“You’re a sack of shit.” The words coming out of my mouth stunned me. Not because they didn’t make guest appearances every now and then (profanity and I were close friends) but because they’d never been directed at a family member before. Family was something sacred. Until now.
“I was,” he agreed. “But finally, nine years into the affair, I managed to escape her. I quit my job. I changed the locks on our house. I told her if she got anywhere near your mother or tried to tell her, I’d make her life miserable.”
“Nice.”
He threw the glass into the trash can under the sink, poking at the rest of it with his boot.
“If you knew all this time, why didn’t you tell your mother?”
“What makes you think I didn’t?”
“She’d have killed me.” Dad popped his upper body into the pantry and returned with a mop to clean up the beer, his eyes clinging to my face the entire time. “Then left me. Not in that order.”
I let out a huff. “As if.”
“What do you mean?” He started mopping.
“Mom never would have left you. That’s why I didn’t tell her,” I bit out, my voice carried by emotions like they were the wind. Gaining altitude, becoming a storm.
The reason I didn’t tell her all these years wasn’t altruistic. It’s not because I wanted to protect her.
I was worried she’d stay, and I wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye.
That I would be so deeply disappointed in her, so upset with her decision, it would affect our relationship.
By not trusting her decision, I robbed her of the ability to make one.
“Yes, she would.” Dad stopped mopping, pressing his forehead to the tip of the mop stick. He closed his eyes. “She would have walked away. She was tempted to do it regardless of my infidelity.”
His head sloped forward, his shoulders sagging, and then … then he started crying.
Lowering himself on the floor in front of me.
His knees sank into the golden river of beer.
My dad never cried.
Not when my aunt died, or when my grandparents passed away, or even when he watched Persephone walk down the aisle, ushered by the brother of the groom, because Dad had had leg surgery and couldn’t walk.
He wasn’t a crier. We weren’t criers. Yet here he was weeping.
“I’m sorry, Belly-Belle. I’m so sorry. I’ve never been sorrier for a thing in my life. I cannot even imagine what it felt like for you to find out that way.”
“It was terrible.”
But, oddly, maybe not as terrible as seeing him like this.
I mean, a part of me still hated him for the distorted picture of partnership he’d ingrained in me, but he was also the person who took care of us.
Who bought me everything I wanted—within his ability—and helped pay off my student debt.
He was one of my investors when I opened Madame Mayhem, and he once punched a man in the face for propositioning me while we were all vacationing on the Cape.
He never locked me in dumbwaiters or was abusive or neglectful.
He fucked up, but he never intended to fuck me up.
“If it makes you feel any better, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even function for a very long time after Sophia and I ended things. And, after a couple of years, I told your mother.”
“Wait, Mom knows?” I grabbed the hem of his plaid shirt and hoisted him up so we were at eye level. His eyes were puffy with tears, bloodshot. “But you said she’d have left you if I told her.”
“She did leave me.”
“She never told me.”
“Do you tell her everything?” He caught my gaze meaningfully, arching an eyebrow.
Fair point.
He rubbed his knuckles against his cheek. “She kicked me out of the house shortly after you graduated college. By then, you and Persy were out of the house. I think she waited until you both left because she didn’t want to traumatize you. I rented an apartment two blocks down for eight months, trying to win her back.”
“Go Mom,” I mumbled. “I hope she got some.”
“She had a two-month affair with a yoga instructor at the local YMCA. After we got back together, I got so mad just driving past the YMCA, I vowed to move us away from that entire zip code to escape that memory.”
“This is why you moved to the ’burbs?”
He nodded.
“Why’d she take you back?” I realized I was still holding his shirt, but that did not deter me from clutching harder.
“Something very inconvenient happened to her.”
“What?”
“She remembered she was in love with me, and by being away from me, she was punishing not only me but herself too.”
I let go of his shirt, staggering back.
My yearning for Devon welled inside me. Wasn’t that what I was doing? Punishing both of us because I couldn’t handle the prospect of being in love? Of putting my trust in someone else?