Page 63 of Ebbing Tides
I guessed it’d just been bottled up for too long.
“It’s okay.” She soothed me, gently stroking the back of my head and neck with one hand. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
Then, to my surprise, I did speak, warbled by years’ worth of heartache. But what I said shocked me even more than my ability to talk.
“I don’t want my dad to die,” I whispered. Then, suddenly embarrassed, I laughed awkwardly and pulled away, wiping my tender palms over my face, as if I could erase the fact that I’d just soaked her shoulder with my tears. “God, what the hell is wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong with you,” she said. “He’s your dad.”
“He’s awful.”
She had seen how terrible he was, and she didn’t even know the half of it.
“He might be awful,” she said, not disagreeing. “But you’re still allowed to feel how you feel.”
“I just …” I huffed out a loaded breath, shaking my head and dropping my hands into my jeans pockets. Then I decided,What the hell? Why not unload it all?“I have spent my entire life wanting him to love me and not knowing why he doesn’t. When Laura was around, he … he was able to pretend, I guess. I don’t know why, but those were the best few years of my life with him. We got along. Maybe he just liked her, and because she came with me, he forced himself to like me, too, but once she was gone, it was over. And now …” I sighed, lifting my bleary eyes to the ceiling and pursing my lips, searching for the words I could never before say aloud. “This was dumped on me. I didn’t want the responsibility of caring for him. I didn’t ask. I didn’t offer. But I agreed to do it because I thought maybe if he didn’t have a choice but be with me, we could fix this.”
“Well, that’s what I said,” she replied, her voice soft and gentle, like a warm blanket on a cold winter day. “That could be why he’s hung on for so long. It’s his unfinished business to make his peace with you … for whatever reason he needs to make peace at all.”
“I can’t get him to talk to me, period,” I muttered, gripping the back of my neck. “How the hell are we supposed tomake peace?”
“Well”—she shrugged before encircling her arms around my waist—“have you ever asked him?”
I sucked in a deep breath, then wrapped my arms around her shoulders and touched my chin to the top of her head. “Asked him what?”
“Why he doesn’t like you.”
“Why the hell do you hate me so much?”I could hear myself asking him the words. God, how old had I been then? My early to mid-twenties maybe?
“Once.”
“And what did he say?”
I swallowed, barely able to remember that conversation, but knowing he hadn’t answered. “Nothing.”
“Well, maybe you should ask him again.”
She sighed with her cheek pressed to my chest, the sound gentle and content. It hurt. I closed my eyes, allowing my soul a moment to revel in the calm she brought. How good it felt. I longed to end every day this way. To wrap my arms around her in my bed, to listen to the sound of her breathing until I finally allowed my mind to crawl toward slumber. To shield her with my body as she shrouded my soul in her goodness and warmth.
From somewhere in the house, one of her kids—CJ maybe—started to shriek, obviously distressed, as the others began to yell for him to “quiet before Mommy hears.”
Melanie pulled from my hold, hastily wiped her cheek, and slapped her hands against her thighs.
“Well, that’s my cue,” she said before hurrying toward the sound of the ruckus.
And as I watched her go, I wondered,How the hell am I supposed to say goodbye to that?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Melanie bandaged my hands after breaking up a fight that Lido had somehow unintentionally started by supposedly liking CJ more than Danny—how the boys had come to that exact conclusion, we never did get a straight answer for.
After assessing the self-inflicted wounds myself, I wasn’t sure they needed to be treated with such attention, but Melanie insisted. I thought that maybe, as much as she felt I needed someone to care for me, she also needed someone to take care of. Someone other than her kids.
“What was your wife like?” she asked, dabbing the antibacterial ointment onto the little cuts scattered across my knuckles on both hands.
There wasn’t a hint of envy in her tone, and that made me smile.
“She was strong … and stubborn,” I replied. “She had fallen in love with me when she was seventeen and never stopped, even though I never said it back. Not until we were much, much older.”
