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“Loved you,” I say. “He’s dead.”
It’s nasty. Such a nasty thing to say, but he was a bastard and she wants him more than me. It’s the worst thing she could say, the starkest evidence of my failure.
She wants to go back to Silt, and I would rather die than go with her.
I would rather die than send her.
Her face crumples. “I hate you!”
And then she’s facedown on the bed, crying again.
Caroline’s in the open doorway, saying my name. Her hand lands on my arm. I come back into my body, the aching tension, the bitter taste in my throat.
I hear myself. Everything I said.
I’m not a good parent. Not a good person.
I can’t become one—I don’t know how. Because Caroline’s wrong. It’s not about parenting books, patience, try
ing harder. It’s about me. I’m short-tempered and angry and violent because I was born this way, born to it. Fucking cursed from the start.
Both of us. Me and Franks.
When I try to touch my sister, she smacks my hand away. “Leave me alone.”
There’s nothing I can do.
“West,” Caroline says again.
“Can you sit with her?” I ask.
Because at least I can give Frankie that much. Someone who knows how to love her.
Someone who will say the right things when I can’t.
Because of the snowstorm and how everything happened with Christmas, Caroline decides not to stay over at her dad’s even for the few nights of break she’d originally planned. What she really wants, she says, is to drive down for dinner with her family and come back the same night.
She wants me and Frankie to come with her.
I have a feeling she’s scared to leave the two of us alone. She dragged us out the day after Christmas to shop sales and spend gift cards at the mall in Des Moines. Frankie hasn’t said anything more about moving home to Silt.
I’m trying not to think about it.
I’m not even angry. I just feel hollow, knowing I can’t give my sister what I want her to have. Not if she won’t let me.
Not if I don’t know how.
Caroline says I’m overreacting. She says my mom’s trouble, but we already knew that. She says I’m a good father, a good man, that everybody’s got flaws.
Caroline points out that I raised my voice, but I didn’t attack my sister physically, didn’t insult her verbally, didn’t bad-mouth my mother, didn’t hit anyone or throw anything, didn’t get drunk or high or shoot anybody.
This is supposed to help, I guess. Counting all the ways I didn’t fuck up.
It doesn’t help. It makes me grateful she’s willing to talk to me at all when I’m such a truculent pain in the ass, but it doesn’t alter my conviction that I don’t have what it takes to be a parent.
But Caroline gets what Caroline wants, so off we all go two days after Christmas to the Piasecki homestead.
Caroline’s from the kind of family with a dining room, and a dining room table, and a tablecloth that’s old, with a lace strip down the middle and candles and dishes that match.
