Branded (Ignite #2)

Everywhere I look today I see smiling, happy families wandering through the park. I volunteer to spearhead the blood drive booth for every function the hospital sponsors and I tell myself that it’s all for the cause, but I do it for entirely selfish reasons. I like to torture myself by staring at all the families meandering about and wonder why I wasn’t blessed enough to have something like that. Why couldn’t I have a mother who ran her fingers through my hair and kissed the top of my head as I looked at a craft table? Why didn’t my father ever tickle me until I screamed with joy and then lift me up onto his shoulders so I could get a better view of the activities?

Why the hell wasn’t I good enough for a life like that?

Today is the annual town festival to benefit the children’s wing of the hospital. During the day, there is a fair set up in the park with tons of booths, including blood and platelet donation mobiles, and tonight is the fireman versus policeman Fight Night. It’s a great event that always brings in crowds of people and it’s the one part of my job I actually look forward to doing. Today, however, I feel like there is a black cloud of doom hovering over me. My calls to the warden at the prison were never returned, but after a few days, it didn’t even matter. A certified letter came to my house yesterday informing me that inmate number 45089 qualified for parole and if I have any questions, I should contact his parole officer.

The anticipation of waiting for my father to show up in my life has put me on edge. The cloak and dagger bullshit with the notes is bad enough. He needs to just show his face already so I can tell him to go to hell where he belongs. I’m not the same little girl he pushed around and threatened. I knew he wouldn’t stay behind bars forever. The random reports I received from the prison told me he was a model prisoner, never getting into fights and even offering to mentor new men. He put on a great show, I’ll give him that. He might have been able to fool the guards and the parole board into thinking he’s changed, but he’ll never fool me.

At least working the blood drive keeps me from putting any more marks on my body for the time being. The searing pain in my heart while I stand here wishing for something I never had hurts more than any burn on my skin.

“We’re good here if you want to take a break,” Suzy informs me as she finishes with a donor, placing a Band-Aid on their arm and pointing them outside towards the juice and cookie table.

“I think I’m going to head over to the platelet donation truck. It’s been about a year since I last donated,” I tell her, grabbing my cell phone from one of the upper cabinets in the donation truck. “I should only be about an hour. If you need me, just give me a call.”

The donation trucks are parked right next to each other by the curb with a couple tables filled with pamphlets and other donation information separating them. A few yards away from the trucks, I see a man squatting down, speaking to a little girl. He leans in to kiss her cheek and I let the pain of seeing the kind of affection I’ve never experienced wrap around me and fill me with determination: to keep moving, one foot in front of the other, to keep the walls up around my heart so no one has the power to hurt me ever again and to never, ever need someone to take care of me. I won’t let myself think of the kiss DJ and I shared at the hospital and how badly I wanted to just confide in him and let him take care of my problems. Too bad he’s the root of half of them.

As I continue to stare as I walk, the man looks up and our eyes meet. I stop where I’m at and don’t realize I’m smiling until he his face lights up and he quickly stands.

“Phina! I wondered if I’d see you here.”

Jackson Castillo was a boy I dated briefly in college who turned out to be quite a nice-looking man. He only had two marks against him – he was entirely too nice and he was Finnley’s loser husband’s cousin. At the time we dated, the whole cousin thing wasn’t really a bad thing. Finnley set us up and I actually let her fantasize for a few months about us marrying cousins, living next to each other and living happily ever after. In the end, I couldn’t handle all that nice. No matter what I did or said to him, he kept coming back for more. It was like kicking a fucking puppy. He always apologized even if I was wrong and he was just too…sweet. I couldn’t handle all that good in my life. It made me feel twice as horrible about the kind of person I was, and every time he gave me a compliment, I wanted to scream and claw at my face to make him see just how truly ugly I was.

“Jackson, it’s been a long time. I didn’t realize you were…that you had a…” I pause, nodding in the direction of the little girl.

He looks at her and then back at me before chuckling. “Oh, no. She’s not mine. Phina, this is my niece, Andreonna.”

I smile down at the girl with long blonde hair and big blue eyes, who looks to be around five years old. She gives me a shy wave before hiding behind Jackson’s legs.

“She’s beautiful,” I tell him.

“And she knows it, when she’s not being so bashful,” he jokes. “I’m not going to lie, I kind of had my fingers crossed that you’d be here today. I might have had ulterior motives when I asked my brother if I could bring Andy to the park.”

I look at him in confusion. “How did you know I might be here?”

He winces, shrugging his shoulders and I immediately see where Andreonna gets her bashfulness.

“Finn used to talk about you all the time when our families got together. She always let me know what you were up to, and I remember her telling me that you volunteer at this thing every year.”