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He swiped his hand across the table sending the plate and its contents across the small space. Noodles and sauce splattered across the cabinets and floor.
"Goddamnit! Is it too much to expect you to be able to put a better meal together? Your mother was an excellent cook. You're her daughter. You look just like her. Why can't you be more like her?"
I stood frozen in place. This was bad behavior even for him.
"But instead," he pointed at me, "You took her from me. It's all your fault she's dead." He pounded a fist on the table and stood so fast his chair fell backward.
He took a stumbling step toward me. I looked to Charly for help, but she sat as if glued to her chair, both of her hands covering her mouth. I took a trembling step backward until I was backed against the wall. He hesitated when he saw my retreat. He closed his eyes, and I saw his Adam's apple bob several times. When his eyes opened, tears flowed down his cheeks. His hand was surprisingly gentle as he reached out and pulled a lock of my hair over my shoulder. He rubbed it between his fingers before dropping it to reach for my cheek. I flinched, but his touch was light, almost caressing. "You're so beautiful. You have her hair, her eyes, her face. Your mother was the most beautiful woman I ever knew."
His hand dropped, and he backed toward the door, darting his eyes between Charly and me. "I...I'm sorry. I can't do this anymore. I can't take being around you anymore. You're too much like her. Every time I see you, Maddy, I see Lilian. It's like I can't breathe, and I'm so tired of suffocating. I've been a terrible father to you. Lilian would be so disappointed in me. I know that because I see the same look in your eyes. I'm sorry for that. You'll be better off without me."
He turned and took four long steps toward the door.
"No, Daddy!" Charly cried.
His hand paused on the doorknob. He looked over his shoulder, first at her, then at me, and back to her. "I love you." He opened the door and was gone.
Charly and I stood as if frozen by the sudden confession and departure of our father. The sudden peel of tires on the street in front of our house snapped us out of our trance, and we bolted to the window. Our father's old car careened wildly as he tore down the street.
I slowly sank to the floor. My dad couldn't love me because I reminded him too much of my mom? Everything suddenly made more sense: the reason why he didn't carry pictures of me in his wallet but did of Charly; why he never stayed in the same room as me for longer than an hour. All these years I'd tried so hard to make him proud, but it would never have mattered.
My eyes burned with the tears I tried not to let fall for a father who didn’t love me back.
I fought the instinct to run after him like Charly did. She stood in the doorway while his car pulled away and sped off into the night. Not knowing what else to do, I turned and slowly began to clean up the spaghetti disaster. Charly came back into the trailer and sat at the kitchen table.
I paused to rinse out a rag and began cleaning a new spot.
“He’s right, you know. You do look a lot like her,” she said quietly.
I paused my cleaning. Like my dad, she almost never talked about our mother.
“I’m sorry, Charly.”
“Don’t be. She was pretty, too.”
“Are you going to leave me, too?” This time, I did cry. Charly had been the one to mostly take care of me, and when I was little, I remembered her playing and singing with me, teaching me how to braid my hair and other girlie stuff.
She sighed. “Nah, brat. We’re sisters. We’ll stick together.”
30
Holt
“Except we didn’t stick together in the end. She left me just like my father did.” She still rested her head against my chest playing with the material of my shirt while I rubbed circles on her back.
"I guess you could say I have some abandonment and trust issues, huh?" She pulled her head back and tried to smile. She looked tired.
I held my thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. "Maybe a little. But it's understandable. What happened to you after your dad left?"
“My grandmother took us in. She was my dad’s mom and they had some kind of falling out years earlier, but I never knew over what or why. But it didn’t stop her from loving us. Before my dad left, I loved spending time with her, but it wasn’t often because I had to sneak it in. Between school and trying to take care of my dad and the house, I didn’t have a lot of free time. She didn’t drive, so it only happened when I had time to walk across town when my dad wouldn’t find out. I was always scared he’d figure it out, but he never questioned how sometimes we had meals nicer than anything little girls could cook on their own. Later, the few years we lived with her were the best in my life. We were still poor, but at least someone made me feel cared for and loved.”
I was glad she’d had something happy to look back on in her childhood. I hated to hear it hadn’t lasted very long. Her Gammy had died suddenly of a heart attack while Maddy was a junior in high school. By then, Charly was an adult so Maddy lived with her, ironically back in the trailer where she’d grown up. Somehow, they’d managed to hang on to the trailer those several years by renting it out while they lived with their grandmother. At her death, they moved back into it since the taxes on their grandmother’s property was too much for them to afford.
I understood what it cost her to tell me about her past. She'd splayed herself open, finally letting down every wall she had put up over her lifetime and allowing me to see her vulnerabilities. She was letting me in, and this time, I hadn’t had to beg for it.
It was humbling.
It was worth protecting.
