Page 2 of A Love Letter to Whiske
“I’m not really hungry yet. Going to go check out the surf,” I replied, my smile tight. I didn’t even look up from my drawer, just pulled out my favorite white, strappy top and avoided her eyes. It wasn’t that I was a dramatic teen who hated her mom, I wasn’t — I loved her, but things were different between us than they had been just two short years before.
Okay, this is the part where I warn you — I had daddy issues. I guess in a way, mommy issues, too.
But let me explain.
Everything in my life was perfect, at least in my eyes, until the summer before my sophomore year of high school. That was the summer I opened my pretty gray eyes and looked around at my life, realizing it wasn’t at all what it seemed.
I thought I had it all. My parents weren’t married or even together, but then again they never had been. I was used to that. It was our normal. Mom never dated anyone, Dad dated but never remarried, and somehow we still always ended up together — just the three of us — every Christmas. I’d always lived in my mom’s house, but I’d spent equal time at my dad’s. My parents never fought, but they never really laughed, either. I assumed they made it work for me, and I was thankful for that.
We were unconventional, me bouncing between houses and them tolerating each other for my sake, but we worked. Dad’s skin was white, pale as they come, freckled and tinged pink while Mom’s was the smoothest, most delicate shade of black. Ebony and ivory, with me the perfectly imperfect mixture of the two.
They may not have made enough at their respective jobs to shower me with birthday gifts or buy me a shiny new car on my sixteenth birthday, but they worked hard, they paid the bills, and they instilled that mindset in me, too. The Kennedy’s may not have been rich in dollars, but we were rich in character.
Still, not everything is as it seems.
I never understood that saying — not really — not until that summer before tenth grade when everything I thought I knew about my life got erased in a violent come-to-Jesus talk. My mom had drank too much one night, as she often did, and I’d humored her by holding her hair back as she told me how proud she was of me between emptying her stomach into our off-white toilet.
“You are so much more than I ever could have wished for,” she kept repeating, over and over. But then the literal vomit turned to word vomit, and she revealed a truth I wasn’t prepared for.
You see, the story I’d been told my entire life was that mom and dad were best friends growing up. They were inseparable, and after years of everyone around them making jokes about them dating, they finally conceded, and it turned out they were perfect together. They had a happy relationship for several years, a bouncing baby girl who they both loved very much, but it just didn’t work out, so they went back to being friends. The end. Sounds sweet, right?
Except it was a lie.
The truth was much uglier, as it so often is, and so they hid it from me. But mom was tequila drunk that night and apparently had forgotten why she cared so much about lying to me. So, she spilled the truth.
They had been best friends, that much was true, but they had never dated. Instead, my dad had turned jealous, chasing every guy who dared to talk to my mom out of her life. But he didn’t stop there. One night, when she was crying over the most recent guy who’d dumped her, my dad had come on to her. And he didn’t take no for an answer.
Not the first time she said it.
Not the eleventh.
She counted, by the way.
Mom was seventeen at the time, and I was the product of that night — a baby not meant to be born from a horror not meant to be lived.
I guess this is the part where I tell you I immediately hated my dad, and in a way I did, but in another way I still loved him. He was still my dad, the guy who’d called mebaby girland fixed me root beer floats when I’d had a bad day. I wondered how the soft-spoken, caring man I’d grown up around could have committed such an act.
For a while, I lived in a broken sort of limbo between those two feelings — love and hate — but when I finally had the nerve to ask him about it, to tell him that I knew what happened, he had nothing to say. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t try to defend himself, and he didn’t seem to hold any emotion other than anger that my mother had told me at all. After that, I slipped farther toward hate, and I stopped talking to him a short five months after the night my mom told me the truth.
And though I shouldn’t have resented my mom for not telling me sooner, I did. She didn’t deserve me to blame her for letting me think my father was a good person, but I did. And so, my life was never the same.
Like I said, it wasn’t that I hated my mom, because I didn’t. But there was a raw wedge between us after that night, an unmovable force, and I felt the jagged splinters of it scrape my chest every time I looked at her.
So, more often than not, I chose not to.
“Okay,” she replied, defeated. “Well, I hope you have fun.” I was still rummaging, searching for my bottoms, and she turned to leave but paused long enough to call back over her shoulder. “I love you.”
I froze, closed my eyes, and let out one long breath. “I love you too, Mom.”
I would never not say those words. I loved her fiercely, even if our relationship had changed.
By the time I found my suit, dressed, strapped my board to the top of my beat-up SUV and made it to the beach, the weight of the day was threatening to suffocate me. But as soon as I set my board in the water and slid on, my arms finding their rhythm in the familiar burn that came with paddling out, I began to breathe easier.
The surf in South Florida was far from glorious, but it worked for my purposes. It was one of my favorite ways to waste a day, connected with the water, with myself. It was my alone time, time to think, time to process. I used surfing like most people used fitness or food — to cope, to heal, to work through my issues or ignore them, depending on my mood. It was my solace.
Which is why I nearly fell off my board when Jamie paddled out beside me.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he mused, voice low and throaty. He chuckled at my lost balance and I narrowed my eyes, but smiled nonetheless. Everything I thought I knew about his body was erased in that moment and I swallowed, following the cut lines along his arms that led me straight to his abdomen. There was a scar there, just above his right hip, and I stared at it just a second too long before clearing my throat and turning back toward the water.
