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Asher was everything to me, but I hadn’t told him that. I hadn’t told him how important he was. At first, I didn’t want to spook him. Later, some terrible mental fallacy convinced me that he knew. I should have been telling him what he was in my life all along. If I’d done that, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt so alone after Eileen had abandoned him.
You idiot, I snapped at myself. Do you really think anything you say could help? You’ve done enough damage already.
Words. They were all just words. Wind could carry them away like they had never been spoken. Eileen had made actions and words weren’t going to help here.
I marched home faster, not entirely sure of what to expect. It was only when I entered the house and noticed the absence of his things that it all made perfect sense. That was what I had been anticipating. That was the thing I had been dreading all day. The cold rock I had swallowed finally made sense.
Asher had left.
In the empty house, I crashed on the sofa in the living room and stared at the black TV screen. A faint reflection looked back at me. A miserable pile of self-pity sitting like a sack of potatoes. Unmoving, barely breathing beyond the necessity, and feeling more hollow than I had ever imagined was possible, I was empty.
Dad found me there several hours later. I had collapsed on my side and fallen asleep in the deathly silence. When the lights came on, they startled me.
“Power’s back,” Dad said.
I wished he’d kill the lights. I wished he would leave me alone. “Uh-huh.”
That silence that followed wasn’t particularly awkward. I was beyond awkward. Just this morning, Dad had been staring at my barely covered body in my stepbrother’s bed. A little bit of contemplative silence couldn’t hurt me anymore.
Dad put his keys on the small shelf near the entrance door and carried a bag of groceries into the kitchen. He then returned to the living room and poured himself a glass of something strong, then picked up another glass and filled it with two fingers of the same light brown liquid.
My eyes were grainy. Blinking hurt. When I straightened my back and observed Dad, he walked over to the armchair and set both glasses on the table.
“Asher?” he asked.
“Gone,” I said in a flat voice. Dad pushed the glass a little further along the table.
“That’s, uh…”
“If you say it’s for the better, I swear to God…” I lifted the glass and pressed it against my lips. The smell of alcohol was almost repelling, but not quite. It burned my tongue, throat, and insides as I swallowed a small sip.
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Dad replied in a gentle voice. After a moment, he added, “He’s a good kid.”
I didn’t look at him. “You must be bursting with pride.”
Dad swirled the drink in his glass. “There’s no need to be so self-deprecating, Jordan. That’s not how I raised you.”
I clenched my teeth and dared myself to take another sip. It was hard to swallow over the knot that was tied in my throat, but the burning was less unpleasant this time around. Still, it felt like exhaling fire when I sighed. “Did Eileen say anything else?” For all I knew, she might be pressing charges against me.
“She doesn’t talk to me unless she has to, Jordan.” Dad took a sip of his beverage and swallowed it loudly.
“Because you cheated.” I tried to make it sound like a question, but my voice was flat as if I were stating a plain fact.
Dad shook his head. “I didn’t cheat on her. Ever. This whole business of another woman is just Eileen shedding some of the blame for the divorce.” He stared at the side of my face until I turned my head and looked into his eyes. There was a half-smile on his face and genuine honesty in his eyes that I couldn’t call him a liar now, even if I thought he was one. I wasn’t sure. But Dad could read the uncertainty on my face. “I did not cheat,” he said firmly. “The other woman is just an employee and a friend. A lesbian friend, I should add, who has been married for two years and whose wife is carrying their child. But you try reasoning with Eileen when she’s fixed on your guilt.”
Checkmate. We both knew what it felt like to be on her wrong side now. She was certain that I had seduced Asher, that I had prepared him to be in love with me. “What now?” I asked. “What will you do?”
Dad set his glass on the coffee table and softly rubbed his hands together. “I think I’ll lick my wounds for a bit. Work. I’ll stay here, of course.” He pondered on it for a bit. “It’s not all that bad. I’ve done this before.”
I hadn’t. My previous relationships had not lasted long enough to qualify for that term. This wild adventure hadn’t lasted long enough either, except that I had been obsessed with Asher for years. And the time we had spent together was almost like we had tried to make up for the time lost. It felt like we had been together for far longer than the calendar showed. “How did you get here, Dad?” I asked, not expecting an answer.
Dad leaned back in the armchair, his gaze drifting over the room and rising to the ceiling. “Nobody can predict what the heart will want tomorrow, Jordan. When we met, we were different people. This last year, since Asher left the house, Eileen and I had to face the cold reality. Everything we had put aside for the sake of peace, for you boys, came to the surface. It hadn’t gone away. Instead, it was just there, buried, waiting to rise from its shallow grave. We started to disagree on the simplest things and the fights that followed…” He rubbed his eyes. “Vicious. Something as simple as whether we wanted to eat out or stay in carried all the pain in the world. Can asking to stay in really be a sign of fading affection? Can being tired really be a personal flaw?” He shook his head abruptly. “We weren’t meant to last, son. It’s nobody’s fault.” He shrugged. “It turned out we both wanted a way out.”
I mulled over that for a long time in total silence.
“What she said about you…” Dad hesitated before leaning in again. “It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And she’ll figure that out on her own, I promise.”
I snorted. “What Eileen thinks of me is not that high on my list of priorities, Dad.”
