Page 6 of I Would Stay Forever
“You’re a piece of crap!” Dean was yelling at my dad. He shoved him in the chest, hard enough for Dad to stumble back a step, but Dad didn’t fight back at all. He just stood there andtook it as Dean continued to throw insults his way, ranting about how he was a horrible person. Even though I’d come running out to stop him, I stood in total shock as I heard the words he threw my father’s way. I’d never seen Dean angry, and certainly never like this. I wasn’t sure what it was that he thought my dad had done to deserve it, but whatever it was, he was wrong.
“Hey!” I yelled again, but neither of them heard me over Dean’s ranting. I jumped forward and shoved my dad back with my shoulder, coming to stand between them. Dean was in the middle of jamming his hand forward again and narrowly missed poking me straight in the eye. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Graham?”
I was surprised by my own tone of voice. I’d never been the kind to get into fights, even with my siblings, and I’d never heard so much hostility in my tone.
Dean scowled and stepped back, putting some space between us. I stayed where I was, my back pressed up against my dad. I could feel his chest rising and falling with every breath, going faster than it should. He was upset.
“Nothing,” Dean said. His voice was tight and he was clearly trying to control it, but the anger from earlier was seeping through. He wouldn’t look at me, his scowl still very much fixated on my dad. “Just having a little conversation, man to man.”
I waited, sure that he was just trying to pull his composure back together before he elaborated on that non-answer. When it was clear that he wouldn’t be elaborating, I spun around to look at Dad instead.
“What’s going on?” I repeated the question directed to Dad this time. My voice had less hostility when speaking to him, but it was still hard. I couldn’t turn it off. Not when neither of them would tell me how they ended up here.
Just like Dean, Dad wasn’t looking at me. He kept his gaze over my shoulder, staring straight back at Dean. I was surprised he wasn’t saying something about the way Dean had spoken to him—unless the words hadn’t come out of nowhere like I’d thought. My heart sank as I looked between my dad and Dean, trying to figure out what exactly had gone on here. What could he have done that was so bad that he wasn’t even fighting back as Dean screamed at him?
“Tell her,” Dean said, his eyes like laser beams. “Or I will.”
“Tell me what?” I asked. Dad still wouldn’t look at me. And now that I was thinking about it, it looked like he was going out of his way not to look at me.
“He’s not talking about you,” Dad said. It took me a second to realize that he was talking to me since he was still avoiding my gaze.
“Then who?—”
“He’s having an affair,” Dean said. His voice was almost flat, but as his gaze finally moved to mine, I was hit by the pain in them. His mouth was pressed into a flat line and his hands were curled into fists, but his eyes werehurt. Or maybe, I thought, it was that he didn’t want to hurtme.
I stared at him for a full minute, trying to make sense of the jumbled words in my brain. I was sure I must have misheard him, because the words as I understood them now made no sense at all. My dad wasn’t having an affair. My dad, who loved my mom more than anyone in the world, who brought her flowers every Friday night, who I’d always looked up to as an example of the kind of boy I would want in my life—he couldn’t be having an affair. He wouldn’t.
“What?” I asked. I wanted my voice to sound deadly—because either I’d misheard orDean was lying—but the words just came out like a scared little kid. My breath came in short gasps as I watched him, waiting for him to take it back. Waitingfor him to say he’d misspoken or for him to somehow say something that could rectify these. But he just kept staring, waiting for me to catch on. Waiting for me to realize that there was nothing he could say to fix this.
My dad.
An affair.
I was going to throw up.
“Is she okay?”
My head snapped to the side at the sound of a woman’s voice. I was sure it would be an employee coming out for a smoke, or maybe even Zoey speaking in a different voice than usual. Instead, I locked eyes with the woman who had been by the cars.
The one I thought was a university student.
The one I thought was with Dean.
The truth of the situation was unfolding in front of me like a horror film: This girl, who could only be maybe five years older than me, wearing a tiny black dress. Dad’s car parked in the back lot of a plaza on the opposite side of town from where we lived.
I studied him in the limited light from the lamp post nearby. His hair was slightly disheveled and his tie was loosened, but no more than I would have expected from a day at work. How many times had he done this, claiming he’d had to work late or went out for drinks with some friends? I studied his face for any sign of remorse—for any sign of the man I knew, the man I’d always looked up to, the man who told me to do the right thing, always—and felt a new wave of nausea roll over me as I saw only indifference.
I whirled on Dean again, shoving him in the chest as hard as I could. I was nowhere near strong enough to be able to overpower a football player, but I’d taken him by surprise and he stumbled back.
“Why are you here?” I yelled. This was all his fault. If he hadn’t been here, if he hadn’t confronted Dad, then I wouldn’thave to know this. I could have gone on in blissful ignorance, just like I had been for however long this had been going on until now. Dean didn’t react, so I shoved him again, wanting him to say something, to dosomething. Tears burned at my eyes as I stared at him, my voice was trembling as I repeated. “Why are you here?”
I didn’t know what I wanted of him now. I knew we couldn’t turn back the clock and stop this from happening, yet somehow, I wanted him to fix it. Was I pleading for him to leave and forget what he saw here? To undo what he said and tell me he’d gotten it all wrong?
Dean’s face crumpled. “I’m sorry.”
Those were the words that did me in. I crumpled to my knees, curling my arms around my stomach as I alternated between sobbing and dry-heaving on the pavement below. I could hear the others talking above me—that woman asking again if I was okay and Dad saying he would take me home and Dean telling them to give me my space—but I couldn’t respond to any of it because my world was too busy turning itself upside down.
“Lovey…” a soft voice said and a hand came to rest on my shoulder. I knew without looking that it was my dad. He was the only person in the world that still called me Lovey. Until this moment, I adored it. Now, I knew it was ruined forever. I would never again hear the name and not think of this moment.
