2.25/5
my favourite scene from the whole book :
(daughter talks to her dad)

“i just don’t understand why you did any of it, though. breaking rules, lying, vandalizing the new house … it’s like you were somebody else. why did you do those things?”

the first lines from the sonnet directly after the one i sent luke popped into my head. “’tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,” i quoted, “when not to be receives reproach of being.”

dad nodded slowly in the dim room. he said softly, “and they that level at my abuses reckon up their own.” here he was, still that high school english teacher my mother brought home to her parents. the words seemed to mean something more to him. “how true,” he mumbled to himself. “how true.”

he was silent again. i was afraid to speak.

“everything’s my fault, blythe. not yours,” he said. “i’ve been so focused on getting that job that i didn’t see how it was negatively affecting you. or if i did see it, i excused it away. i never should have pulled you out of meriton. you were on a good track there. you were so rock solid that i convinced myself you’d transition to ash grove without a hiccup.” he shook his head. he held one hand above the other and pressed them together, lacing his spread fingers. “i’ve been trying to force your future success to mesh into the fabric of mine.” he dropped his hands. “so selfish. It should be the other way around.”

“but dad, you’re doing it for the family. you want a better life for us. that’s what you said.”

“that’s what i told myself too. very convincingly. i guess it’s true, but not in the way you think. it doesn’t have to do with social status or being able to buy expensive clothes and cars, or even paying for bryn mawr. it has to do with how you and zach will live your lives. i don’t want you and your brother to have to make concessions when you get older. i don’t want you to have to settle for less in life and then feel like you have to defend or explain or excuse the choices you’ve made. or had to make.”

he shook his head and looked at the shadowed floor between his feet. “i’ve watched your mom do that for twenty years. i hear her defending me to your grandparents—and i know she’s doing it because she loves me—but, god, it kills me. it kills me. because she shouldn’t have to do it at all. that’s not what i want for her. i want her to be proud of her life and her choice in a husband. i want to be good enough so that there’s no need for explanation or defense. i want to give her back the lifestyle she sacrificed when she married me. the one she’s lived without, all these years. i owe it to her. and she deserves it.”

“dad, you don’t owe mom anything. there’s no way she’d ever say you owe her.”

“she denies it, but it’s there. the debt is still there.”

the way he said that reminded me of the last two lines of the sonnet i had sent luke. most textbooks translate them as roughly, “i hurt you, but you hurt me first, so now we’re even.”

i had a different interpretation, especially of the very last two words. they’re not “ransom mine,” they’re “ransom me.” deliver me from the punishment for my sin.

to me, that last couplet meant, “we each screwed up and hurt the other. let’s say that your screwup was a debt you owed me. well, my screwup now releases you of that debt. consider the slate clean. there is nothing for me to forgive anymore. but i still need your forgiveness because that’s the only way i can stop punishing myself.”

as far as mom and dad were concerned, her shortcomings might cancel out his shortcomings, but until dad believed that mom truly forgave him for those shortcomings and accepted him completely—flaws and all—he’d never be able to stop punishing himself for making her sacrifice so much in order to be with him.

it was insane. she’d done that the day she fell in love with him.

“did you ever think that maybe she saw it as a fair trade?” i said. “or even a better deal for her? she got to swap a dull, predictable, passionless life like her parents’ for a fun, spontaneous, love-filled life with you. money matters most to people who don’t have it, dad. she wasn’t interested in money. you brought things to the table that nobody else could give her. nobody. including gran and granddad. those are the things she deserves—the things only you can provide for her. she owes you a debt too, dad.”

dad went, “psssh,” and waved the idea away. a few seconds later, he sniffed and rubbed the back of his shirtsleeve across his nose. he swiped his thumb under one eye. then the other.