“Not so much don’t care as don’t believe it.” I shuffle over to drop the broken glass into a trash can by the work table. Now only a few feet separate us, and there is some pitiful little eight-year-old ballerina in me who wants to fling herself into his arms, who is glad to see him after all these years.
Weak little snot. Sitting on that step in her ballet slippers waiting for him to come home. Waking up on birthday mornings wondering if a card would come. Every recital, secretly thinking this might be the one where he turned back up because he promised he’d never miss. And that little girl in her purple tutu and tights was always fool enough to believe him. Was it a secret hope, a hidden wish that if I made it big, he’d have to come? If I was a big enough star in the sky, it would draw him out from wherever he’d gone, and he’d have to come?
Looks like it worked.
“Mama’s dead.”
I say it just as much for my benefit as for his, a flat, harsh reminder that this man took everything from my mother, who deserves my loyalty. He may look like the man who sat me on his lap and read Bible stories to me, but he is actually the man who left my mother one afternoon and never looked back.
“I heard.” His lips turn down at the corners, and when he lifts his eyes to me I see genuine sorrow.
“Did you ever love her?”
Did you ever love me?
“Of course I did.” He shakes his head, shrugs the broad shoulders I remember thinking could carry the weight of the world. “Things got complicated.”
“Really? Seemed simple to me. You were married and had a family. You don’t fuck around and leave them for the church secretary.” I offer a careless shrug of my own. “But hey, I was a kid. What did I know? Please enlighten me with your perspective. Tell me how very complicated it was.”
“I deserve that.”
“You deserve worse,” I spit, clenching my teeth around a stream of vitriol that’s been building in me for a decade and a half. “Mama deserved better.”
“She did. Much better. I always knew she was too good for me.”
“On that we can agree.” I tap my foot against the trash can. Even now I have to fight the urge to apologize because he’s the one who first taught me to respect my elders.
“It should have been simple, Kai Anne. It should be, but things got so twisted around.” He leans against the work table and sighs. “I never wanted to be a preacher.”
“What?” I frown, recalling all the Saturday nights I saw him bent over the Bible preparing for his Sunday message. “But you loved God. You loved the church.”
“You’re right. I did love God.” He picks up my work gloves, flipping them from hand to hand. “I still do. And I loved the church, but I never wanted to lead it. Never wanted any of that. I came from generations of preachers. It was expected, and I was good at it.”
He glances up with an adult honesty I never would have recognized as a child.
“It was the natural progression of things,” he says softly. “My family wanted me to go to seminary. So I did. And then your grandfather wanted me to be his assistant pastor. So I did. And everyone wanted me to marry your mother.”
He licks his lips and tosses the gloves to the work table before looking back to me.
“So I did.”
“So you didn’t love her.” I want to wail because I know she loved him with her last lucid thoughts.
“I didn’t love her the right way. I loved her the best I could with what I knew love to be.” The callused hand he runs over the back of his neck makes me wonder what he does with those hands nowadays.
“Not the deep way?” My voice is hushed in this room with Mama’s jars where I suspect she stored her loneliness. Where I think she sealed her regrets. “Is that how you loved Carla? Deep cries out to deep?”
He knows exactly what I mean. Surprise flits briefly across his face. Maybe he’s surprised that an eight-year-old grasped that much about a Bible verse and that it stuck with me all these years. Did he really have no idea how much I adored him? How I lived for his every word? That I even felt a childish possessiveness of him with the people from the church who stole his time from me? I think of all the things I lost when he left, it’s that feeling I mourn the most. That my daddy stood on the stars to hang the moon. I’m sure all girls lose it at some point. I’m sure many think they never will. I can testify that when it goes, it’s gone forever.
“I guess you could say it was that deep cries out to deep kind of love.” He looks down at the shed floor. “It feels almost blasphemous to say it, though.”
“It should. To feel it for anyone other than your wife should feel like a blasphemy.”
He only nods.