Page 76 of Brazen Deceits

Because I haven’t agreed to an official “probationary period,” I don’t know anything else about the trip to Chicago this weekend. I mean, besides the existence of this new van and the fact that the guys have been spending every free moment outside working on it.

I haul my backpack and a paper bag of toiletries and shoes out to my dad’s old beater. It’s a competition between his car and Jansen’s for which one would be more likely to leave parts trailing it down the highway. My dad hops out, pulling me into a hug, my bags banging against his legs.

“Clara-girl! How’s my big-time college girl doing?” He gets my bags, tossing them into the back. I slide into the passenger seat while he hurries to the other side of the car. “How’s your semester going? Are you acing all your classes like always?”

I laugh. “Of course, Dad. You know I won’t let anyone beat me.”

He squeezes me one more time. “I’m so glad you’re coming home for the weekend. Your mother’s been wanting to talk to you. It’s time the two of you clear the air.”

“I’m not the one who needs to apologize, Dad.”

He tsks. “You know how your mother gets. Just say the words and you’ll be fine.”

I shake my head, watching as we speed away from the house. No one’s there to see me off. No one even checked in on me for the last couple of days. I never expected to feel lonely in a house full of people I care about, but there you have it. I was.

My dad chatters about the liquor store on the way home, the rush they’re expecting this afternoon, the new personalities he has to manage. I smile at the right points and laugh when it’s expected, but my mind is back in my room, listening to the creaks and groans of the house as the guys get ready for Sunday.

And I want to be there.

“Dad—what makes someone a good person?”

My dad stops his story, glancing at me before turning back to the road. “That’s a tough one, Clara-girl. Any reason you’re asking?”

I watch the stripes on the road flashing by. “I don’t know. I just feel like maybe we can’t tell who’s good and who’s bad, not really, not without knowing them. So how do you know? How can you tell?”

He peeks at me, taps the wheel with his pointer finger, then swallows, his face grim. “Did I ever tell you about your grandfather?”

My dad never talks about my grandfather. He’d let Abuelita talk about him, but Dad never jumped in. “No.”

His hands are tight on the steering wheel, his eyes locked on the road in front of him. He doesn’t want to talk about this.

I’m about to tell him to forget it, to tell him some stupid story about Emma’s sister, but he dives in before I can form the words. “My dad, he was a hard man. What mattered to him was that we were the perfect family. We had to wear the right clothes, always say ‘yes sir, no sir’ when we talked to him, always had to present our best selves. And we were praised for it. ‘Oh, those McElroys are always so put together, so polite, so…good.’”

Dad blinks back tears, some memory catching him. Two exits later, he sighs, clearing his throat. “But we weren’t any of those things. We were terrified of our dad. Anything we did wrong, any sign that we didn’t fit into the perfect image of his family, we were punished. And I don’t mean we were grounded.”

He shakes his head, tears shining unshed in his eyes. “I could deal with it. I thought if I took the brunt of it, then Mama, my little sisters, they’d be safe. But of course, that’s not what happened. One morning, I found my little sister Tiffany in the bathroom, bruises on her wrists, on her arms. She wasn’t even crying. She told me she’d lost the present she was supposed to give her teacher for Christmas, but she hadn’t told Dad because she didn’t want to get in trouble again. Again, Clara.” He blinks back tears. “How many times, and I hadn’t noticed?”

He clears his throat. “Dad ran into the teacher at the grocery store and mentioned the gift to her. Once he realized itnever made it, he lost it. He screamed at Tiffany all night, he shook her, he told her she was a failure, that she’d shamed the family. My sweet little sister had bruises, was icing them in secret on the bathroom floor after being kept up all night, all because she lost a stupid gift.”

He glances at me. “She was only seven. She’d just learned how to read, for God’s sake. So what if she lost some fucking fancy pen? God, I never forgave him for that, the way he took the sparkle out of my little sisters’ eyes. Both of them. Over and over again, their lights kept being dimmed.”

I curl up in my seat, scared of where this story is going. “As I got older, I got madder, Clara. I realized my family wasn’t perfect, despite what everyone else thought. My dad, even if everyone thought he was great, he was a bad man. And I just wanted someone to see it, to tell me I wasn’t crazy, that we really were broken, hurting, literally bleeding to be something we could never ever be.”

He pauses, signaling a lane change, working up to the next part of his story. “When I was fifteen, my dad went out of town to deal with some issue with his parents’ estate. I called my aunt, my mom’s sister. I told her what had been going on, asked her to come, to rescue us, to fix it. And Adriana was there, braiding my sisters’ hair, talking to my mom in Spanish so fast I couldn’t always follow it. But at the end of the week, nothing changed. My mom refused to ‘uproot’ us, she said that I was exaggerating, that she and my dad had normal fights, just like any couple. That us kids were fine, that we were safe.

“When my dad came back, he figured out what had happened. I don’t know if he guessed or if Mama let somethingslip, but either way, that night was the last I spent in that house. It was long, it was bad, and even now I don’t like to remember it. The next morning, I dragged myself out to the street, forced myself to my feet, spit blood in the gutter and vowed I would never go back until my father was gone.”

He holds my gaze. “I kept that promise, Clara.”

“Oh, Dad.” I reach for one of his hands, and he lets me take it.

“I left my sisters there, my mom there, left them with him and just ran. And I’ll pay for that choice for the rest of my life. My mom forgave me. I still pray that my sisters will let me back into their lives. I did a lot of things, Clara, after I ran away. Things that should have sent me to jail, things that I regret with every bone in my body. I stole—food, clothes, drugs, and so many damn cars. I camped in empty houses, trashing them. One after another, I saw friends of mine overdose, go to jail, sometimes just disappear—there one day, gone the next.

“But then I met your mom. She saved me, Clara.”

Tears streak down my cheeks, imagining my dad, younger than me now, so alone, so scared, so broken. This rock in my life, set on such a shaky foundation.

My dad pulls his hand from mine, downshifting as he zips onto the exit. “Here’s the thing—after all that, all I did, all the shitty choices I made, I don’t know if I’m a good person or a bad person, Clara-girl. I can’t guess how God will judge me. I know I try every day to be a good man, to make loving choices. But I’m not all good or all bad. And as much as I hate to say it, we’re all bits of good and bad, Clara, even you. You’re a light, mija, but lights need shadows to shine.”

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