Page 92 of Our Hearts Knew Better

I can’t help my laugh at the loyalty lines that have already been blurred. “Like you told her I was taking care of Floyd?” He drops his hand as I risk to say, “You owed me.”

“No,” he says back, shaking his head. “You owed me.”

I follow him out, up his ass to keep him walking, while slowing down the question that risks more falling apart.

Did I?

You Be Better

Summer

There are so many leaves on this bush. They conceal me, but while they’re concealing me, they’re also concealing too much of my father’s house.

Levi was the first—and only—person I told I was coming here, and I turned him down when he asked if I needed company. My heart swelled with the pain of knowing he wanted to be beside me, and my thumb short-circuited over that N and O for too long before I finally pressed down and sent it, adding a quickthanksbefore I shoved my phone away.

Adam seems to have gotten even busier and more and more unavailable.

But I would have told him no too—if I had asked him and if he had offered.

I have to face my father myself.

And not trusting Levi was a lie, so I’m here again, back behind the bush, going over what to say before I go in and say it.

How do I go in? Do I barge through the door, taking immediate control? That’s what my bones bounce for me to do, but that would give him another heart attack, for sure.

I just have to knock.

But that will give him more of an upper hand. He’ll open the door and I’ll just be standing there, handing myself over on a platter for him to poke at.

“You’re hiding?”

I jolt at my father’s voice, a wince throughout my body at the proximity of the raspy sound, deeper and tired, from age and from sickness.

Now I have no plan.

I think about when I finally saw that lizard again, this morning, dead on the bathroom floor, and then think of how those people who talk way too fucking much say that a lizard in the house is a sign of good fortune.

Being caught behind a bush in front of my old house isn’t luck turning around for me.

I’m officially firingthemfrom talking.

“Iwasn’thiding,” I announce as I step out into the open, a breeze blowing my hair across my face in an attempt to conceal me again. I finger the strands away. “I was spying.”

My father smiles at me, so like the smile he’d give me most mornings at the table over breakfast, before he left me to eat alone. He looks how he sounds; tired, in a shirt and sweatpants, that he’s probably sweating in if he still keeps the house warm.

His hair’s thinner, his body’s thinner, and I try to keep my thick skin at the sight of him this way, so he can’t dig in and make me feel sorry for him.

“Wanting to confirm your old man’s dead on the floor, you need to get closer,” he says, gesturing to the front window.

My father’s delivering punchlines and I still feel like the joke. Unsteady. The ground coming up around my feet to swallow me whole. I press my wedges into the dirt like I’m welcoming it.

“This isn’t funny.” I sound so defensive, defensive of the girl who grew up with him, the girl I still am around him, instead of the woman I became away from him. I need to merge both into one person, but I can’t even think of what else to say right now.

My father’s smile has faded, with a quick raise of his hands, a submission that seems to freeze me.

“You coming in?”

Until he says that, and my lungs squeeze with the same suffocation I felt when I was inside those walls, my feet pulling me backward, an inner facepalm for thinking this would be good for my head.

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