David walks toward me now, carrying a duffel bag. I am beginning to think he is going to call it quits. I have a sudden and sinking feeling that he isn’t going to listen to me; he isn’t going to forgive me. He is next to me now, asking me what the hell I was thinking. Asking me why I thought it was all right for me to do this to him. I tell him that I don’t know, and that sometimes life is complicated. I didn’t know all this would happen. I didn’t know it would be like this. I didn’t mean to hurt him.
When Shep and I first got together, David was dating Kelsey. I thought they were going to get married someday. Shep and I would sit at Peyton’s drinking beer and Scotch, and he would go on and on about how Kelsey was too good for David and how one of these days she’d figure it out and dump him like the loser he is. But I always thought they were sweet together. They were an unconventional pair, for sure, but sometimes there is balance in those kinds of relationships. They were together for nearly a year when Kelsey ran. That’s when it started for David and me. He came to me for help when he found out she was pregnant. David was sure that Kelsey’s parents would disown her, that they would make her life miserable, and that he would be to blame. He didn’t know what to do. Kelsey would not terminate the pregnancy, that he was sure of, because she was so Jesus-y. He told me that he begged her to run away with him, begged her to let him take care of her and the baby somewhere far away from this town. But she refused. She said she didn’t want to be with him anymore because this whole mess was his fault. She was going to do this on her own, and God would take care of her and the baby. David was devastated. He wept in my arms.
David made me promise not to tell anyone that Kelsey was pregnant. And three days later, she was gone. It was the day of Beth Lanko’s funeral. Kelsey never showed up to work, and within hours, everyone was frantically looking for her, the police included. David came to my house that night. He was so composed, so cold. I think he was in shock. He said he didn’t want to talk about it. I had to drag the words out of him one by one. He couldn’t believe she actually did it. She left him, left her family, left everything. He asked me what he should do. I told him that he had to go to the police, but that he needed to go to her parents first, to explain what had happened, to explain why she left. To apologize. He walked out my door that night and did exactly what I told him to do.
He must have lost a bit of himself that night, because after that, David was different. He withdrew from everything. I think he was mad. Mad at Kelsey, mad at the police for not finding her, mad at her parents for choosing their religion over their daughter. They were furious with her, just as David had suspected they would be. They refused to forgive her, or David, for the mess the two of them had gotten themselves into. Within two days of learning that Kelsey was pregnant, they told the police to stop looking for her. They said that wherever she was, God would take care of her. God would help her find her way. She would come back when, and if, she was ready. And they would be waiting for her—praying to find a way to forgive her.
Shep was furious at David. He said that David had ruined Kelsey. That Kelsey deserved better, and that he, too, would never forgive his son for knocking up such a nice young lady. David was a disgrace, Shep said, and he should be kissing his father’s feet for permission to continue to work for the company.
A few weeks later, David started regularly showing up at my house. I think he just needed someone to talk to. He needed someone to listen. We would talk for hours. About his mother, about my ex-husband, about life. I was connecting to David in a way I never had connected with Shep. Shep was fun, but David was deep. Then one night, he told me about when his mother was sick and about how his father refused to get her the help she needed. But she never asked for it either, he said. David didn’t think she wanted to be helped. It was hard, he said, especially because he was so young. He loved her, and he thinks she might have loved him back, in her own strange way. But he was never certain of it. His mother’s illness and Shep’s alcoholism clearly put David at the mercy of their diseases, rather than providing him with the stability every child craves. I can’t imagine how it would make a child feel to have to deal with such unpredictability. For things to always be so out of their control. It must have been hard for David. It would be hard for anyone.
To make matters worse, David told me that shortly after his mother died, in a drunken stupor Shep told David that he’d been an accident. That he was never supposed to “be.” That he was responsible for his mother’s death because their life would have been different had he not been born. She wouldn’t have gotten sick, Shep said, and she wouldn’t have died.