Felix
I sat there in the front seat of the rental car, staring at the missed call notification on my phone. It wasn’t often that my family tried to reach out to me, but when they did, I was always met with the sinking feeling that they were going to do everything they could to make me feel bad for sticking to my adventures instead of giving it all up and living the life they so clearly wanted for me.
I had gotten the call when I had been on my walk to drive the car back to my hotel, I hadn’t noticed because it was stuffed deep into my pocket while I listened to the morning birdsongs around me. But now, outside the hotel, I knew that I should call them back at some point. Maybe I could leave it till this evening, give myself some time to think about what I was going to say, or maybe…
Before I could ponder too much longer on that matter, the phone burst to life in front of me, catching me off-guard. It was my father again, and I stared down at it for a moment,wondering if I should put it off again. But, instead, I let out a sigh and picked it up, tapping the take call button and lifting the phone to my ear.
"Hi, Dad."
"Felix," he greeted me, and I could already tell that he was distracted. "Why didn’t you answer earlier?"
"I was busy…"
"Doing what?” he replied, with a slight chuckle in his voice. "You decided to get a job all of a sudden?”
I gritted my teeth, willing myself not to rise to his attempts to undercut me. I had to remember how alien my lifestyle was to him, how he couldn’t begin to make sense of it. To him, it was just a matter of time till I was going to see sense and settle down, and it didn’t seem to matter how many times I tried to dissuade him of that fact, he couldn’t get it through his head.
"Everything okay?" I asked, turning the conversation to the matter at hand.
"Your mother wanted me to give you a call, see where you were," he replied. I wished it had been Mom calling me. She was the only one who actually seemed willing to entertain my stories on the road, even if I knew she couldn’t wrap her head around my reasons for them. But she had always been keen on making sure that I had a good relationship with Dad, and if that meant nudging him in the direction of being the one to talk to me, so be it.
"I’m in this town called Whisper Falls," I explained. "It’s…"
"Whisper Falls?"
"Yeah."
"Never heard of it."
I closed my eyes slightly. My father, he saw everything through the lens of his work, and if he hadn’t done business somewhere, he barely even thought that it existed.
"It’s just a small place," I replied. "But it’s very beautiful. And the people are great."
He let out a non-committal grunt.
"When are you coming back to the New Orleans? Your mother’s asking."
"I was going to visit over the holidays this year," I replied.
"I don’t understand why you can’t make more of an effort to spend time with us," he huffed. "Your mother’s always complaining to me about it. All you’re doing is travelling, it’s not as though it’s anything important..."
As he talked, I drifted off, so used to the way he spoke to me that it hardly even registered. There was an irony to it, no doubt, that he couldn’t see that this was exactly the reason why I didn’t spend more time with my family. Because as soon as I stepped through that door, this was the shit that I got, berating me for not doing anything more important with my life, anything worthy of the seriousness that my brothers did. He would tell me off like I was an errant teenager sneaking out late, not a grown man exploring the world beyond the bounds of the rules and expectations he had placed on me.
"I’m coming up for the holidays, Dad," I told him firmly, not wavering. "Tell Mom to give me a call, okay? I’d like to talk to her."
He sniffed. I could hear chaos on the other end of the line, as he was no doubt striding through the busy office right now, people yelling to one another here and there, tapping away furiously on computers as they tried to keep up with whatever demands my father had placed on them. I doubted that he went any easier on them than he did on me, and I almost felt sorry for them.
"I will."
"I’ll speak to you later, okay?”
"I have to get to a meeting anyway," he agreed.
"Okay, I’ll…"
He hung up the phone before I could finish what I was saying, and I pulled it from my ear, staring down at it for a moment, his voice still ringing in my head. I didn’t know what I expected, truthfully. Every time I talked to him, it felt as though it went the same way, the same dismissive attitude he hit me with serving to underline the reasons that I had walked away from that life in the first place. I doubted that he could even see it, given how stuck he was in his own head, but that wasn’t my fault. And there was no way I was going to give in and go crawling back there, knowing what I was going to be met with.
I started the engine and pulled away from the hotel, not even sure where I was going to drive to, but knowing that I needed to get out on the road to clear my head. There was something about the scenery stretching out around me for as far as the eye could see that settled my head when it was in a mess like this.
