“You should be a little nicer when it comes to Sarah, too, considering she’s the one who fronted me the $100 I didn’t have out. She gave it to me out of her last $300 so that I could pay the $200 I already gave you.”
“Well, if you’re both being evicted, she can’t be any more responsible than you are.”
“We both lost our jobs, Father.”
I only address him as father when I’m extremely irritated with him, which I certainly am at the moment. I can feel my face getting hot and red and sweat building up around my hairline. My fists are clenched behind my back, and if I don’t walk away soon, I’ll be forced to walk away before I say something I regret.
“And in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a literal global pandemic happening right now. Like half the world’s pre-pandemic employed population is out of a job. This isn’t about fiscal irresponsibility.”
“How is any of this my problem?” he barks. “How is it my problem that you can’t manage your finances or prepare for a disaster or do anything right? Huh? How is that my problem? I’m asking you a question!”
I can see the fury in his droopy, drunk eyes, and his words sting so much that something in my brain just snaps.
I shout back, “I never said that it was your problem! But it’s not my problem that mom left you because you’re alcoholic, misogynistic drunk who has never had a kind word to say over the entire course of my life, and yet you still seem to treat me as if I’m responsible for it.”
Smack!
Omigod.
He just… he just slapped me. Clean across the face, I swear to God.
The palm of my left hand touches my face so fast that if feels like it was there all along, as if I’d been the one to slap myself.
My mouth dangles open to say something — to say anything! — but I’m absolutely speechless.
“Another word from you and you’ll be on the streets tonight,” he says through gritted teeth. “We’ll see how well you hold up in a pandemic without me to fortress you off from it, you ungrateful little shit.”
He walks away, grabs the bottle of Jack, and then fumbles down the hall toward his bedroom.
The whole time I’m stoic, left as if I’ve just gazed into the eyes of Medusa, unable to move a muscle since he struck me,
Just before the door to his room slams shut, he yells, “I expect my money tomorrow, girl!”
When my petrification finally melts away, I look around the otherwise empty house and try to find a way out, as if I didn’t grow up and live in this house for the first eighteen years of my life.
But everything appears so foreign to me now. I don’t recognize anything around me, which maybe isn’t that unusual, considering that for the past two years I’d avoided this house like people are now avoiding the virus plaguing the world outside these walls.
When I see the front door at last, I dart out and just begin to run.
I run and I run and I run until my legs can’t take it anymore. And when I finally come to a stop, I realize that I’m right back in front of the diner that is now empty, where patrons once upon a time sat inside and enjoyed their breakfast and coffee at this time of day.
And right there on the sidewalk across the street, I lose my cool. Tears erupt from my eyes, and I start yowling inconsolably. It’s lucky there’s no one out there in the world right now.
The only thing saving me the embarrassment of looking like a mad woman is that everyone is shielded in their homes from the pandemic and too afraid to come out.
Homes…
I had a home just yesterday, when Sarah and I packed up the last of our boxes and moved them to our respective parents’ homes. And now, just 24 short hours later, I don’t even remember what having a home feels like.
My dad’s house has never been home to me. He’s never let me get comfortable enough there. If he wasn’t nit-picking me about my weight or what I was eating and reminding me how no man would ever love me or take me seriously, he was drinking himself to death and trying to take my mom and me right along with him.
If she hadn’t left him a few years ago, I don’t think she would have survived.
I’ve known the feeling over the last twenty years, or at least those in which I was having to dwell under the same roof as him.
So, I resolve that I must find a job immediately. I can’t sit here on the sidewalk blubbering like an infant breaking their first teeth until a fairy godmother comes to rub some of my dad’s Jack Daniels on my gums.