Page 122 of Honey Pot

“You weren’t there, you were training Nicholas after hours on a Sunday.”

I didn’t want to be angry, I hated the feeling but, where Mama could pull out all the soft, saddest feelings, Dad only formed the most hateful, bitter ones. It felt like all I did anymore was hash out the old memories with the people in my life. I was fucking sick of it.

“I was just a kid when Arlo and I helped Mama paint the kitchen in the Nest. Silas sat in your spot at my fucking High School graduation.” I held up my hand as he opened his mouth with an excuse. “I thought maybe there was something important going on, a valid reason you didn’t show up, but the guys on the team were louder than anyone in the crowd. So if they were there withme, where were you?” I raised my voice as I posed the question.

“I was nineteen when Dean and I found her on the living room floor.” I bit back the tears. “Nineteen, answering the questions my Dad should have been doing when I found my Mom passed out. I went to the doctor's appointments, I kept her spirits up. I read to her, I fed her, I bathed her. Just because you couldn’t bear to see her like that. I was just a kid.”

Dad stared at me, his jaw tight as he nodded. He listened to everything I was saying, but I couldn’t be sure he was actually processing it.

“You aren’t a kid anymore,” he said after a tense moment of silence, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes dropping to the grass. “Clementine can’t erase all of the bad things you suffered, Cael–and I am sorry that you had to do those things. That’s my fault.”

“You’re damn right it is,” Isnapped.

“But,” he raised a hand, stopping me, “you were also a kid when you fell in love with her. You were six, nine, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen.” He listed off the ages like they meant nothing, but I had a memory for each year I had loved her.

“You were young. You didn’t know what love was,” Dad said. “Leaving Texas was what was best for all of us.”

“No, it was what was best foryou,” I snarled.

“You ever stop to think what would have happened to your Mama?” he stopped, stumbling over his words. His eyes shifted to the sky for a split second. “If we had been alone in Texas?”

“It would have been better than dying in a room without windows, begging for you to come see her. She begged, did you know that? She begged us all, all she wanted was you. All I wanted was you. At least in Texas, she would have had Mary and Clementine.”

I watched a flicker of secret cross his face, an angry, deep-rooted secret, and I hated him for it, the ability to just shove it all down and ignore the pain he was in. I wanted to scream at him.

“Your mother's death destroyed the boy you were.”

“You didn’t know the boy I was,” I hissed at him.

“What do you think it would have done to Clementine?” He asked.

The knife to my throat pinched, I could feel the blood dripping from each tiny cut he created with his questions. I couldn’t answer because I knew that he had pushed me into a corner. Mama’s death would have hurt Clementine more than anything; it had, and she wasn’t even around for it.

“You spent your entire life protecting that girl, Cael.” Dad pushed from the grass. “I was just trying to protectyou. Loving her through grief would have broken you beyond repair. It would’ve broken her, and she didn’t deserve that. You can’t love someone like that without resenting them.”

“I don’t believe that.” I shook my head. “You want to blame us, blame the way we loved each other, but I know deep down that there's nothing wrong with the way I love her and there has never been a second in my entire fucking life where I questioned the way she loves me,” I snapped at him. “The grief broke me because you didn’t care as long as I was playing baseball and keeping my headdown. But I couldn’t handle it alone, so I did drugs to feel alive and to keep putting on the mask you wanted me to wear!”

“Blaming me for your addiction, I thought we were over that. Isn’t that what your sessions are for?” Dad asked.

“You wouldn’t know,” I said each word with frustration. “You haven’t asked me a single question about my recovery. You go through Silas, who tells me by the way. He makes sure I know that you care, but you’re too much of a coward to ask me yourself because you don’t want to have this conversation.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Dad nodded after a long beat of silence. Silas had always been more of a Dad to me than he would ever be. The wind ripped around us and the smell of damp lavender kicked up in the air.

Stop fighting.

Mama’s voice floated between us and made me want to cry.

“I have this for you. I should have given it to you a long time ago, but I never thought you deserved to have it.” He held a letter out to me, Honeybug scribbled across it in Mama’s pretty handwriting.

Anger was the first to the party and it seemed that was the new normal but I shoved it down and took the envelope from him.

“I’m going back to Harbor this morning,” he said, backing away. “I’ll be at the office.”

I watched him go, eyes trained on his back as he disappeared down the path.

The paper was old and light in my palm, and it wasn’t clear how long it had been in his possession, but the fear of opening it was still so real. I folded back the flap and sunk back down into the snow-kissed grass, my knees against my chest as I read it.

My sweet boy, my Honeybug.

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