Page 102 of Our Hearts Knew Better

“I know, but…” He sips his water. “I still get tired.”

A dusty feeling of concern settles in me. “How tired are you right now?”

“Not much now,” he assures me as a joke, his lips folded into a smile that lifts into his nose, while I’m keeping a tight pinch on the corners of my own lips. It’s a strange smile. And he’s being extra with his jokes. All of this reminding me how much I don’t know him anymore, how much there is to know.

“Worried about your old man?” he asks with another sip from his glass, and I almost deny the feeling, until he releases me from a response. “I’m fine.”

I scoff as I move past him, farther into the house, tugging up my feet like the floor is paste. “You’re not an old man.”

“They say a heart attack ages you,” he says, keeping his same open tone to my guarded one, to my pushing to see if he’ll go, then make me want to go. Which I admit I only half want to leave.

He makes a noise around another sip when I face him again. “My doctors,” he specifies. “You wanna shut them up too?”

I feel the stretch in my mouth and I pinch,pinch, before I take in the walls that try to make me that girl again.

I’m realizing I’ll always be that girl, but I’m also now the woman who takes care of her.

I might have the urge to smile with my father, because it’s not like we’ve never shared them, or shared laughs, but now that I’m near him, this timeinside, I can see I’m a bulldozer. These walls can’t hold themselves to me anymore.

The next thing I realize is the subtle cool breeze along my skin.

The air conditioner is on.

My eyes travel the space we weren’t in long enough—I wasn’t—to have moregoodmemories, as shallow as they might have been, before reconnecting with my father’s. He watches and waits for me with one hand in the pocket of his sweatpants, these ones a darker gray, close to the gray of my button down crop top.

It seems he has changed. He’s not saying one negative thing about me showing skin. Though it’s only an inch of my navel.

I shift the box in my arms, giving it a lift, and clear my throat to admit, “I need your help with this.” If there are things I won’t recognize, he’s the only one who will.

“I hoped you would,” he says, with a gesture for me to follow him as he starts toward the kitchen, but I step in front at the same time, making him the one to follow me.

I hoped you would.Like he wanted us to go through Mom’s things together, but as he had kept her to himself all those years, he was giving me the choice to do the same.

Not much of a choice, though, when he’s got to have her all along.

“Help yourself to anything that makes your stomach growl,” he tells me, meeting me at the table where I lay the box, and sit in the chair opposite the one he still sits in, instead of diagonal. He gives a glance to the empty chair that was mine, then swallows his last sips of water.

He’s saying similar things he used to say to me, but he keeps watch on me with a more genuine warmth, open face and open posture.

I just treat it as an observation and focus on the box. My mom.

“You hungry?” he prompts when I don’t respond or get back up to find some food.

“I can’t eat anything right now,” I mutter as that same sick bubbly feeling settles into my stomach and steals my appetite. And I know it was a mistake right as he shows me some of that concern I felt.

“Are you eating—”

I make a noise that cuts in. “Stop.” I eye him over the box, the bags under his lids, his crow’s feet now dented deep without his big smiles. “You didn’t once ask me that when I lived here.” When he was giving me silent treatment and leaving me alone for meals.

“Because I knew you were eating,” he says low, down at his glass, and I just sigh.

“Got any scissors?”

My father reaches for the box and rips the tape off like he has Hulk arms, the sudden sound a split in the strained air between us.

A scoffed laugh is jolted out of me, and he smiles.

Honeysuckle overwhelms my senses before I even fold back the flaps and look inside. I gasp in the scent as I pull out an old perfume bottle.

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