“I know it won’t be enough, but I have to try to explain this to you.” He sighs, a small smile on his face. “Just about everything in my life felt like a trap, but Carla made me feel . . . free. I felt like myself with her for the first time, even though I knew it was wrong. There had never been anyone I could bare myself to. I could share my darkest parts with, but she saw them and loved me anyway.”
I hate that I know exactly what he means. I felt that with Rhyson almost from the beginning. My eyes settle on my phone on the work table. It holds my darkest secrets, and yet I’ve withheld it from Rhyson. If deep has ever cried out to deep, it does with us. The lies I’ve told, the secrets I’ve kept feel like such a betrayal I can barely stay in the same room with myself.
“All my life I hoarded my secrets and hid my true self from everyone around me.” His eyes focus on something in the past or something inside of him, but not on me. “I did all the things they wanted, knowing it wasn’t me. It wasn’t right. I never learned to stand, so when things got tough, I hid and then I ran.”
“You’re right. It’s not enough.” Frustration rips the next words from my mouth. “You felt trapped? By the church? By the town? By mama? By me? What had you feeling so trapped, Daddy?”
“All of it.” He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You don’t know what it’s like to want more and be stuck here.”
“I don’t know what that’s like?” I close the distance between us until I’m standing right in front of him. I’m no longer a little girl, but he still towers over me. I bang my fist on the work table. “I stayed in Glory Falls five years after I was supposed to be gone, and do you know why?”
I couldn’t stop the tears if I wanted to, and I don’t even want to try. He needs to see.
“I stayed because Mama was diagnosed with ALS.” My voice breaks, catching on emotion. “And it was a privilege to take care of her ‘til the day she died. I wouldn’t trade one day of it. What you call a trap, I call love, Daddy. I realize now you wouldn’t know the difference.”
“Kai Anne—”
“Tell me, when you heard she died, did your sympathy card get lost in the mail?” My words ooze venom and disdain. “Along with my birthday cards and all the money we could have used to survive?”
“I sent your Mama money and she sent it back every time telling me to bring it myself. We divorced, Kai Anne. My address was on every letter. She knew where I was.”
“That’s a lie.” I mean to screech it, but it comes out a creaky whisper.
“It’s true. I tried a few times, but she told me to stop if I wasn’t coming home.”
“So you stopped because you were never coming home, right?” I blink at these damn tears that tell him too much. “And me? You never thought to reach out to me? See how I was doing?”
A mixture of emotions passes over his face. It looks like guilt. It looks like regret, but I don’t know this man anymore, so I won’t presume to know.
“I didn’t know what to say after so long,” he finally says. “I wish I had been strong enough to face my mistakes. To face the church and the community.”
He looks down at his boots.
“To face you and your mama.”
“I wish you’d been strong enough not to fuck another woman.”
We both flinch at the vulgarity dirtying the air between us. The last time he saw me he was teaching me scripture, and we were bonded by love. Now all we have is this biological link and a collection of memories that feel like lies.
“Carla was pregnant,” he says softly. “For a long time I resisted what we felt, but eventually, it was too strong, and we gave into it. When she got pregnant, I—”
“You have a family?” I cut in, so braced for his answer, the muscles in my back and neck and arms ache.
“Yeah, we had a little girl.” I think it’s involuntary, the smile and tender look that soften his rocky expression.
Jealousy rocks me. He stayed for her, but not for me. He chose them, but not me. He loves them, but didn’t love me. Not enough.
“Pictures?” Tears water the question. “You have pictures of her?”
He flips through his phone for a minute and hands it to me. Photo after photo of him with his new family at ball games, during the holidays, on vacation. And then finally the one that punches right through my heart with brass knuckles.
His daughter, the little sister I’ve never met, at a dance recital, and him right there with her perched on his knee.
I just can’t. I hand him the phone. I gulp back a knot of emotions that have gotten so tangled up over the years I can’t separate the love from the hate, the bitterness from the regret, the resentment from the longing.
“There was a little girl who used to wait for you to come back.” I sniffle, swiping at the tears that defy my every attempt to hold them back. “I used to think, if I just do well at this dance recital, if I just make the honor roll, if I get the lead in this play, he might come home.”
I drop my head into my hands, tears slipping through my fingers, sobs tumbling past my lips.
“If I can just be good enough, he might come back.”
I lift my head and laugh, cheeks wet.