“But how?” Needing to move, I carted an armful of plates to the sink. “He’s already in prison.”
I ran warm water over the dishes, then positioned a cup under the Keurig, slamming down the lid. Lore hadn’t even told me this one fundamental thing about her and Fabian. But why? Because it raised questions of her complicity? God. What kind of crime writer was I that I hadn’t confirmed this from the very beginning? What else had I missed because I enjoyed talking to her, because she felt like a safe space to share my own mistakes? Tears of frustration and shame lodged deep in my throat. She’d fooled me, just like she’d fooled everyone who loved her. And I’d let myself be fooled. Again.
“Maybe,” my father said softly, “they forgave each other.”
I turned. There was something on his face, an impression more than an expression, the final delicate ripple after a stone’s throw in water. That was all it took. The anger that had been crackling in my chest since we’d arrived—no, since before then, since long before—blew open into a dark flame.
“Forgave each other?” I repeated, too loud, as the Keurig spat coffee. “What, like Mom forgave you?”
My father recoiled, a hand to his ribs, as if the words had pierced the tender flesh between each cracked bone, and God help me, it felt good.
“Cassie.” He removed his glasses, then put them back on. Outside, the rain had started, a silent downpour. “I . . .”
“You what?” I remembered Lore asking me if I was going to confront him. It had meant something to me, that she thought I was brave enough to do that. I was brave enough, damn it.
My father cleared his throat. He glanced apologetically at Duke, of all people, as if sorry to mar his first impression. Then he turned to Andrew. “I’m an alcoholic.”
“Obviously. And?” I was steely now. Indestructible. Vibrating with power. “What else?”
Lightning flashed, illuminating all the smudges on my father’s glasses as he set them on the table. Maybe it helped to not see us clearly. Maybe none of us saw each other clearly.
“Cassie, I don’t think this is the appropriate—” he started.
“Appropriate?” All the years of silence, of pretense and repression, coursed through me. All the times my mother had said it was an accident, all the times she’d covered bruises with her Clinique foundation, all the times I’d read about murder because murder made me feel better about what was happening inside my own goddamn house. “You want to talk about what’s appropriate?”
“Cass,” Duke started, looking between us uncertainly. When conversations got too heated in his family, someone always shouted, “Table!” and that was it. The topic was tabled until emotions cooled. But I wasn’t going to do that. Not anymore.
“Was it appropriate what you did to Mom?” I asked my father, low and cold.
Andrew’s cheeks seemed to sink inward, his mouth pinched. “What’s she talking about?” he asked my father.
My heart seized. “Tell them!”
My father’s cheeks turned a mottled red below the bruises. Maybe he would show himself, shed the pretense like a translucent skin, and finally other people would see what I had for all those years. They’d know. We’d all know.
But he only pressed his palms together, so hard that his nails bloomed deep fuchsia in the center, capped with white crescents.
“Let’s start with my ninth birthday.” I clutched the counter to keep me upright. “Do you even remember?”
Unexpectedly, Andrew slammed a fist on the table. Dishes rattled. “Someone tell me!” he shouted.
My father lowered his face into cupped palms. Muffled, he said, “The day your sister turned nine, I was fired. It was during the holidays. Your grandfather died close to Christmas. He was a tough father—” He raised his head, looking at me with something like scorn, as if to say I had it good compared to him. “But his death hits me hard every year. With being fired on top of it—well. I went to a bar. I drank too much. Then I got home and—”
“I was helping Mom clean up after my party,” I interrupted. This was my story. It filled my veins as much as my blood, and I was going to tell it. “You got home,” I said to my father, “and Mom accidentally knocked the urn off the mantel.”
At this, he stilled. Shook his head once, slightly.
“What do you mean no?” My chest was tight and sore, as if I’d been kicked.
“It wasn’t her,” he said softly. “You knocked it over.”
“No. She knocked it over, and you hit her.” The words came out small. I tried again. “You hit her. You smacked her right in the chest.” I was crying now, a torrent of memory and hurt, a hand over my heart. The sorrow when she’d looked at me, as if seeing something irreparable break. My innocence. My trust.
Duke’s spine stiffened. Andrew paled, looking between my father and me.
“You hit her,” I said again. “You hit her. You hit her.” The three words kept bubbling up, over and over, spilling out of me.
When I finally stopped, my father said, “She stepped in front of you.”
“No.”
He closed his swollen eyes. “I think you meant to wave at me. Something. And the urn fell, and I just—reacted. I didn’t mean to. God, Cassie, I never meant to hurt anyone. Never. Not you and not her. I swore I’d get sober, that it would never happen again. She told me if I ever laid a hand on you, she wouldn’t just leave me—” He opened his eyes, gave a painful almost-smile. “She’d kill me. I quit drinking, cold turkey. And God knows why, she stayed.”
No. He was changing things. But I could almost feel the cool swish of my mother’s sleeve as she darted before me. Her chest, right where my face would be. My bare feet dusted with my grandfather’s ashes. But no. That wasn’t how it happened. She had never protected me. I had protected myself.
I shook my head. “But you kept hitting her! Anytime you started drinking again. Right up until—” I looked at Andrew. “Right up until she got pregnant.”
“Jesus,” Duke said, a low hiss.
Sorry we’re not your perfect family, I thought at him bitterly.
At some point, I had gone to the table. I was gripping the edge, my fingers searching for rough spots, seeking splinters. But the wood was varnished, too smooth. The leftover food was dull and congealed now, turkey like drying strips of human skin.
“I tried.” My father looked at Andrew, whose chest moved fast with shallow breaths. Through clenched teeth, my father said, “You don’t know how hard I have to try, every damn day, to be better than I am.”
I exhaled hard through my nose. “We all have to try to be better than we are. Every one of us. That’s no excuse.”
My father looked me in the eyes. The only rage in the room was mine, and in a sickening whoosh, even that disappeared, leaving me shaky, hardly able to stand.
“I know,” he said.
The room was pitched into the kind of silence that emphasizes every background noise: a Home Depot commercial in the living room, the fan humming over the stove, rain lashing the window. The room flashed white, and a clap of thunder jolted Andrew’s skinny shoulders. He looked at me accusingly.
“You said there wouldn’t be thunder.”
Lore, 2017
After speaking to Fabian, I was feeling inquieta. I called Cassie.
“Lore. Hi,” she said, strained. “Were we going to— Didn’t we say we’d pick back up after Thanksgiving?”
“I’m returning your calls from this morning,” I said, wondering now if they were what the cuates used to call “butt dials”—and what Michael adorably mistranslated as “booty calls.”
“Right. Sorry, just—give me a second.” The line went disconnection-quiet, as if she’d muted herself. “I just had a quick question: When did you and Fabian get divorced?”
The corners of my lips twitched in anticipation of Cassie’s reaction. “We didn’t.”