Page 77 of The Odds of Happily Ever After
“Feliz aniversário, Gabriel.”
“Thanks.”
“Did you forget the right way to say thank you?”
I took a healthy sip of my rum. “Obrigado.”
“Sim. How are you celebrating your birthday? Party? Date?”
“I’m in Miami.”
“Fancy. With a girlfriend?”
“No.” I emptied my glass.
“You are thirty, no? Is it not time to settle down?”
Catching the eye of a passing waiter, I raised my glass to him with a finger pointed up. “You’rein your fifties,” I told my father.
“I settled down at twenty-five.”
And how did that work out for you?I didn’t voice the question, but he seemed to sense it the same.
He sighed. “Not all marriages turn out like mine and your mother’s.”
If you went by the numbers, the possibility of annulment and divorce wasn’t as uncommon as he wanted to believe. “I’m . . .”Happy?The word jammed in my throat. “I’m fine.”
Thank you, Tala, for giving me the perfect placeholder for these questions.
“I worry about you.” My father’s voice lowered. “It is not easy to be alone.”
I didn’t need him to tell me that. I’d spent so many occasions by myself that another one should have been a non-issue. But between Tala and Luna, I’d gotten used to celebrating with other people.
That was the problem with getting close to others. You became accustomed to not being alone, which made reverting to it hard once they left.
Suddenly, my long-buried resentment boiled to the surface.
“Why did you leave me, then?”
Silence weighed on the other side of the line. I never asked more than surface-level questions, and doing so now clearly took my father off-guard. It might have been the liquor, or how he had the gall to speak of worrying about me when he was one of the reasons for my being alone in the first place.
But after that initial question left my mouth, the others poured out. “Do you have any idea how I felt being abandoned by not just one butbothof my parents? Wondering if I did something to drive you two away? Having to rely on someone who was barely a family friend for a place to live and scrambling for money to pay for the things you promised to cover?”
The waiter appeared with a fresh glass and wordlessly exchanged it for my empty one. I sucked in a breath and battled to compose myself, all too aware that there were strangers around.
“Gabriel . . .”
“Funny how you’re worried about me now when you didn’t seem to care back when I actually needed someone.” I tossed back my rum and put the glass down with a satisfying clink.
“I’m sorry I left you,” my father said somberly. “After Yasmin—I was in a dark place. I could not take care of myself, let alone another person. And every time I looked at you . . .”
He didn’t continue the sentence, but he didn’t have to. I always saw both my parents’ features when I looked in the mirror.
“I needed to be home. To heal. But do not think I don’t regret leaving you. It is my biggest failure, my biggest source of shame, knowing I let you down. I want to try to make things right with you.”
I remained silent because I knew better than to trust my father’s empty words.
“I often wonder what might have happened if we never left Rio. We had a good life here,” he murmured as though talking to himself. “Those first years in California were good, too, but that didn’t last.”
