Page 13 of Our Hearts Knew Better

Everyone around here knew Adam’s dad, too, but from the little he’d told me, I’d sensed his dad knew him about as well as my dad knew me.

I took my last bites and last sips in between answering Dad’s questions about which classes I was most excited for my senior year and watching the wind in the bushes outside the windows.

He followed my stare, and the back of the chair pressed hard into my spine when my body and my heart slumped at his weather report; incoming rain storms for not one but two nights in a row.

“You love the rain,” Dad said, an absolute statement, like I couldn’t change my mind. I felt tied in that way when his mouth was the one finalizing a piece of myself. Somebody else might’vesaid it with a bit more curiosity, with some furrow, a nudge for me to express my possible new aversion to something.

I did love the rain. But I couldn’t climb a trellis in it.

Dad was slurping the last of his coffee as I carried my dishes in a clutch to the sink. He didn’t make me clean. It was something to hold over my head—you should be thankful for the life we have, Summer—like the roofs he provides and the food and the clothes. He made sure I was physically protected.

Thanks, Dad, for the least you could do.

I left the dishes to rot in the sink, for his hands. If he taught me anything useful, it was to take my wins where I could get them.

I caught the outline of my reflection in the window, my hair bigger, drying to its frizz, silently talking to that girl, reminding her not to feel bad. I wouldn’t let the way he did take care of me cloud over the ways he didn’t. I wouldn’t let the outside picture summon this sickly guilt that lived low in my stomach. Because other sickly things lived there, too, feelings that would change us forever when they washed over me entirely.

There were so many pretty bushes in our backyard. So many tall trees. Greens, browns, pinks, yellows, and blues, all looking happy and alive. I couldn’t imagine anything happening out there, around all the blooms, because nothing would.

Wishes to be the daughter he wanted, the daughter who only needed her dad, the daughter that this was enough for, still whispered against invisible flickering flames.Us against the world.

What was so wrong with this life?

Everything.

The feeling from that knowledge hollowed me, the experience from last night being the first true thing to fill me up. It was like my love of food. One taste and I needed the whole meal.

I couldn’t help what I wanted, what I yearned for, any more than he could. We’d never align our perspectives. I deserved to grow up, to grow.

“You’re gonna hang around here,” my dad said—told me, with just enough inflection in his voice to seem like he was asking my plans for the day. I wasn’t baited. We both knew I was hanging around here.

I faced him with my new shield of possibility. “Yeah, I’ll find something to do. Probably just watch something or finish my book.” That same shame I felt some last night when I thought about reading leaned me against the sink before I straightened right back up.I can change, I told myself.And I can still love something and want more.

I didn’t like that I had to talk to myself that way, but somebody needed to.

The crinkle in Dad’s eye saidgood answer. And I said nothing else to keep us on the same side of ourfamily feud.

Ironically, my current read was about a single dad. I’d read a lot of those types of romances, the dads who had healthy relationships with their kids. I’d also gravitate toward stories with mothers who were still alive. And I would always read those, because I would never actually have those.

He never asked me about what books I read, or even what I watched. It wasn’t like I could be influenced by anything when my life was school and home, with practically no other people in my life to push the influence.

I’d considered taking a cue from my books and trying to set my dad up with one of my single teachers or some other single ladies to loosen him up, but he would have never gone for it, because none of them would be my mom.

“We’ll finish the unpacking after lunch,” he told me, with a smile for the plans we’d have together, a smoother for the loneliness. I could almost act like it wasn’t there.

He brought his empty cup to the sink and I moved aside with another smile back. His showed off like he was open to anything, open to me, but every time my mouth opened in response, I still had to watch what I said and not ruin his idea of me.

I wished I could reach my fingers into my chest and rub away the ache from not being able to tell him about my night, how I was making friends.

How could I love someone so much yet hate how he is?

I had to turn my thoughts upside down. Take my wins. I wouldn’t have even met Levi and Adam if I hadn’t had to sneak out. At least not the way I did. It wouldn’t have been the same at all, and my next small shimmy reminded me that I, for sure, won something last night.

Cha-ching!

Mom was no longer here.

She wasn’t here in North Carolina. She wasn’t in Georgia. She wasn’t in Tennessee. She wasn’t in Ohio, or Maryland, or Alabama.

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