Page 72 of Keeping Score

Why did I have to ask? Why did I have to be afraid of showing up uninvited? It wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t fair that some girls had fathers who changed their oil and taught them how to drive and intimidated their boyfriends into treating their daughters nicely and I had a father who was peering at me through a crack in his door asking why I dared show up on his doorstep.

“Dad, please,” I begged, hating myself for it.

I looked a wreck. My hair was plastered down against my head from the downpour and I was sure my makeup was probably running down my face in ugly streaks.

He sighed, opening the door a few inches to let me inside. I breathed in relief, walking into his condo before he had the chance to change his mind.

It was spacious. Open. Filled with the types of flashy things I figured he might have. State-of-the-art television. Pristine marble-top counters. An enviable record collection that part of me longed to sit and sort through with him.

But there wasn’t a trace of me anywhere. No pictures. No framed articles of my magazine features. Not even a childhood drawing or card—the kind I imagined he’d always been secretly hiding away somewhere, a trinket he might pine over when he revisited his regrets about leaving us.

Guess it was nothing but a pipe dream, after all.

“Care to tell me what you’re doing here, Margaret?” he asked, narrowing his eyes on me in suspicion.

As if I were here to raid his house or ask for money—or worse, emotional support.

“It’s Maggie,” I said, for the first time in years. “I don’t go by Margaret.”

He scrunched his face as if he’d smelled something sour.

“Margaret sounds much more professional. You want to be taken seriously, don’t you?”

“Is this a business meeting?” I asked, eyes widening in what I tried not to be accusation. “Why do I have to be professional?”

“It was just a bit of friendly advice, Margaret. What’s going on?”

“I was just—” I looked around, trying to gather my thoughts. “I wanted to know—” I paused again. How could I phrase it without sounding pathetic? “I—”

“What is it, Margaret?” he asked, and the irritation in his words was enough of a trigger to let it explode out of me.

“Why didn’t you fight for us?”

His eyes widened, as if it were the last thing in the world he’d been expecting.

Maybe it was. Maybe he thought he’d trained me well enough not to ask those types of questions. After all, he’d successfully dodged any real discussions about the past in all our meetups over the years.

And I’d let him.

I let us both avoid it. Pretend it never happened.

But I couldn’t anymore.

“I just need to know,” I sighed. “I need to know why you didn’t come back for us. Not once.”

“It’s complicated,” he said, averting his gaze. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try,” I begged. “Help me understand.”

It wasn’t sarcasm. I wanted nothing more than for him to take the unrelenting weight off my chest. To give me a feasible reason why he couldn’t come back for me. I was ready to listen. To understand what could make a father turn away from his family like that and not think twice about it.

“We’ve talked about this before.” He shook his head, squeezing his brow as he stared down at the floor. “Your mother can be difficult. It would’ve been too much—”

“So, you were fine with never seeing your kids again because it would’ve been too hard?”

“I see you now!” he retorted, irritated at me for neglecting that piece of information. “Quite regularly, might I add.”