Re: Carriage House: Atticus & Billy
"Know I offend you sometimes. Consider it a teaching opportunity. You teach me what I said wrong, and I'll listen carefully." Atticus smiled when he made the offering. An easy-going smile, no worries, and he was hard to ruffle. Lately, Carver pushed him on that more than anything, on his perpetually chill demeanor, but Atticus didn't want to think too much about the boys and their troubles, not today. He might be messing up with Billy, but this interaction was still less lined with mines than anything with Carver and the boys was.
Atticus wasn't sensitive. Sensitive had been beaten out of him by bullies at school. Fat and awkward, always sick, Atticus was an easy target. No connection between him and any dead kids years later, ones that made his life especially hard, but the damage was done. Atticus let everything slide off. Like a duck with water that way, and happier for it. Didn't mean he was blind. He was observant, in his lazy way. Atticus knew Billy was sensitive. Atticus knew he said the wrong things. Just wasn't anything he could do about it, because Atticus' inactivity meant there wasn't much he could do about most things, at least in his own head.
"Doctor parents. Right. Easy going of you. When I taught, most of the teenagers wanted to do their own thing. They didn't listen to their parents much." Didn't listen to any authority figures much. Was how the whole thing with demon summoning started. Teenagers, in Atticus' experience, didn't listen. "Sound like good people, your parents." Atticus barely remembered his own parents, and that was deliberate.
Atticus plunked a lobster tail onto his plate, and he cracked it and plucked white meat out with his fingers. It was deliberate, but Atticus wasn't any aesthete. He didn't mind getting his fingers dirty. Billy was pointing out forks, and he was talking about getting meat out of claws, and Atticus laughed low and gravel. He grabbed a claw, and he cracked it as he had done to the tail. He dug out the fat meat with his fingers, but then he held the claw up. Exhibit A, and then he sucked the remaining meat out. Point proven. "Calling my hands fat?" he asked after, not bothered at all.
The toast, that required some thought. Ultimately, Atticus lifted his glass with dirty fingers that marred the foggy old crystal. "So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?"