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And she’s turning into you.
Stubborn, mischievous, and always ready for a fight.
Unfortunately, all true. And being a DEA agent, constantly in the line of fire, didn’t help. My partner, Raul, had always told me to take it easy, to cut back on the workload, to not take the risks I was prone to taking.
“You have a little girl at home, man,” he would always say. “I’m not ready to tell her that her father’s dead because he was being a reckless asshole.”
It was the only way I knew how to do my job, though. I would be lying if I said I didn’t care what happened to me. Being a father changes you, in more ways than one, and I would have gladly given my life for Kelly if I had to. Dammit, I’d kill for her. But sometimes, instinct just kicked in, and for a few seconds, a few stupid seconds, I’d forget that I had a little girl waiting in the neighbor’s apartment for me to come home safe.
Which was probably why the captain had asked me to take a leave.
Or the fact that you had survived four bullets and no one on the force wanted to be the bearer of bad news if things had gone south.
That, too.
I could still remember my conversation with the captain a week ago, when I was finally able to walk on my own two feet again and could trudge into the precinct. I had tried to assure him that I was fine enough to come back to work, maybe even take a desk job for a while. But I wasn’t very convincing, and I doubt the cane I was using to help me get around made it any better. He had literally kicked me out of the office, told me to take a break, stay with family, heal first, then talk about coming back to work.
“And for fuck’s sake, Alex, look after your goddamn daughter!”
It seemed like everyone was always chastising me to be a better dad, telling me what I was doing wrong and what I should be doing right. I appreciated their concern and tolerated their words. What they didn’t seem to understand was that no one chastised me more than myself. I started asking myself what would my dad do?
That’s when I started thinking about going home for a while.
Not home to the house Kelly and I shared on Beaker Street, but home to Connecticut, where I grew up. I had called my father a few days after I took leave and told him we were coming home to visit.
Kelly was great company, usually, but with the start of summer holidays and both of us in each other’s faces all day, the house was quickly turning into a warzone. I blamed it on puberty, she blamed it on the fact that I wasn’t taking enough meds. Or that I was just being an asshole intent on ruining her life.
It’s like I’m married all over again.
“We could’ve taken a plane, you know,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“You don’t say,” I replied. “Jeez, I should’ve thought of that.”
Kelly leaned in again. “You know, sometimes I wonder which one of us is the adult in this relationship.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll pretend to be the father whose credit card pays for all the stuff you have, and you pretend to be the daughter who is always grateful that her father loves her so much to spoil her in every possible way.”
She huffed at me. “Spoils me so much that he’s trapped us in a car for two days?”
“So much that he hasn’t stopped two states back and told the closest trucker to drive you back to Miami,” I replied. “Do you know what happens to little girls whose parents don’t keep their eyes on them all the time?” I looked at her in the rearview and frowned. “Do you know?”
“I’m twelve,” she replied. “I’m not living under a stone.”
“I’m going to have to rethink giving you your own phone,” I said, shaking my head.
Kelly threw her hands up. “Sure, take it,” she said, slumping back. “Just what I need to make my life even more miserable.”
“Your life is not miserable,” I countered.
“I’m in a car for two days,” Kelly shot. “What’s your definition of miserable?”
This conversation for starters, I wanted to reply, but just smiled and shook my head.
We passed a road sign that read “Kent 30 Miles” and I let out a sigh of relief. Kelly had noticed it to, because she let out her own frustrated “finally” before shifting closer to the window to get a look at the world around us. I think it was the first time she had peeled her eyes away from that damn phone in two days.
Connecticut was beautiful in the fall, peaceful, the complete opposite of Miami with its year-round flow of tourists, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the scorching tropical heat. I had grown up in Kent, my parents’ house a constant reminder of the youth I had spent scraping my knees and bruising my elbows.
Moving to Miami had never been an easy decision, especially since leaving my dad alone was pretty much like giving a child a gun and asking him not to pull the trigger. Ever since my mother’s death back when I was in middle school, I had come close to losing a finger, breaking bones, and
