For Love Or Money. Tara Taylor Quinn
even know it.
“KELS?” BURKE TAPPED on his daughter’s slightly ajar door just before ten that night. He’d let her have the evening her way. They’d stopped for the rice and salad bowl she’d wanted for dinner. He’d done some work on his laptop while sitting with her through the shows she’d chosen to watch on TV—if you could call her dead stare “watching.”
He’d helped with the laundry—even though it was her night to do a load and she’d said she was fine doing it alone...
“I’m decent,” she called through the door after a full thirty seconds had passed.
They’d had that talk last summer, too—with the help of her pediatric psychiatrist, Dr. Zimmers. He wasn’t to walk in unannounced now that she was wearing a bra and having her period. Didn’t matter that Burke was a doctor. He was a bone doctor. Kelsey’s emphasis on “bone.” And she was his daughter. And she had things to be modest about now.
“Can I come in?” he called.
“I guess.”
Better than whatever. He missed the little girl who used to beg to sit on his lap. Or ride on his shoulders. Ride high, Daddy! He could hear that tiny little voice like it was yesterday.
But it wasn’t. Not even the day before that. More like a lifetime ago.
She was on her bed, propped up with pillows, her tablet on her lap. Wearing the flannel, black-with-pink-heart pajama pants he’d bought her just before school started. With an old T-shirt left over from when her mother was a seventh-grade English teacher and insisted the three of them show team spirit, wear team colors and go to all of the athletic activities they could make.
Palm Desert’s vibrant red clashed with the pink heart. The vibrant gold, not so much.
Her long brown hair, usually in a ponytail, hung around her face. At least she was leaving it long. She’d tried to insist on coloring it purple that summer. He’d held firm against that one.
Leaning over to glance at what she was doing on her tablet, Burke took a seat on the side of the double bed. Keeping a respectable distance.
She turned her tablet around. “It’s just Friday’s Fashion Boutique, Dad.” She named an interactive fashion app that he’d seen her use many times before. Kind of like a modern-day Barbie doll, his mother had said when his folks had come from Florida the previous Christmas.
“A good parent checks, Kels,” he reminded her. Another thing he was not going to budge on. All parental controls were in place when it came to her use of electronics and social media.
She had a phone. She could call and had limited text capability—enough to reach him when necessary. Period. And he could see the numbers she called and texted every day if he chose to check.
He didn’t. But she knew he could.
“I don’t care if you look.” She shrugged, turning her tablet back around. She didn’t fight him. Never had when it came to her limited use of social media. And from the horror stories he’d heard from his peers, nurses, even his patients, he had real reason to be thankful for that.
“Dr. Zimmers called me today,” he said, getting right to the point.
She continued to move her finger along the ten-inch glass screen. Tapping and dragging.
“She wants to put you on medication.” He named a brand. Didn’t figure it would mean anything to her.
“I’m not taking it. You can force it down my throat and then I’ll stick my finger right behind it and throw it back up.”
Thirteen-year-old drama queen had joined them.
“We need to talk about that.”
Kelsey’s gaze was resolute when she put her tablet facedown on the mattress and looked at him. In that instant, he could have been looking at himself in the mirror when he was getting ready to put his foot down with her.
“We’ve talked about it, Dad. I’m not going to start taking some upper pill because I’m sad that my mom died. Or because I get sad sometimes when I think about it.”
“You’re sleeping way too much.”
“So get me up earlier. You’re the parent. Help me out.”
He could do that. “You’re a grump in the morning.”
“You can take it.”
She had a point.
“You spend too much time alone.”
“I’m dancing again. Be happy with that for now.”
“It’s not my happiness I’m worried about,” he said. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve heard you laugh out loud, Kels? Or since I’ve heard a note of excitement in your voice?”
He could talk to her about an imbalance of neurotransmitters that could lead to serious depression if not counterbalanced.
“Then give me something to get excited about.” Her quiet words, spoken to her tablet, stopped his thought process cold.
Rather than arguing with him, or giving him the rote “whatever,” she’d actually given him a positive opening. In two years’ time, it was a first.
Expecting a request for a smartphone, a trip to Disneyland or a week off school, he said, “I’m not talking about a momentary fix, Kelsey. You know that.” Though he was tempted to give her any of those things, all of them, to reward the open, non-defensive approach. “Maybe you need to try the medication...”
If Lil, Kelsey’s mom, had been able to take something for her paranoia, would she still be alive? Not that the paranoia had been the actual cause of death. No, the onset of labor at the beginning of the third trimester had done that.
“Dad, you promised me...”
A promise he might have made a mistake in making. Lil had, by example, made her daughter petrified of “drugging herself up.” She’d been almost fanatical about medication—to the point of toughing it out through headaches so she didn’t have to take an over-the-counter painkiller. She’d had Kelsey on the same pain management regime.
It had taken Burke getting really angry, raising-his-voice angry, before Kelsey had taken the antibiotics she’d needed for strep throat the previous year.
The girl seemed to think putting drugs in her body was disloyal to her mother. But there was so much she didn’t know. Some things Burke hoped to God she never knew.
Still, antidepressant medication was not going to be as easy a win.
Maybe because he didn’t want to medicate her, long term, either. Not unless she truly needed the help.
“It’s been two years since Mom died.”
“So give me something to get excited about.”
There it was again. That opening.
In all of the advice he’d received over the past two years, most of it well-meaning, and some of it professionally sought, no one had told him that raising a thirteen-year-old was going to make him dizzy. He’d never have believed, even a year before, that his sweet, rational, logical-beyond-her-years little girl was going to morph into a confusing mass of humanity that he could no more predict than the weather.
“What, Kels? What can I give you that you’d be excited about?” Knowing as he asked the question that he’d walk through fire to get it for her. As long as he didn’t think it would do more long-term harm than good.
She grabbed her tablet. Swiped and tapped so fast he didn’t know how she could possibly even read what she was choosing. She stopped. Seemed to be skimming the page. And turned the tablet around to him.