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“Hey,” came an unfamiliar voice when I answered. “Is this Tillie’s hot neighbor? You were the most recent on her contact list.”
“Who is this?”
“I’m Brenda, Tillie’s friend. You might wanna get over her and help her if you can. We’re at Jensen’s bar, and this guy, Brick, is giving her a tough time.”
Pure rage shot through me. I was rushing out of my house before I was even conscious of moving.
“What the fuck is he doing to her?”
“Well,” Brenda sounded hesitant. “I’m not sure what’s happening. They went outside because he said they had to talk, but he looked really pissed when he did it. Tillie said it was fine, and that was the only reason I left them alone. I think they were arguing about money. I dunno, I just have a bad feeling about this.”
With every word, my anger just boiled until it was pretty much overflowing. It seemed Brick wasn’t going to listen to any sense. All he had to do was send me the amount of debt she owed, and I would have taken care of it.
But now, he’d fucked with the one thing he shouldn’t have.
And he was going to pay the consequences.
TWENTY-ONE
TILLIE
The first time my dad hit me, I was about sixteen. I’d come home late from a party the night he’d gone to the hospital and was diagnosed with stage four liver failure. When I came in, he immediately started in with the barbs, and when I attacked back, he jumped up from his couch and smacked me right across the face.
I stood frozen for a few seconds, tears leaking from my eyes. It was from the shock than anything else. This was the first time his abuse turned physical, and while the slap across my face stung, the tears were more symbols of the fractured limit I’d set.
I didn’t know why I thought physical abuse was the one boundary he wouldn’t cross. As my dad got meaner and said increasingly vicious things to me, I first comforted myself with the knowledge that all his abuse was when he was drunk. I told myself he never said mean things when he was sober, and it was the alcohol making him this way. But then it became more difficult to differentiate when he was drunk or sober. He stayed drunk most of the time anyway, and he wasn’t much nicer when he was sober.
And then I thought, “Well, it could be worse. At least he doesn’t hit me. At least he didn’t abandon me just as my mother did.”
Even when my mother left us, I somewhat excused his temper because I told myself he had a right to be mad. At the time, I fully blamed my mother for being the wrong party and thought my father was right to be heartbroken about her abandonment, even if he wasn’t the best husband ever.
But then, after my mother left, I began to see more of the man he truly was, the man who’d scared her off.
But I told myself it wasn’t that bad. My father might call me a bitch and say he wished I was never born, but at least he didn’t hit me. Despite his threats, he never hit me.
So, the first time he did, it was like my illusion absolutely splintered. It was me waking up from a lifetime of minimizing my father’s actions and telling myself it truly wasn’t that bad. It was me realizing my dad wasn’t just a guy who had a piss poor temper and sometimes drank. He wasn’t a man who just said mean things when he was upset but was otherwise an average guy.
Nope.
My father was an alcoholic and an abuser.
My father was a man who despised me—his own daughter—simply because he thought my mother cheated on him. He thought I wasn’t really his child.
And because of that, I was stuck in the cycle of abuse. The first time he hit me, he later gave some half-assed apology that still somehow managed to blame me for his actions. He said he didn’t mean to do it, but my mouth was just too fast sometimes, and it would always get me in trouble. Besides, I shouldn’t have left home without telling him first because what if he needed something and I wasn’t there?
While he spoke, I just stood there in shock and nodded, not necessarily accepting my fault but just too numb to say anything else.
I hadn’t told anyone about the abuse, not even Brenda, my best friend. Instead, I’d lied to myself and told myself that it wouldn’t happen again because I wouldn’t let it happen again. I wouldn’t do anything to be on his bad side, and I would stay away if I noted he was in a temper.
But it didn’t work. Everything I did irritated him, and he was no longer held back by any illusions or veneers of civility. Because once he hit me the first time, he was capable of hitting me again.
And he did so. Again and again and again.
If I was being frank, the only thing that stopped the abuse was the fact that he eventually got too sick to move much. And even then, he would still spew abuse at me whenever his pain became unbearable. Toward the end, he’d been more sedate, as if accepting his fate. He’d made his peace with death. But never once had he apologized. Once, in the hospital, he’d opened his mouth, and I thought I saw something resembling regret in his eyes. But then his mouth shut without saying anything, and I looked back at my phone while waiting to see when we would be discharged.
All that to say, at this point, I thought I would be used to the pain of getting smacked around. I thought I’d built a tolerance. But when Brick hit me, it was like taking me back to that first time, and the pain exploding in my cheek reminded me of the astounded feeling of not expecting things to get this bad. Because as angry as Brick got, I didn’t think he would hit me.
But like my father, Brick was an abusive piece of shit, and I should have accepted that earlier instead of trying to minimize who he was.
