“I’ll answer all of them before you can ask them. It’s the beauty of the game. Your turn,” I said.
“Okay. Since we’re starting off heavy. Um—my mother committed suicide when I was seventeen. She suffered from severe depression.”
Now I felt my face dropping as the curtain over her eyes slowly began to lift.
“My mom died trying to get me to the hospital. My mom was pulling me out from underneath the tractor, but she had a heart attack from the shock of everything, I guess. Paul was the one that called 9-1-1. I Momma died in the hospital two days later.”
“Oh my God, Drake. I’m so sorry,” Delia said, genuine compassion in her eyes.
“Your turn,” I said.
“My father was an alcoholic,” she said.
So many fucking pieces dropped into place with those five words.
“He loved my mother the best way he could, but it wasn’t enough. He’d get sober then get drunk again. Get sober then get drunk again. One day he and my mother fought so hard and screamed so loud that he gathered his stuff and left. He um—”
I watched tears crest her eyes as she turned her gaze out the window.
“He left drunk. Just left me and Mom behind. I can remember how broken she was, sobbing on the kitchen floor as I rushed to the door. I wanted him to come back so badly. I screamed for him. Begging him to come back and at least sleep off the alcohol first.”
Her hands were trembling so badly that I took them into mine. I didn’t know what else to do. Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever pictured innocent little Delia going through shit like this. It was like I was seeing her for the first time.
And all of her reactions were finally making sense.
“He died, didn’t he?” I asked.
“No questions. It’s your turn,” she said.
“My wife was pregnant with our second child when she died. I didn't just lose one child that day, I lost two, along with the woman I loved.”
Delia covered her mouth with her hand, gasping, as she stared at me with such intense pain in her eyes. “I'm sorry, Drake. I had no idea.”
I wasn't sure I could handle talking even more about it, so instead, I took a deep breath and said, “Your turn.”
“Shortly after my Dad left, the police called. They said there’d been a crash and that my Dad was hurt. He’d run a red light in his drunken stupor and crashed into an oncoming car. He was dead before my mother could get out to him,” she said.
“Holy fuck,” I said, as I drew in a deep breath.
“After the investigation and after his truck was declared totaled, I bought it from the scrap yard. I learned how to fix trucks and cars because of that thing.”
“That old rust bucket truck is the one your father crashed?” I asked.
“It is. It’s the only thing I have left of him. Whenever I sit behind the wheel, I feel like he’s with me. And I need that—especially now.”
I squeezed her hands in reassurance as a tear trickled down her cheek.
“I was a mistake to my parents,” I said.
Delia slowly panned her gaze over to mine as her eyes locked onto me.
“My parents were just hooking up when they got pregnant with me. And my Mom was like you, according to my Dad. She was hesitant to even do this with him. She wanted an abortion, but he convinced her not to get one. They tried to make it work, but it wasn’t easy. But they did go on to fall in love with one another, to lead a great life. They had my sister and that brought on a whole other set of struggles, but they did it. They stuck by one another because they knew they could trust the other to be there.”
“You’re making that up,” she said.
“God as my witness, I’m not. Took my father six months, according to him, to convince my momma to do it with him, to raise me together instead of separately. He believed in a unified home and he believed Momma and he could do it. And they did. They built all of this together, but what brought them both to it was me. The mistake.”
“This child isn’t a mistake,” Delia said. “No child ever is.”