I DIDN'T TELL HIM not to come in with me, because I was hoping the nurse would. And she did. She came out with my chart and called my name, and he got up, too.
She said, “You can just wait here in the waiting room, Mr. Mundt.”
“No. I'm going in with Sebastian. I have to tell the doctor what the problem is.”
She put her hands on her hips. She was pretty young. Under thirty, I think. And she couldn't have weighed much more than ninety pounds. But she didn't look like she was about to take any crap from my father. “I thought it was Sebastian who had the sleeping problem.”
“It is, but—Sebastian, don't you want me to go in with you?”
“No. Please just go sit down, Father. You're embarrassing me.” It even embarrassed me to have to call him “Father” in front of people. It sounded like I was in some old British play from the nineteenth century.
He looked truly perturbed. Betrayed, even. But he did not come in.
The nurse led me down the hall and had me step on the scale.
“I'm sorry about my father,” I said.
“Don't worry,” she said. “I can handle him. I've had worse.”
She led me into an examination room, and took my temperature and my blood pressure. She didn't seem to like the blood pressure reading. Not surprising. I could feel my own heart pound. She said, “Do you have a history of high blood pressure?”
“No. Low-normal, actually. Maybe you could take it again after I tell you what I'm about to tell you. Then maybe I won't be so scared.” She didn't react quite the way I thought she would. She just leaned back and waited for me to go on. “My father doesn't want me going out of the apartment. The only time I ever get to go out is when I'm running. Which I only get to do because some other nice doctor stood up for me and told him I needed fresh air.”
“What about school?”
“He homeschools me. Anyway, I've been going out at night after he's asleep. Not getting into any trouble or anything. Just going out. Walking, or riding the subway. So I've been sleeping later, so he thinks I have a sleeping problem. I'm sorry to waste your time like this, but if I'd told him the truth, he would have put a stop to it. So I just couldn't bring myself to do that. So, I don't know what the doctor wants to do. If he wants to give me sleeping pills, I could just not take them. But I made up my mind that when I came here, I wouldn't lie.”
“How long has it been since you had activities outside the house?”
“Since I was seven,” I said. She looked shocked. I think she'd thought I meant I'd been grounded for a month.
I watched her sit with that for a long time. Then she said, “You know, if he really isolates you to the degree you say, it might be considered a form of abuse. Do you need help? I don't want to make your situation worse. I want to do what's best for you.”
“I'm almost eighteen,” I said. “Four more months. Then I'm leaving. So, thanks. But I think the best plan is just to ride it out from here.”
Then I realized, sitting there watching her think, why I'd chosen to do this. I wanted some kind of perspective. I wanted to get a third opinion on my own weird reality. My father said it was right. Delilah said it was not. I wanted to know what someone else would think. And now I knew. I also realized something else I hadn't known before: That doctor who got me out running—who told my father I needed fresh air—saw exactly what was going on and wanted to help me. And he did help me. And now I wanted someone to help me again.
I said, “You know, before that doctor got my father to let me go running, I used to get sick all the time. And my friend Delilah— who my father doesn't even know about, by the way, so don't rat me out—said maybe I was just getting sick to get out of the house. And when she said it, it sounded strange to me. Like something I'd never thought of before. But today, on the way over here, I had this funny feeling. Like part of me had known that all along.”
She sat thinking another minute, then leaned forward and patted my arm.
“Okay. I'm going to go talk to the doctor. He'll probably want to ask you some questions, too. And I'm guessing he'll want to talk to your father. But I'll tell him what you told me. And we'll see what he wants to do.”
I SAT IN THE WAITING ROOM while my father went in. He looked defensive. And he looked small. He looked so small and so afraid that I wondered why I'd ever been scared of him.
Just before the nurse disappeared with him, she smiled at me, which made me feel good. Actually, it made me feel like I was about to cry. I had this feeling in my chest and at the back of my throat like I could cry at any minute. But I don't even know why.
After about twenty nervous minutes, my father came back out. He looked and sounded bristly. “Come on, Sebastian,” he said. “We're going home.”
HALFWAY HOME ON THE SUBWAY I got up the nerve to ask him what the doctor said.
At first he didn't answer. For so long that I thought he never would. Then he said, “He thinks you need more activity. That you can't sleep because you spend too much time cooped up in the house. I told him you run every day. He said he has nothing against homeschooling, but he wants you to have social opportunities with people your own age.”
“Well, that's close to what the other doctor said. And look how much healthier I got after I started running.”
He made a sound like a snort. “Seems no matter what I allow it's not enough.”
“So, are you going to do it?” No reply. I waited. Still nothing. “Father. I said, are you going to do it?”
“Sebastian. Please be quiet and let me think.”
All the way home, no more word from my father. We ate dinner, he went to bed. Not a word. But he looked intimidated to me. And I took that to be a good sign.
I SAT ON THE SUBWAY SEAT with Maria beside me. Holding her hand.
“I've been thinking how it's going to be,” I said.
“Oh. You mean if we go away together?”
My stomach turned to ice. Heavy, tingling ice. “If?”
“When. When, I mean.”
“You didn't change your mind, did you?”
“No. It's just scary to think about it.”
“But you still want to do it.”
“Yeah. I think so.”
By now I was full-on scared. And I couldn't think what to do to fix it. I had to get us back to that place where we definitely knew what we would definitely do.
I reached deeper into myself than I ever have before. And this is what I found.
I said, “When I was little, I spent some time in the desert. The Mojave Desert, in California. Have you ever been to the desert?” She shook her head no, and I went on. “It's hot. But then, so is the city. But it's a different kind of hot. I guess it's hotter, but it's dry. A baking kind of heat. It doesn't make you feel like you're going to faint. And at night, the stars are so clear. There are hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe more. Maybe millions. And they're so bright. It's like every little square inch of sky has a thousand bright stars. And it's not flat, either. There are mountains. A whole range of mountains on the horizon. And on the mountains are windmills.”
“Windmills?” she asked. I felt as though she had clicked out of her worry and into my story for the first time.
“Windmills. Thousands of identical windmills. They sit up there on Tehachapi Pass and turn the wind into power. And there are layers after layers of them. So you could just watch them spin forever. It's like watching water flow. I don't really know how to describe it.”
“I'd like to go somewhere where there are windmills,” she said. “Is that why you told me that story?”
“Yes. It is. I wanted you to know there's a place for us.”
Her eyes lit up and she squeezed my hand tighter. “Oh, Tony! You do know that movie! I thought you didn't, when I first brought it up. I know it's old. But I love that movie.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Except it didn't have a happy ending. But we will. Right?”
“I wish I could picture those windmills,” she said. “But I can't see them in my head.”
“I'll bring you a picture of them.” I figured I could print one off the Web.
“Will you, Tony? I'd love to see.”
She put her head on my shoulder all the way back to union Square. It seemed like, if that really had been a rough spot, it was smoothed over now.
When the doors opened, she kissed me, short and fast on the mouth. “Windmills? Really?”
“Really.”
“I can't wait to see that,” she said. “Day after tomorrow?”
“Yes. Day after tomorrow.”
“Good.”
Then she was gone.
On my way up the stairs that night, I had a Knowing Moment.
I guess in some ways I'm like my sister, Stella. She just pays more attention to stuff like that than I do. I can do a lot of the same things as Stella can, but most of the time I just ignore it.
Stella says that the past and the future aren't really so different, like we think they are. I mean, in metaphysical terms. I don't quite get this part, but I think it has something to do with quantum mechanics, which I guess nobody exactly gets anyway. Stella says there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to remember the future exactly the way we remember the past. Well, I guess remember is the wrong word, but there isn't exactly a right one. Because we don't do it, so we never made up a name for it. But Stella says we only use some really small percent of what our brains can do, and maybe that's one of the unused parts.
I'm taking a very long way around to say this. On the way up the stairs, I knew something. Very plainly. I still had not gotten Tony's address. Or phone number. Or last name. And as I was walking up the stairs, I knew it was too late.
If I had really thought about it, I could have gone a little further in my head and put together that lots of big trouble was waiting for me upstairs. But all I thought about was Tony. Losing Tony.
It was almost like my life flashed before my eyes and all I saw was Tony.
When I opened the door, I didn't even see Carl. I swear. I felt his fist hit my cheekbone, slamming me back against the door, slamming it closed as I hit it. I hadn't even seen him coming. I think I saw a flash of the fist, but it seemed unreal. Like something you would dream.
I felt the wood floorboards under my knees.
“I went by your work today,” he said.
And part of me thought, Good. Good. It's over. It was ridiculous, it needed to be over. Now it is. My whole head was throbbing. I could feel a trickle of blood run down my cheek where Carl had caught me with his class ring.
He said, “I was going to stand right with you and be some support for you while you asked Danny about your paycheck.”
I thought, You liar. You are such a liar. You didn't go there to support me. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered.
I pulled up to my feet and walked into the kitchen. A little dizzy, but I was going. I was going to get some ice to put on my face.
“Don't you walk away from me!” he screamed. Loud enough for the neighbors on both sides to hear. But I didn't care about the neighbors. I only cared about my kids. I knew they could hear, but there was nothing I could do about that. I just hoped they stayed in their rooms. I was pretty sure they would. They always did before.
“Don't you dare walk away from me! I want to know where you've been.”
“Nowhere,” I said. And I opened the freezer door to get the ice. “I just rode around on the subway.”
“Bullshit!” he screamed. “You look me in the eye and tell me there isn't somebody else.”
I looked down at the kitchen linoleum. I had to. There was nothing else I could do.
Stella says when we were kids and things got bad she would go outside herself. She said she would be in a spot near the ceiling in the corner of the room. Watching. Like everything was happening to somebody else. Like you watch a movie on a screen.
Not me. I tuck in. I go into an even deeper place in myself. And I pull the covers in over me. And then I dare you to find me. You have to find me to touch me or hurt me. At least, the part of me that really counts. I go inside and just hold very still. And part of me feels dead. Like it doesn't matter. Whatever it is. It just doesn't matter.
I think I had my eyes closed when I got hit with Carl's flying tackle. I just remember falling with him on top of me. And, of course, hitting the kitchen table is one of those things you don't ever forget. We have a big glass kitchen table with a border of metal all around it. Like a frame. I hit it with the side of my body, and then we hit the ground, and I just lay there on the floor feeling like someone had stuck burning hot knives into my side.
I'm not sure where Carl went, but he wasn't on top of me. And I didn't really care. I kept trying to take a breath. But I couldn't get any air in. I was used to getting the wind knocked out of me, so I guess I was just waiting. It would hurt too bad to breathe anyway, so I wasn't going to try too hard.
The door to the freezer was still standing open. I could see steam pouring out of it, the way fog pours over the top of a mountain. Or, at least, the way it poured in a photo my mother used to have over her bed.
My breath wasn't coming back. You'd think I'd be all panicky around that. But not so much. It was strange.
That thought came into my head one more time. You didn't get his address, and now it's too late.
I don't remember anything else after that.
I can only describe my father's mood the following morning as sullen.
He looked almost like a little boy to me. An old child with gray hair. Sulking.
I got it in my head that I was just going to open my mouth and ask a brave question. But I froze. I opened my mouth and nothing happened. After that it just got harder.
It's like if someone had a loaded gun in your face. I don't know how else to describe how it felt to try to talk to my father. Even on a good day. If someone always has a loaded gun in your face, you weigh every word before you say it. You only dare say it if it might save you. But you're never sure, so there's this tendency to freeze. Say nothing at all.
This went on for nearly a whole bowl of granola.
Then I decided to say “Father.” Put it out there really fast. Then I'd have no choice but to finish the thought.
“Father.”
He looked up. Suddenly he looked more angry than sullen. It was something like looking right down the barrel and seeing a live round. I couldn't go on.
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“What is it, Sebastian? Spit it out.”
“I just wondered … if you'd thought any more about what the doctor said.”
The minute it came out of my mouth, I knew it was a stupid question. He'd thought about nothing else since. I had interrupted his thinking about it to ask if he was thinking about it.
“We're getting a second opinion,” he said. I dropped my spoon. On purpose. The clanking sound startled him, set him off as if I'd yelled at him or challenged him. “Not even an opinion,” he said. “I don't pay a doctor for his opinion. I wanted him to prescribe sleeping pills for you and instead he tells me I'm raising my son wrong. Where he gets off, I don't know. He barely knows you. He hasn't sacrificed his life for you, like I have.”
Now, mind you, my father said this a lot. That he sacrificed his own life to raise me right. He quit his job as a college professor when his mother died, and has managed to live on the money she left him. And, yes, it's been all about me. Even I have to admit that. And I'd heard that same song about sacrifice a hundred times. And this was the first time I didn't believe it. And I can't even explain what changed.
All of a sudden it was just written all over his face. He didn't sacrifice anything for me. He didn't want his life anymore, so I was a convenient excuse not to have it. Letting me have friends, that would have been a sacrifice. Keeping me all to himself was purely selfish.
“I'm going running,” I said, and stood up rather abruptly. My legs hit the underneath of the table so hard that I knocked over his glass of orange juice. He scrambled for a dishcloth to clean it up. I didn't. I headed for the door.
“What about the rest of your cereal?” I heard him ask.
I didn't answer.
I think I finally got it. It doesn't pay to try to communicate with my father.
? ? ?
I DIDN'T GO STRAIGHT TO DELILAH'S. I was going to run first. I wanted to run some of the bad thoughts and bad energy out of my system. I wanted to outrun my bad morning.
But as I passed by under her window, I heard a big voice yell, “Hey!” But I didn't catch that it was her voice. That one little word wasn't enough for me to recognize it. A second later I heard, “Hey! Tony!”
Amazingly, I looked around. Isn't that amazing, that I would answer to Tony? I thought that was amazing.
“Up here.” That was when I recognized that it was Delilah.
I looked up. She was waving her arms frantically. Yet somehow happily, too.
Of course, I went back upstairs. She was waiting for me in her open doorway.
“Isn't that amazing, that I answer to the name Tony?” I asked her that from halfway down the hall.
“I didn't want to get you in trouble with your father. You know, if he heard.”
It struck me that this was the second time in a couple of days that just yelling someone's name on the street could have spelled disaster. Then it struck me how wrong that was. To have to keep your life sectioned off like that. A signal that you'd fallen into a bad way to live.
“Hurry up,” she said. “Hurry up. Get your skinny little butt in here.” Her face seemed happy, lighted up—but scared, too. And I got a little scared myself. Started thinking Maria was standing in her apartment or something. Not that she ever would be. I just couldn't think what else would be so exciting and scary. “I got something for you.”
As I walked through the door, she set it in my hands. A big nine-by-twelve cardboard Express Mail envelope. I looked at it for a minute without comprehension. I really didn't know, at first, what it was.
Even when I looked at the name on the return address. Anne Vicente. I knew I knew that name. It was so familiar. It's not that I couldn't place the name, exactly. It just all happened so fast. Or maybe in a weird way it almost happened in slow motion. So I could almost feel the bits of information drop into my brain and find a spot. Before I could even process the name, click with why I knew the name, my eyes fell on the last line of the return address. Mojave, California. My stomach went cold, my knees almost buckled, and I got so dizzy that Delilah had to step in and lead me over to the couch to sit down.
“It just came in the morning mail,” she said. Like the words had been ready to explode from her mouth for a long time. “Just about an hour ago. I didn't know how to let you know. I was going nuts.”
The words sounded hollow coming into my brain. Like I was half asleep, and someone was talking to me. Dull and far away. The envelope was sitting on my lap. I just kept looking at it. I looked up at Delilah. I expected her to tell me to just open it. But I underestimated Delilah. She was smarter than that. She knew it wasn't all so easy. My answer might be in this envelope. My whole life might be about to change. Retroactively. That was the weird part. I might be about to have to go back and rewrite—or at least reframe—the last decade of my own history. Or maybe I'd read this letter and still wouldn't know what to believe. Suddenly that seemed a thousand times worse.
I picked up the envelope. Held it in both hands. “I didn't think this could possibly get here so fast,” I said. It sounded like somebody else. In a way. “Three days?”
“Might have been four,” she said. “Pretty sure it was four.”
The envelope had one of those tear strips on the back. Lift the little tab and pull off a whole long strip of the cardboard and then you're in.
I held it out to Delilah. Closed my eyes. “Pull that, okay?” Might've sounded stupid. But I needed help. I felt the tug of it, and heard the quiet rip of the cardboard letting go.
I looked inside. There was an envelope, but something more, too. What looked like separate small papers or pictures.
I turned it upside down and spilled the whole thing out onto my lap. The envelope said, “To our darling Sebastian.” It caught in my chest like something solid I'd breathed into my lungs, something I'd meant to swallow. I picked up one of the pictures. They were pictures. I could see that now. They were lying facedown on my lap. I picked one up and turned it over.
It was a picture of my mother.
I want to put something to how I was feeling just here, but there's nothing to say. Part of me knew it. Part of me was expecting it. That part had already given up and stepped out of the way. It just fell into this perfect blankness, like a fresh fall of untouched snow. Nothing moved, and it never made a sound. For that moment, I mean.
It was a moment when something became so inevitable that I just surrendered to it.
She was standing in front of a big jeep sort of vehicle. Very new. The car couldn't have been more than a couple of years old. Her hair was partly the honey brown I remembered and partly gray. She looked about the same age as my father. Which she was, almost exactly. But, I mean, my father now. I mean, she wasn't the age I remember her. But it was her, and I knew it.
I picked up another photo. I'm not sure how much later, though. It was my Grandma Annie, sitting on the porch swing of her little house in Mojave. It was the same house. I recognized it immediately. And, ten years aside, the same Grandma Annie. The same tanned, leathery skin and cheery gray eyes.
I turned over the third picture, and it made my stomach buzz and tingle. She had sent me a picture of the windmills the way they look from her backyard.
I looked up at Delilah. It's hard to describe what I saw in her face.
I handed her the picture of my mother.
“Is this your Grandma Annie?”
I shook my head. I couldn't talk.
“Didn't think so. She looks too young. This is your mother.”
I nodded.
Then I started to cry. And you know what? I wasn't even humiliated to cry in front of Delilah. You tell me, do you know anyone who wouldn't at a time like that? Because, well, if you do, I don't want to know them. You'd have to be made of stone. You'd have to be dead.
I wasn't dead. Not anymore.
Delilah brought me about three big handfuls of tissues and piled them in my lap. She even hobbled over and got me a little wastebasket. I was going though them pretty fast. I needed a system. I never bothered to take out my handkerchief. Wouldn't have been enough.
I'm not sure how long that went on before she said, “Don't forget you got a letter under there. Not to rush you now, child. Take your time.”
But I could tell she was curious. And truthfully, I'd more or less forgotten. I was so busy processing the information that I had a mother. The letter from my grandmother, who I'd always known was out there somewhere, had fallen to the back of my mind. Besides, it was obliterated by a sea of tissues.
I plowed through and found it. And opened it up. I read it once through quietly to myself. Then I read it out loud to Delilah. Because I knew she wanted to know. Not out of nosiness. Just caring. She wanted to be part of this. And she was. How could she not be? She'd started it. This whole moment was courtesy of Delilah. I owed her.
“Our dearest, darling Sebastian,
“Your mother, Celia, and I were so excited to get your letter, we hardly knew what to do with ourselves. I called her at work, even though I usually never would. I got a call from the folks at the motel. I retired from there years ago, but I still know all of them, and they called me up right away. And I called your mother as soon as I got home. She works as a hairdresser in Port Hueneme. That's near Ventura. Even though she can't really take calls at work, because she has a client waiting right there in a chair with their hair all wet and everything. But we talked and talked and she danced around and around right there in the salon and I danced around and around on my front porch. We were so happy, we hardly knew what to do.
“But your letter broke my heart, too. It just broke my heart when you said you forgive me for forgetting all about you. Honey, we never forgot you. Not for one day. The biggest regret of Celia's life is that she let that awful man bully her out of seeing you again. But she was afraid of him, and she thought things could get worse for you if she didn't do what he said. But over the past ten years, between the two of us, we probably wrote you a hundred letters. We sent them to the right address, too, we know that now. Same place you still live. And they never came back returned. So we didn't know if your father didn't let you see them or maybe you were mad about her leaving and didn't want to write back. Now we know. He never showed them to you. Honestly, I didn't think he would sink that low. Even with all I know about him.
“Ask me anything you want about your mom. Anything. You'll hear from her, too, in about a day. Now that we know how to write you. She missed the last mail pickup the day you wrote, having to finish work. But you'll be hearing from her.
“We love you, Sebastian. We always did. We never stopped. We always dreamed we'd see you again. Maybe when you were eighteen, and he had no say. Won't be long now.
“With all the love in the world, Your Grandma Annie.
“P.S.: I'm sending a photo of both of us, and of the wind farm the way it looks from my house. Do you remember how you used to love those windmills, Sebastian? You'd sit on the porch and watch them for hours. I never saw anything like it. It's like you were hypnotized. Oh, but you were so little. You probably don't remember.
“P.S.S.: Thank Delilah for us. She is a lifesaver.”
I put down the letter and looked up at Delilah.
She said, “Do you remember the windmills?”
“I was telling Maria about them last night. I told her I'd show her a picture of them tomorrow night.”
We both just pondered the wonder of that in absolute silence.
After a while I said, “They wrote me a hundred letters. And he never let me see them.”
“How does that make you feel?”
The minute she asked, it happened. It came up out of me like a bad meal that had been making me sick. Like a storm suddenly built up pressure inside my gut and then let go. I was so angry, I couldn't even talk. I couldn't even answer the question. I couldn't even make myself say the word.
I SLAMMED BACK into the apartment. I'm sure my eyes were still red and swollen from crying, but I didn't care. I slammed the door shut again at my back.
I could hear him in the kitchen. He called in, “Your vacation is over, Sebastian. You have lost your privileges because you abused them. You will no longer take off, and not tell me where you're going, and come back as you please. Is that understood?”
I just stood there. My back to the door. Hoping nobody was about to actually get hurt. And that if anybody did, it was me. Because the last thing I could accept right now was suddenly becoming my father. He stuck his head out from the kitchen. I saw the alarm on his face when he looked at me.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. The look of alarm turned to genuine fear. He was afraid of me. Good. “You lying bastard.”
He said nothing. It was a horrible yet satisfying moment. Terrible and beautiful all at the same time. There was nothing he dared say to me. He looked down at the carpet. And he didn't even know what I'd busted him for yet. But he looked down in shame.
“What did you do with them?” I was not shouting. My voice was measured. Carefully measured. As if I didn't dare shout. As if I couldn't afford to. “The letters from my mother. The ones that were my property. That belonged to me. What did you do with them? I want to know. Did you throw them down the garbage chute? Burn them? Flush them down the toilet?”
“Sebastian—”
“Answer me!” Now I was shouting.
“What difference does that make?” Quietly. As though he was talking to someone who held a loaded gun in his face.
“Answer my goddamn question. What did you do with them?”
Long pause. I could feel something in my temples throb, and my ears rang.
“I put them through the paper shredder.”
“You said that was for credit card statements. Oh. Never mind. That's right. You also said my mother was dead. I forgot. You just lie.”
“Sebastian, I—”
“How could you tell a seven-year-old boy that his mother is dead? What kind of monster could do a thing like that?”
“I'm not a monster, Sebastian.”
“Are you sure? Have you looked at yourself lately?”
“I did it for you, Sebastian. Someday you'll understand. Maybe even forgive me.”
I shook my head so hard I almost unbalanced myself. And at nearly the same time I flew across the room in his direction. He stumbled back about four steps. Hit his own chair and fell back and caught himself halfway into a sit. I managed to stop myself just a few inches short. I could have hurt him. It would have been easy. But I didn't. That's what my father would have done—the easiest thing. The easiest thing is not always the best. Usually not, in fact.
“No. Don't say that. I will never forgive that. Never. It was unforgivable. Don't ever say that again. In fact, you know what? Don't talk to me again. Just don't talk. Don't say a word to me anymore.”
I turned and paced back to the middle of the room, then got stuck there. Totally lost. I didn't know where to go or what to do. I couldn't think or remember what might come next.
“For how long?” I heard him say.
“Forever. Never talk to me again.”
“Sebastian. We'll get through this. If you'll hear my side.”
“No. No. I won't. I'm not interested in anything you have to say.”
“But I want you to hear my side.”
I whirled back to face him, and he dropped into his chair. He had been hanging like that, half up, half sitting. And he just fell back. “I don't give a goddamn what you want! All my life you've had what you wanted! You know what I wanted? I wanted friends. I wanted a mother. I wanted to get a letter from my grandmother. I wanted to go outside and play. You didn't care. So don't expect me to care about what you want. I'm leaving.”
Just as my hand touched the knob I heard him say, “When are you coming back?”
“When I damn well please.” I looked over my shoulder at him. “You want to stop me? Go ahead.” I faced him and leaned my back on the door. Just to be clear I wasn't running away. I wasn't sneaking out. “You want to enforce your rules? Feel free. Come stop me.”
I could tell by his face that he knew what I meant. To stop me he'd have to physically overpower me. If he thought he could do it, if he wanted to take control again, this was his chance to try.
Thing is, I wasn't a little kid anymore. Any coward can bully a little kid. I was six feet tall and pumped full of adrenaline. I waited. But he never even looked me in the eye.
“Yeah, that's what I thought,” I said.
Then I went back downstairs to Delilah's for the rest of the day.