran through my mother's voice and I
knew she wanted to cry. From the sound of her voice, she had
already cried over this mess for hours. "He's covering the missing
capital, too. It will be okay, sweetie."
    I choked on the knowledge that the man
I had called a manipulative asshole and accused of fucking Pamela
Marks intended to pay my last semester of school. "I'll take a
loan, mom. Aiden can't pay--"
    "It's already paid, Cecelia. He
insisted it be done before we broke the news to you."
    I sighed, not the least surprised.
"I'll pay him back, but tell me how this happened."
    "She kept making what looked like
processing errors. Aiden corrected her a dozen times over, even
wrote her up the next to last time, about ten days before your
father's surgery."
    I stopped listening for a few seconds.
Had Marks been trying to create discord between my dad and Aiden as
part of her plan?
    "…her last processing error was a
whopper and then she skipped town," my mother continued. "She
wasn't even married, can you believe that! Made up a husband and
two children and a bunch of sh -- lies about him being out of work
and the youngest child having asthma."
    My mom continued venting until my
father took the phone away and asked her for an ice pack for his
knee.
    "Hey, sunbeam."
    I dug my nails into my palm, knowing
what he was about to ask and wanting to cry because I knew I would
agree to the request.
    "I feel just awful believing…" He
trailed off.
    "I know daddy. I feel awful,
too."
    "He doesn't have to know…" He groaned,
the sound wet and miserable.
    "No, he doesn't," I agreed, the memory
of those same words passing my lips during my last visit to the
lake house when Aiden worried our relationship would hurt my dad.
Certain I was seconds away from bursting into tears, I made a hasty
good-bye and hung up.
    Aiden didn't have to know -- but I
did.
    ********************
    My heart didn't heal. Not by
Thanksgiving, when I made up a fake, critical project that kept me
from coming home. Not by Christmas when I said I was spending it
with Harold's family, even though I had backed out of that third
date and never spoke to him again. Certainly not by late January
when my mother slipped in news of Aiden's current girlfriend in our
weekly conversation, or in February when he had a different new
girlfriend.
    I cried alone in my dorm room all the
weekends I was supposed to go home. Somehow, I managed not to cry
through the interview that landed me my first job two states
away.
    I cried at graduation, but almost
everyone with ovaries was crying and even a few of the male
graduates and fathers. And I cried as my parents drove away from
campus believing that I really did have to show up a week early at
my new job and that I really would come home for a couple of days
before the summer was up.
    Returning to my dorm room, vision
blurred and the salt of my tears coating my tongue, I almost sat
down on a small package someone had left on my bed. I pushed it up
by my pillow and grabbed the