WOULD I HAVE BEEN ANY MORE shocked if Mama had walked through that door, hailed by wind chimes? Alive and well? No, I don’t think so.
My father is just as I remembered, only older. That’s a stupid observation. Obviously he’s older. I haven’t seen him since I was eight, but he’s still handsome. I see traces of myself in his lips and eyes. He still looks at me like he loves me more than anything. It was a lie then, and surely it’s a lie now.
His name was all I could manage, that first startled breath of a word, and then nothing. All rational thought flees when you see a ghost. My fingers go numb, and the jar of cinnamon I’d just located drops and shatters on the floor.
I glance down at the pile of fragrant glass broken at my feet. I can’t move. I don’t bend to pick it up, clean it up. I just look from the mess at my feet back to my father. Neither of us makes a move toward the other.
“There was no one at the diner . . . the house.” He thumbs back in the direction of Glory Bee. “I just thought I’d check to see if there was someone out back.”
“What . . .” I have to stop for a moment, damming every emotion that would flood this room and drown us both. “Why are you here?”
He takes a cautious step into the shed, eyes exploring the shelves packed tight with jars and spices and all the things Mama needed. He scratches his eyebrow, which used to be a sure sign of nerves. Sometimes he’d do it right before he got up to preach. I don’t know what it’s a sign of anymore. Maybe now he just itches.
“I heard on the news that you were in the hospital.” He takes two more steps in my direction. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Fury elbows my shock aside. Outrage tightens my fingers into fists and boils hot water just below my skin until it overflows, hissing when it hits the surface.
“And what did you think you could do?” I snap. “You didn’t make sure I was okay when you missed my recital. That hurt. Or when I sprained my ankle at cheerleading camp, or broke my wrist in gymnastics.”
“Kai Anne, I—”
“Or how ‘bout this one? You weren’t here when my mama was sick.” My lip betrays a tremor, but I pull it tight. “I could’ve really used your help all those times, but you weren’t there for any of it. So why the hell would you think I need you now?”
“Baby girl, if—”
“Don’t you dare call me that.” Like a riled bull, I force air through my nostrils. “My father called me that, and you’re a stranger. I have no idea who you are.”
“I understand you’re angry.” He shakes his head, his expression helpless at how understated that must sound even to his own ears. “Anger probably doesn’t begin to cover it, but I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing knowing you were in the hospital.”
“I think you’re very good at sitting back and doing nothing. That’s exactly what you’ve done for the last fifteen years. Nothing. And it’s real convenient that you show up now that I’m on television and linked to a very wealthy man.”
“You can’t think . . .” He frowns. “I don’t want your money, Kai.”
“Good, because I don’t have much of my own yet, and if I had millions I certainly wouldn’t give it to you.”
“Maybe this was a mistake.” He directs his words and his eyes to the shed floor. “Carla just thought that—”
“Your mistress?” I slice into whatever crap he almost spouted about that whore he left my mother for.
Anger flashes in the glance he raises to me, but he quells it.
I thought so.
“My wife,” he says softly. “We got married.”
I grab the shelf to steady myself. He married that woman? That somehow makes it worse. She wasn’t some hussy he ran off with on a whim. He committed to her instead of to us. He chose her over us.
Over me.
“I . . . I didn’t realize that. I mean, I had no idea where you went.”
“Vegas.” He crosses over to the work table, picking up a mason jar and inspecting it. “We moved to Vegas.”
“Please tell me you see the irony of the southern Baptist preacher leaving his family with his . . .” The word “whore” hovers over my lips. “Mistress for Sin City.”
“Carla had some friends out there, and we just needed to get far away.”
I bend to finally pick up the cinnamon splattered glass at my feet. As careful with my next words as I am with the shards in my palm.
“Far away from us, huh?”
He looks up, his eyes muddied with regret or some emotion he shields with his lashes before I can fully read it.
“Not from you,” he says softly, swallowing visibly. He opens his mouth and then shuts it before trying again. “Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, Kai Anne. It doesn’t make it right, and I know you don’t care, but—”
“Not so much don’t care as don’t believe it.” I shuffle over to drop the broken glass into a trash can by the work table. Now only a few feet separate us, and there is some pitiful little eight-year-old ballerina in me who wants to fling herself into his arms, who is glad to see him after all these years.
Weak little snot. Sitting on that step in her ballet slippers waiting for him to come home. Waking up on birthday mornings wondering if a card would come. Every recital, secretly thinking this might be the one where he turned back up because he promised he’d never miss. And that little girl in her purple tutu and tights was always fool enough to believe him. Was it a secret hope, a hidden wish that if I made it big, he’d have to come? If I was a big enough star in the sky, it would draw him out from wherever he’d gone, and he’d have to come?
Looks like it worked.
“Mama’s dead.”
I say it just as much for my benefit as for his, a flat, harsh reminder that this man took everything from my mother, who deserves my loyalty. He may look like the man who sat me on his lap and read Bible stories to me, but he is actually the man who left my mother one afternoon and never looked back.
“I heard.” His lips turn down at the corners, and when he lifts his eyes to me I see genuine sorrow.
“Did you ever love her?”
Did you ever love me?
“Of course I did.” He shakes his head, shrugs the broad shoulders I remember thinking could carry the weight of the world. “Things got complicated.”
“Really? Seemed simple to me. You were married and had a family. You don’t fuck around and leave them for the church secretary.” I offer a careless shrug of my own. “But hey, I was a kid. What did I know? Please enlighten me with your perspective. Tell me how very complicated it was.”
“I deserve that.”
“You deserve worse,” I spit, clenching my teeth around a stream of vitriol that’s been building in me for a decade and a half. “Mama deserved better.”
“She did. Much better. I always knew she was too good for me.”
“On that we can agree.” I tap my foot against the trash can. Even now I have to fight the urge to apologize because he’s the one who first taught me to respect my elders.
“It should have been simple, Kai Anne. It should be, but things got so twisted around.” He leans against the work table and sighs. “I never wanted to be a preacher.”
“What?” I frown, recalling all the Saturday nights I saw him bent over the Bible preparing for his Sunday message. “But you loved God. You loved the church.”
“You’re right. I did love God.” He picks up my work gloves, flipping them from hand to hand. “I still do. And I loved the church, but I never wanted to lead it. Never wanted any of that. I came from generations of preachers. It was expected, and I was good at it.”
He glances up with an adult honesty I never would have recognized as a child.
“It was the natural progression of things,” he says softly. “My family wanted me to go to seminary. So I did. And then your grandfather wanted me to be his assistant pastor. So I did. And everyone wanted me to marry your mother.”
He licks his lips and tosses the gloves to the work table before looking back to me.
“So I did.”
“So you didn’t love her.” I want to wail because I know she loved him with her last lucid thoughts.
“I didn’t love her the right way. I loved her the best I could with what I knew love to be.” The callused hand he runs over the back of his neck makes me wonder what he does with those hands nowadays.
“Not the deep way?” My voice is hushed in this room with Mama’s jars where I suspect she stored her loneliness. Where I think she sealed her regrets. “Is that how you loved Carla? Deep cries out to deep?”
He knows exactly what I mean. Surprise flits briefly across his face. Maybe he’s surprised that an eight-year-old grasped that much about a Bible verse and that it stuck with me all these years. Did he really have no idea how much I adored him? How I lived for his every word? That I even felt a childish possessiveness of him with the people from the church who stole his time from me? I think of all the things I lost when he left, it’s that feeling I mourn the most. That my daddy stood on the stars to hang the moon. I’m sure all girls lose it at some point. I’m sure many think they never will. I can testify that when it goes, it’s gone forever.
“I guess you could say it was that deep cries out to deep kind of love.” He looks down at the shed floor. “It feels almost blasphemous to say it, though.”
“It should. To feel it for anyone other than your wife should feel like a blasphemy.”
He only nods.
“I know it won’t be enough, but I have to try to explain this to you.” He sighs, a small smile on his face. “Just about everything in my life felt like a trap, but Carla made me feel . . . free. I felt like myself with her for the first time, even though I knew it was wrong. There had never been anyone I could bare myself to. I could share my darkest parts with, but she saw them and loved me anyway.”
I hate that I know exactly what he means. I felt that with Rhyson almost from the beginning. My eyes settle on my phone on the work table. It holds my darkest secrets, and yet I’ve withheld it from Rhyson. If deep has ever cried out to deep, it does with us. The lies I’ve told, the secrets I’ve kept feel like such a betrayal I can barely stay in the same room with myself.
“All my life I hoarded my secrets and hid my true self from everyone around me.” His eyes focus on something in the past or something inside of him, but not on me. “I did all the things they wanted, knowing it wasn’t me. It wasn’t right. I never learned to stand, so when things got tough, I hid and then I ran.”
“You’re right. It’s not enough.” Frustration rips the next words from my mouth. “You felt trapped? By the church? By the town? By mama? By me? What had you feeling so trapped, Daddy?”
“All of it.” He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You don’t know what it’s like to want more and be stuck here.”
“I don’t know what that’s like?” I close the distance between us until I’m standing right in front of him. I’m no longer a little girl, but he still towers over me. I bang my fist on the work table. “I stayed in Glory Falls five years after I was supposed to be gone, and do you know why?”
I couldn’t stop the tears if I wanted to, and I don’t even want to try. He needs to see.
“I stayed because Mama was diagnosed with ALS.” My voice breaks, catching on emotion. “And it was a privilege to take care of her ‘til the day she died. I wouldn’t trade one day of it. What you call a trap, I call love, Daddy. I realize now you wouldn’t know the difference.”
“Kai Anne—”
“Tell me, when you heard she died, did your sympathy card get lost in the mail?” My words ooze venom and disdain. “Along with my birthday cards and all the money we could have used to survive?”
“I sent your Mama money and she sent it back every time telling me to bring it myself. We divorced, Kai Anne. My address was on every letter. She knew where I was.”
“That’s a lie.” I mean to screech it, but it comes out a creaky whisper.
“It’s true. I tried a few times, but she told me to stop if I wasn’t coming home.”
“So you stopped because you were never coming home, right?” I blink at these damn tears that tell him too much. “And me? You never thought to reach out to me? See how I was doing?”
A mixture of emotions passes over his face. It looks like guilt. It looks like regret, but I don’t know this man anymore, so I won’t presume to know.
“I didn’t know what to say after so long,” he finally says. “I wish I had been strong enough to face my mistakes. To face the church and the community.”
He looks down at his boots.
“To face you and your mama.”
“I wish you’d been strong enough not to fuck another woman.”
We both flinch at the vulgarity dirtying the air between us. The last time he saw me he was teaching me scripture, and we were bonded by love. Now all we have is this biological link and a collection of memories that feel like lies.
“Carla was pregnant,” he says softly. “For a long time I resisted what we felt, but eventually, it was too strong, and we gave into it. When she got pregnant, I—”
“You have a family?” I cut in, so braced for his answer, the muscles in my back and neck and arms ache.
“Yeah, we had a little girl.” I think it’s involuntary, the smile and tender look that soften his rocky expression.
Jealousy rocks me. He stayed for her, but not for me. He chose them, but not me. He loves them, but didn’t love me. Not enough.
“Pictures?” Tears water the question. “You have pictures of her?”
He flips through his phone for a minute and hands it to me. Photo after photo of him with his new family at ball games, during the holidays, on vacation. And then finally the one that punches right through my heart with brass knuckles.
His daughter, the little sister I’ve never met, at a dance recital, and him right there with her perched on his knee.
I just can’t. I hand him the phone. I gulp back a knot of emotions that have gotten so tangled up over the years I can’t separate the love from the hate, the bitterness from the regret, the resentment from the longing.
“There was a little girl who used to wait for you to come back.” I sniffle, swiping at the tears that defy my every attempt to hold them back. “I used to think, if I just do well at this dance recital, if I just make the honor roll, if I get the lead in this play, he might come home.”
I drop my head into my hands, tears slipping through my fingers, sobs tumbling past my lips.
“If I can just be good enough, he might come back.”
I lift my head and laugh, cheeks wet.
“And I was right because here you are. I finally made it, and you finally came back, but you know what?” I look at him, even though the tears in my eyes make him a wavering line. “I may be good enough, but you’re not.”
It’s his turn to be teary eyed. He opens his mouth and then clamps it closed. What can he say to me that will make it right? That will erase Mama’s years of back-breaking work? Of denying herself so I could have? He wasn’t worth her love. And even though maybe on some level, just about every step I’ve taken to get where I am was to prove something to him, to draw him back to me, he’s not worth mine either.
“I think you should go,” I choke out, turning my back on him, an echo of what he did to us all those years ago.
“Kai Anne, let me just say one thing before I go,” he says, voice husky with tears. “I know you’re mad at me, but I’m not giving up,”
“Oh, I think you will.” A harsh laugh abrades my lips. “Giving up is what you do best.”
“I understand if you want nothing to do with me, but you have a little sister who would love to know you. She’s your only blood left in the world, after all,” he says. “I’m leaving my number here on the table.”
For a moment I think he’s gone, and I almost let it all go, but then I hear one more broken whisper before he leaves for good.
“Bye, baby girl.”
I train my eyes on the hands fisted around each other at my waist. I didn’t get to see him leave the first time, and I don’t want to watch him go now. I hold it together until the door closes behind him, and then like the ballerina Mama gave me years ago, I shatter. I’m strewn, my broken pieces so myriad, I could never put them back together into what they were before he re-entered my life. I cry for that little girl who held on to her delusions about her father for too long, and for my mother who loved wrong and only once in her whole life, and could never let go even when that love let go of her.
I sob for hours, or it could be only minutes. I shed a billion tears, or maybe it’s just a few. This is a vacuum that has sucked away all sense of time and reality. In Mama’s shed, I’m suspended in pain and lost in regrets. Hers. Mine. Daddy’s. They’re all here. I pour them all into this room, into these jars, and it’s only once I’m empty that something begins to fill me for the first time. An understanding that I couldn’t have had without this pain at the hands of my father.
Train up a child in the way he should go.
This, like so many of the lessons from my father’s Bible, revisits me.
As a little girl I expected my father to do just that. To train me in the way I should go, but it’s only now that he’s unpacked his life, his mistakes, his weaknesses that I see he did exactly the opposite. Everything he modeled for me was all wrong, but in many ways, I was trained by his failings. Tutored by his mistakes.
Aunt Ruthie told me more than once that I’m just as much my father’s daughter as I am my mother’s. That I’m as much like him as I am like her. I didn’t believe her until now. The secrets. The lies. The hiding. The running. All a latent legacy from my father that, under pressure, has sprung to life.
Hypocrisy scents the air and turns my stomach. I’ve asked so many things of Rhyson that I haven’t been willing to do myself. I let my own fear and insecurity ruin our trust. The foundation he thought we were rebuilding, I’ve cracked with my lies and secrets. San tried to tell me. Rhyson learned from his mistakes and has done everything to show me, but it was coming face to face with my father that held the mirror up to me. My life for the last few months has been one huge blind spot with me overlooking all the ways I’ve done to Rhyson exactly what he did to me. I was blind to it, but now . . . well, now I see.