AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I’m in the kitchen draining rice when I hear Dad come home.
He appears at the doorway. Like Mom, he doesn’t fill up the spaces he used to. Once upon a time—B.C., of course, but before he started looking so terrified all the time, too—he’d loom in any doorway he stood. I thought he was the biggest man alive. Now, his shoulders don’t even take up half of it.
He clears his throat awkwardly. “Didn’t know you were stopping in today.”
I put the rice on the stove to cook and turn to him. “I’m cooking dinner.”
“Should I go find the takeout menus?”
I roll my eyes. “Very funny. Mom beat you to that joke already, though.”
He takes a seat at the circular kitchen table. It came with the house, as the old story goes. Dad wanted to throw it away—“or burn it,” he always interjects at that part of the telling, “whichever happened faster”—but Mom insisted we keep it because it was yellow and had pink daisies and purple butterflies painted along the legs.
She’s always had a thing about yellow. The whole house has little pops of it sprinkled through. “Like we live in a sunflower patch,” she tells anyone who asks. “It’s a dark world sometimes. I think it could use some brightening.”
“Want something to drink?” I ask, glancing toward Dad. “Iced tea?”
“No, thanks.”
“Hot tea?”
“No, thanks.”
“Bourbon, then?”
Dad glances at me as though he likes that idea a little too much. He starts to shake his head, but before he can, I nod. “Bourbon it is.”
I grab a glass from the china cabinet in the hallway and pour him some bourbon. He almost never drinks before eight o’clock, but judging by the look on his face, I don’t think he’s going to object tonight.
I hand him the glass and take the other open seat. The silence stretches and folds in on itself. The cuckoo clock on the wall ticks. Dad’s heel bounces on the tile. I rap my nails on the tabletop again and again.
I’m keenly aware of the fact that he and I haven’t had a proper conversation since I moved out. It’s lurking between us, this ugly, unspoken thing, like some rotten stuff we’re both pretending not to smell.
He takes a sip of his bourbon and sighs, but he makes no attempt to talk to me. I sit there for a full five minutes waiting for him to say something. When he doesn’t, I check on the rice, grab a couple of ice cubes from the freezer and a mallet from the drawer, and head back to my chair.
I place the ice cubes on the table and smash them with the mallet.
“Goodness!” Dad splutters, gawking at me in shock.
“There. Now that I’ve broken the ice, we can talk,” I say with a straight face.
He stares at me for a moment, and then his face cracks. The two of us burst out laughing. “That… that was… Good God, that was terrible,” he wheezes, still choking on his cackles and dabbing tears from the corners of his eyes.
“The worst,” I agree. “Some guy at a bar used that line on me last year.”
“Please tell me you didn’t go out with him.”
“I let him buy me a drink. I thought it was creative at the time.”
Dad just shakes his head and wipes the last of the tears from his eyes. Then he sighs deeply and his shoulders sag and, just like that, he’s the same sad old man he was when he walked in again.
“You deserve a man who doesn’t need to use a pick-up line at all,” he murmurs. “You deserve the best. You and your sister both.”
I frown as I watch him. He’s got a few new wrinkles along his forehead. It seems like all of us do, me included. “I take it Ilarion didn’t impress you? Mom seemed to like him.”
His mouth ripples with tension. “He just… doesn’t suit her.”
“Mom thinks we should just trust Celine.”
