The Good Father

Until the last horrible few months of their marriage they’d had great discussions about anything and everything that didn’t pertain to intimate, personal emotions.

And they were back where they’d started. He was a man who could be a potential domestic abuser. As his dad had been.

“My dad was a great guy once. I told you that.” The boat swayed, and he shifted. Unbuttoned the top of his shirt as he started to sweat in the cool night air.

“Yeah.” The man was a first-class dick, and Ella knew it. She also knew that discussion of him was off-limits. Even in college, he’d refused to talk to her about his old man. What she knew, she’d learned from Jeff, and he had it on good authority that Jeff had told her very little.

His beer was more than half gone, and he wasn’t tired.

But maybe he could talk himself to sleep. Maybe he owed Ella this—understanding. A way to set her free.

“He and my mom, they were high school sweethearts.” He’d never told her that, either, though he knew that Jeff had done so.

“Both of them products of abusive homes.”

He drank. “Time

out of time,” she’d called their weekend. He damned sure hoped she was right. That he’d be himself when he got home the next day.

Himself with one hell of a headache—not from three beers, but from the tension climbing up the back of his neck.

“That’s what brought them together.” He wasn’t as careful about his word choice as usual. “The dark secret they shared. The shame.”

Shame. Brett could feel it, even now, descending upon him. Like humidity from the air, it clung to him. Making him sticky. Heavy.

“They promised each other that they’d never have an angry word in their home. Because they both knew the cost, the pain, they trusted each other like neither of them would ever have trusted anyone else, to keep the violence away.”

He heard an intake of breath. And knew that he was giving Ella something she’d deserved long ago.

“It worked right up until I was ten years old.”

There were so many ways that it had worked right. Little League. Summers at the beach. Dinners at Uncle Bob’s. His father had taught him how to in-line skate. And let him ride behind him on the back of his motorcycle...

“What happened when you were ten?”

He knew she already knew the answer to that question.

But he didn’t want her to go up to the cabin. To leave him out there all alone.

He did, of course. But he didn’t.

“My little sister was diagnosed with leukemia. And because my dad was spending so much time with Mom and us, while they figured everything out, he lost his job.”

“What about the Family Medical Leave Act?”

He forgot. He was talking to a nurse.

“It had just been signed into law a couple years prior to that, and I don’t know what happened. I was only ten.

“The story’s a classic from there,” he said. “Dear old Dad started drinking, and anytime he found out Mom had another bill to pay or Livia needed another test, he’d hit something. Started out with the wall. Then Mom.”

And eventually him.

But never Livia. That was the only hope the old man had of ever meeting up with a saving grace. He’d always been good to Livia.

“I thought he just started getting physically violent when you were in high school.”

He’d forgotten that she just knew basic facts.