Men like feeling needed and masculine, Lenore.
Even as a child, that didn't seem like something I wanted to do - pretend not to know something so someone else could 'teach' me something I already knew.
Even still in grade school, I had been on the receiving end of boys thinking they knew better than me, that because I was just a girl, I didn't know how to play soccer and basketball and how to ride a skateboard.
I couldn't imagine wanting to purposely let them think that. I had always been more inclined to show them up, to wipe those snide looks off their faces when I scored a goal or rode the curb.
You're never going to get a boy to like you if you keep scraping up your knees.
I was nine when she told me that. Boys should have been the furthest thing from my mind.
And while I didn't know the term 'deflecting' at that age, I somehow understood that she was telling me that because it was clear that Letha's daddy was mad at her almost all the time, no matter how pretty she made herself, or how much she hung on his every word.
He barely even looked her way anymore actually.
His whole world was the little girl with the big eyes who had just learned to say 'Daddy' which never ceased to melt him.
It was then that I first began to suspect my mother resented my sister. She was shorter with her, snapping at her for crying, for not being smart enough to know how to use her fork or walk like I had been doing at her age.
When her husband came home and made a bee-line for the spot on the floor where Letha was sitting up on her pink and white baby blanket with a bunch of squishy plastic animal bath toys in neon colors, half of them with teeth marks from her incoming front teeth, all of them dripping in spit, my gaze would often go to my mother.
Without fail, you could see her looking at her baby daughter with a look even my young eyes couldn't mistake. Jealousy.
And the more Jake celebrated each and every one of Letha's many milestones over the next four years, the more my mother turned cold to her.
And at twelve, well, I finally had my mother's card. And I had a mouth confident enough to call her on her nastiness, and start to protect Letha from it. I had probably never played with a Barbie or tea set in my life, but there I was during my first year of middle school, spending every afternoon listening to why this Barbie was mad at that Barbie while pretending to sip tea out of an ornate, mini, hand-painted, real China tea set Jake had bought her for her birthday. All in an attempt to keep her out of my mother's sight.
But I had school.
And Letha didn't.
And I couldn't count the amount of afternoons I would come home to find Letha in bed clutching a stuffed pig, telling me that Mommy was mad at her again.
It wasn't, though, until later that year that I walked into the house one night after taking a rare bit of time to myself to go shoot hoops with the neighborhood kids, to find Jake screaming at my mother in the kitchen. I'd heard men argue with my mother before. In fact, it had happened so much in my life that it was all background noise to me. But this wasn't just an argument. And I had never heard a man yell so loudly that it sounded like he was losing his voice.
My mother, as was her go-to during any argument, was sobbing.
I could only catch bits and pieces, but it seemed like my mother had finally crossed the line and struck Letha. There was, apparently, a mark and everything.
I didn't stay to listen to more, I moved through the house to find Letha on her bed, her piggy in her lap, her hands pressed to her ears.
And there was a mark.
Right there across her cheek.
I sat with her, stroking her hair, telling her that Daddy was just mad at Mommy for hitting her because hitting wasn't nice.
Until I heard the words that would change everything.
"I want you out!" Jake screamed. "Pack your shit and get the fuck out of our lives."
Ours.
It didn't take a genius to know he meant his and Letha's.
Of course he didn't want me, not even if I had been every bit a second mother to Letha her entire life.
He didn't want me.
They never did.
None of them.
And at twelve years old, I had long-since gotten over the shock of being tossed aside like an old shoe that didn't fit anymore.
That didn't mean, however, that it didn't sting. It always stung. It never mattered how many nights I sat across a table from one of the men, how many movies we had all watched like a family, how many times they bought me birthday presents, in the end, to them, it all meant nothing.