Page 143 of Again, In Autumn

Before I have the chance to talk to him further, my dad leaves. He drops Heddy’s bag at the back door and takes off. I don’t call or text him. I just let him go without saying what I should have at the table.

That I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t need his money or food or house. His role in my life can’t be puppet master. A parent should be more than that, and should have always been, but we let him get away with neglect because we didn’t know better.

Meanwhile, Heddy has always loved, cherished, and guided us. I thought she was filling in for my mother, but I realize now that she had three shoes to fill: a mother, a father, and a friend. She did them all so seamlessly. Maybe my father couldn’t see us because he was mourning his wife of twelve years, but I wouldn’t know because he never said. Heddy parented us while mourning her best friend of twenty years, alongside Francesca and me.

“Go talk to Adam now,” she tells me while we do the dishes.

Maggie and Diego have since gone home. David is bathing the kids and getting them ready for bed. Kate and Caroline eat another slice of pie in the living room while watching a Christmas movie. Francesca hasn’t come out of her bedroom since she returned to the house and stormed up the stairs.

I wrap up in my jacket and walk through the dark to Adam’s house. I knock on the door.

Maggie answers, a sad smile on her face, Christmas dog pajamas on. “He’s not here,” she says before I can get a word out.

“Oh. I’ll come back later, I guess,” I say, thinking he’s gone for a walk or a drive.

“No, Vienna, he left.” She wrings her hands nervously. “He took his bag and his dog, and they went back to Chicago.”

The wind gets knocked out of me. I clasp my chest, struggling to breathe.

“That’s not possible,” I mutter.

“He just needed to get away, fast.” Maggie grips my shoulder. She hesitates. “Look…I went to see him in Nashville after he moved there, and the boy hadn’t showered in weeks. He was a complete mess. He lost the first job he had lined up because he didn’t show up. He bombed the first gig he had because he couldn’t get any words out.”

I move my hand to my face, pressing my fingers into wet eyes, feeling the tears drip down my palms. “But we had a plan. He was going to come to Atlanta –”

I feel like I’m crumbling.

“I screwed this up so bad,” I whimper.

She says, “He’s afraid that pining after you is going to affect his career and his dreams, like it almost did last time.” She runs her hand along the length of my hair. “If you two are meant to be, you will be. You found each other again once.”

I finally say, “I don’t want to wait fourteen more years.”

“Then don’t. Talk to him. Make it right.”

When I walk away from her, I think about walking back to my property, sitting in my bedroom and crying in that house full of people. Instead, I reach the bottom of the treehouse, stare at the big empty box in the branches, and climb up in the dark. I relax against the planks and curl my knees up, crying into my sweatpants, not caring about the cold on my fingers or what animal could be waiting at the bottom when I finally climb down.

It’s so dark and quiet, that my muffled sobs are the only sound I hear.

I’m so jealous of people finishing their Thanksgiving meals and setting up Christmas trees, unconcerned with ultimatums from their absentee fathers or arguments with delusional sisters. Or the potential loss of a good, loving, funny, compassionate man.

The wooden house moves.

“Ahh!” I scream, scrambling to hold on to something. This whole thing is about to come crumbling to the ground. Francesca was right. This thing is not stable and I’m going to die here, tonight, next to the hamster we buried twenty years ago.

“It’s just me,” David says, climbing up the ladder. “This is so much smaller than I remember.”

He pulls himself up with difficulty and sits opposite me, both of us breathing heavily for different reasons.

“You scared the shit out of me,” I admit.

He says, “I scared the shit out of myself. A fall from that height…Fran would be widowed.”

“How did you know I was up here?”

He sways his head in the dark. “Well, you and Adam used to come up here all the time. Plus, I heard you crying.”

“How do you know we came up here?” I wipe my face.

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