“I got home, and you weren’t there. I figured you’d be studying, not necking some asshole kid at the side of a coffee shop like a cheap tramp.”
Shame coats my body like glue. If I didn’t have to keep both hands on the steering wheel, I’d hide my face with them. I can’t believe he saw that. My dad. Oh. My. Goodness. This… this is so embarrassing.
I want to change direction and drive somewhere, anywhere else.
“I used the ‘find my friend’ thing you taught me to use, and I was going to surprise you with a hot chocolate. Turns out, it was me who got the surprise.”
My entire body cringes. This is painful. I feel like I’m twelve years old, and I can’t fight the tears as they course down my face. For the first time in I can’t remember how long, I felt alive, and now he’s taking that from me, turning it into something cheap, something wrong. I know wrong. My ex was wrong. This… this doesn’t feel at all like that.
Someone other than me touched my face, my gnarled, ugly, broken face, and breathed life into my gnarled, ugly, broken heart.
“Daddy, I—”
“I’m going to be having words with your aunt Maureen. She told me she’d spoken to you last week about getting out more, going and doingnormalthings. She didn’t mean this, Eloise.”
How the hell does he know what she meant? Ugh. That was unkind, and I stop the words from coming out of my mouth, but they coat my tongue with a bitter taste.
I talk to Aunt Maureen—Mom’s sister—once a month, and it’s always the same message. Don’t let the accident ruin your life. Go and be a normal kid. Your mom would want you to live, not exist.
I talk to Dad every night, even if it’s a sixty second check up on how the day went and to let him know I’m home safe and sound. Even though he spends a lot of time on the road, and we don’t see much of each other anymore, he always worries about me.
I can’t say I blame him. He almost lost both his wife and his daughter in a major car accident. That’s left a lasting impact on all of us. Knowing he’s out on the road every day twists me up inside, so hearing his voice before I lie down every night is usually a comfort to me, too.
But not tonight.
Tonight, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. I drive home listening to the lecture, knowing I’ll get it all over again when we get back to the house. My tears stop, but my mental running commentary doesn’t. I keep thinking of things I want to say back to him, but I never will.
Never. It’s not that I’m afraid he’ll hurt me or anything—it’s not worth the argument. Any time we disagree, he shouts loudest until I can’t fight anymore, and I give up.
I always back down. Every single time. And hours later, I think of all the things I should have said to him, but I never bring it back up. I never re-start the argument, because we’d go around and around in circles all over again, and I don’t have the heckin’ energy. Even if I’m right.
And sometimes I am. I have to be. I can’t always be wrong, even if he is my dad.
“Eloise.” His stern voice pulls me out of my internal monologue once more.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to snap at him. To tell him to leave me the heck alone. But I don’t. I bite my bottom lip and shelve it, like I always do.
The fight deflates out of me as I pull into the driveway. “Yeah, Dad?”
“We’ll talk about this inside.”
I’d love to say we won’t. I’d love to tell him to go screw himself. But at the end of the day, he’s really all I have left in this world. Mom’s death changed both of us. It made him harder, colder, angrier, and if I thought my parents were overprotective before Mom died, boy, did I learn how much more my dad was on his own.
Technically, I’m a grown adult. But I don’t think Dad will ever consider me that way. To him, I’m the little girl who needs Band-Aids for grazes on her knees, who wears My Little Pony shirts, and who can’t make a decision over anything.
To him, I’m the girl who needs her parents to do everything for her, including protecting her from herself.
Sometimes I wish I could find the words to tell him how much I resent it. But for as smart as I am, my years of instruction at school are of no use to me when he starts yelling. My words vanish, and I shut down. I want the argument to be over, so I stay quiet and let him rant his way through whatever he needs to say.
I make my way inside and head for my bedroom.
“We aren’t finished here, young lady.”
Except, I am. “I’m tired, Dad. Can we talk about this in the morning, please?”
Letting him know that he can yell at me some more the next day usually works, and I hold my breath as I reach out for my bedroom door handle. Please, please tell me he’s going to let me sleep.
After a longer pause than I’d like, telling me he’s pretty darn ticked off, a resigned sigh falls between us. “Fine. In the morning.”
