Jack came up from the spare room and I changed the subject really fast but he looked at me suspiciously. I wondered if he had heard that I was talking about him, and what I had said. Now that I thought about it saying that I knew better then to talk about him was a rather harsh thing to say, though honest. If he was offended though he didn’t act like it.
“I noticed coming up that your gutter was all plugged up with leaves. You have to work tomorrow right? I can take care of the gutter for you if you show me where the ladder is,” Jack said over dinner.
“I don’t expect you to work around the house to pay for your keep or anything,” I protested.
“I know you don’t, but I don’t mind. You had a point about me not being able to go job searching dressed like this and I’d rather not laze around the house all day. If I’m here I might as well be of help, I hate to be a free loader.”
When he put it like that I couldn’t say no, and the gutters really did need to be cleaned, so I showed him where the ladder was in the garage before I left for work the next morning. The gutters were clean when I got back from work that night, plus the hinges on the door that squeaked had been oiled, the bushes had been trimmed and the lawn had been mowed, I didn’t know what to say, except thanks. I made us dinner, Jack admitted to having no idea how to cook except microwave dinners.
“You’ve done so much in only one day. I just don’t have time to do stuff around the house anymore,” I admitted.
“I like to have something to do, and I used to do stuff like this during the summer back when I was a teenager. Earned a decent amount of money at it, people will pay you good money to do stuff if they don’t like the job themselves.”
“Are you going to work at something like that now?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I’m willing to take about anything that I’m offered. There are a lot of places that won’t hire you if you have a prison record,” Jack said casually. There he went, saying things bluntly that I would have been ashamed with myself for commenting on.
After dinner I insisted that we go shopping for things that he would need if he was going to start life again. I offered to take him to a nice clothing store where I bought my clothing but he refused and insisted that we go to a cheap super store instead.
“If I’m going to pay you back for this stuff someday I’d like it to be in my price range. Besides, nowhere that will hire me will need a designer suite.” We got him clothing, toiletries, the basics. More basic then I had ever lived with, and yet he still seemed uncomfortable when the total was rung up, almost like he expected me to be angry with him for spending so much money.
“Didn’t your parents buy stuff for you when you were younger?” I asked, trying to reassure him that it was alright. “We’re family too.”
“My parents don’t have a lot of money,” Jack said, a comment that had about the effect of a bomb on me. “They didn’t buy me a lot.” Now one of the things that my family never talks about is money, and especially not the lack thereof. Jack had just broken one of the rules of family conversation and yet he didn’t seem to care about it.
“They live in a nice house,” I said weakly.
“Yeah, well they would wouldn’t they?” was all Jack said, and I guessed that I had touched on a sensitive subject for the first time with Jack.
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