Read Online Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend by Louise Rozett - Free Book Online Page B

understand the
problem. I did something very public, and I did it without Mom’s
permission, using private family photos of Dad. But I don’t understand why having a website in Dad’s honor makes her so crazy.
I thought she’d be happy when she saw all the photos I scanned
and uploaded, and all the quotes I posted, and the Word of the
Day section featuring his favorite words of all time.
But she wasn’t happy. She was pissed. And when she realized that I didn’t really care that she was pissed, and that if she
wanted the website taken down she was going to have to figure
out how to do it herself—all hell broke loose.
I think what freaks my mom out the most about the site is that
it’s an open invitation for people to express their opinions. I run
the site, and I can make changes to it, but I have no say in how
people respond. And it turns out that there are all sorts of people who knew Dad well, and they have things to say about him.
Mom doesn’t like that, because she can’t control what they write.
Which, of course, is exactly why I do like it.
“Rose, are you still with us?” Caron asks. She usually gives
me about three seconds to think before she makes a comment
implying that I’m not paying attention.
“I guess I don’t really get it, no,” I lie.
“The problem, Rose,” my mother says, her overt patience communicating just how impatient she is with this conversation, “is
that you went behind my back after I specifically asked you not
to, and you got Peter involved by using his credit card.”
“Can you tell Rose how that made you feel?”
“Betrayed. Betrayed at a very vulnerable moment.”
I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but I know that would probably
also be betraying my mother at a very vulnerable moment. It’s
not that I don’t care that she feels betrayed, it’s just that I think
her reasons for feeling that way are ridiculous.
Maybe that’s the same thing as not caring. I’m not sure.
“It also scares me,” she continues. “There are a lot of people
out there who prey on those who are grieving. And Rose is now
having interactions with people she’s never even heard of before,
who claim to know her father. It’s dangerous in many ways, including emotionally.”
“Can you explain to Rose what you mean by that?” Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. That’s Shakespeare for here we go again.
“Rose launched the website on the anniversary of her dad’s
death in June. Within a few hours, there were nearly fifty comments on the site about him. Some were nice, some were odd,
some were from people who obviously didn’t know Alfonso at
all and just wanted to make themselves feel important and involved. It would have been extremely confusing and painful for
anyone, but it was especially so for a teenage girl missing her
father. Rose didn’t leave her room for three days.”
That’s not entirely true. I left to use the bathroom and to eat
occasionally.
“I was just reading the comments and writing back to people,”
I say. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“That’s part of what you were doing, Rose. You were also having an emotional breakdown as a result of being assaulted by all
the information that didn’t reflect back to you the person you
thought you knew—”
“Kathleen,” says Caron in her special voice. This is some kind
of code they’ve established, because every time Caron says her
name like that, my mother looks guilty and then stops talking.
So what if I’m in touch with people we don’t know who knew
Dad? So what if some guy he knew for, like, two days in Iraq
posted about how they’d had a beer together and how he could
tell that Dad was the “genuwine article”? Why is that less valid
than my story about him showing me his twenty-volume Oxford
English Dictionary for the first time?
I don’t really know how Kathleen and I got here. I feel like
things were fine, and then suddenly they weren’t. We had this