Chapter Nineteen

Becca

 

It was hard waking up without Hale beside me. When I read his note that he’d gone to see his brothers, it was hard not to follow and make certain he was okay. But the hardest thing of all was leaving Hale’s bed to return to my childhood home.

Momma didn’t give me a choice. “If you ever loved me, Becca June, you’ll come and tell your daddy goodbye.”

That’s the call that woke me from sound sleep and the last thing I wanted to hear.

My Mercedes rolls to a stop. I climb out, slowly, my heart heavy and chills racking my spine. I look up at the grand estate. I don’t feel what I feel because my father is dying and the hours he has left are few. The cold taking up residence deep within me is due to fear. Fear of what he’ll say and what his words will do to me.

At thirty-two years old, I’m still afraid of my father. It saddens and disappoints me, but it sickens me more than anything.

I ring the doorbell beside the heavy door that marks the entrance to my childhood home. The door looks new. It’s not. It’s a door capable of keeping a giant out and secrets and screams locked tight within. Momma has a thing about keeping up appearances with things looking fresh, no matter how badly they’re falling apart on the inside.

The door was recently sanded to perfection. I slide my fingers over it, feeling the slickness of the wood as I wait. She chose a dark stain this time. It goes nicely with the ornate ironwork that decorates the windows. I wish I could tell her I liked it. I wish I could tell her a lot of things. But like the feelings stirring deep in my gut, my conversations with Momma have never been sweet ones.

Even as a child, I noticed the strain between us. I wanted to connect with her as easily as Trin and her momma so effortlessly did. Once, when I was nine and my birthday was just a few days away, I tried to mirror Trin to see if Momma would respond like Miss Silvie.

Momma pulled away, frowning. “What are you up to, Becca June?” she asked.

“I want to be close to you,” I admitted. “Like the Summers are. Trinity and her momma hug all the time when she comes home from school, in the kitchen while making supper, anywhere, really, they hug all the time.”

“Sylvie Summers?” she asked, her voice judgmental, as if seeing more than what was there. “Didn’t I tell you she refused to hold the Confederate flag during our annual picnic last year at the club? Sweet heavens, you’d have thought we were asking her to hold up the building itself.”

I knew that flag was offensive, even then. Miss Silvie herself had told me why. She was teaching Trinity and I how to make cranberry cookies. She explained why the flag was special to some and why it hurt so many others. She didn’t judge, but she did make us understand. But me talking to Momma wasn’t about what Miss Silvie did. It was about what she and Trin had that I really wanted.

“Momma, I want us to be close,” I repeated.

“To spend time together?” she guessed. “Maybe go shopping?”

The annoyance in her tone already told me I was fighting a losing battle. My mother never made me cry like my father. But that day, my tears didn’t want to stop.

Momma raised her small thin brows she’d plucked one too many times, her impatience with me growing at the sight of my tears. She motioned around the room, where the dining room was stuffed to the gills with traditional Southern men and their wives. The clink, clink of meticulously polished silverware tapped against the stark white dishes. “What do you call this, Becca June?” she asked.

There wasn’t so much of a sliver of what I’d hoped for. Instead, there was only confirmation of what I’d always suspected. I was a burden to my mother. An obligation. I wasn’t something to simply love and cherish. “Wipe your eyes, Becca June. People are staring.”

I shake out my hands. These are the type of memories my childhood home stirs. I don’t need them now. I’ve never needed them.

The door swings open, the motion so awkward I know it’s not whom I’m here to see. I was prepared to find my cousin, Kirk, in the kitchen, complaining about liberals and blaming everything on the manipulation of the media, or perhaps in the billiards room shooting pool with my other cousins. I hadn’t expected him to answer the door.

Age wasn’t kind to Kirk. He’s heavier, the little hair he has left thinning at the top. He doesn’t bother saying hello. Neither do I. “Upstairs,” is all he bothers with.

I try to relax my hold on my purse strap. I don’t realize how hard I’m gripping it until I have to shake out my hand when Kirk turns his back.

The air inside the house is frigid, as my father prefers. In another house, all the wood paneling would provide a sense of hominess and small children would slide down the long winding banister. This house has no such things. I wasn’t allowed to be “childish,” even as a child. This is the place where happiness comes to die and where the dreams you have are quickly silenced.

Kirk hops up the stairs in his bare feet. Momma never allowed shoes upstairs. It’s the reason Kirk glances over his shoulder and frowns at my feet.

My mint heels are high, but respectable, and my white cold-shoulder dress sleek, yet professional. “I’m not staying long,” I say, before he can remind me to take my shoes off.

“Suit yourself,” he mutters, caring about as much as I do.

We reach the second floor. Just as I didn’t expect Kirk to answer the door, I don’t expect all the people gathered along the east wing. Matthew is here with his wife, Lynda. Matthew appears relieved to see me and he almost smiles. “Hi, Becca,” he says.

“Hi, Matthew,” I reply.

Brent’s drunk. The tangy smell of Wild Turkey seeps across the space with his sharp exhale. He never married. Neither did Parker, who, like Brent, is only standing because the wall is holding him up.

Both give me the once-over, as if barely recognizing me through their haze. I pass them and Sully, and his wife, Jerilyn, holding his hand, while her free one strokes her pregnant belly. I nod to her. She was nice enough to invite me to their wedding. I sent a gift, but declined the invitation.

I keep walking, my head neither high nor bowed. I try to avoid eye contact with Parker. He’s on wife number four and it shows in every wrinkle on his face. Davey crosses his arms, his long hair covering his eyes as he leans forward. It doesn’t quite conceal him. I know he’s watching me. But like most of my family, he doesn’t say anything.

I was the black sheep of the family long before I left. Nothing’s changed. If anything, there’s another coat of midnight dark wool covering my hide.

Momma waits at the end of the hall speaking quietly to Reverend Ellis. She abruptly quiets when she sees me.

“Hello, Becca June,” Reverend Ellis says, smiling kindly.

“Hello, Reverend,” I reply. “Thank you for coming.”

He places his hand on my shoulder. “I’m here for whatever you need, child.”

I tilt my head respectfully and turn to my mother.

The frigid temperature in the hallway drops several degrees when I look at her. She’s not scowling. People are watching, after all.

I want to cry and it has nothing to do with my father. In my absence, my mother became old, small, and frail, and I couldn’t help her.

My heart clenches. I try to be kind, wishing it wasn’t so much of an effort and praying that awful feeling spreading like wicked wildfire across my chest will cease its torment.

“Hello, Momma,” I say, bending to kiss her cheek.

She clutches my face gently, a gesture of tenderness she’s never demonstrated before. It’s brief, but it’s there, a minute effort that took a great deal from the woman who gave me life.

I take that moment and tuck it away, deep within that space in my heart reserved just for her. She may not like me, and I may never have meant as much to her as I would’ve hoped, but she’s still my Momma and I love her.

“You look well,” she says.

“Thank you,” I say, my voice strained and delicate enough to barely be more than a wisp of air. “You do too, ma’am,”

I meant what I promised myself all those years ago, that I’d never return to this house again. But my father is dying. By the way everyone has gathered, today might very well be the day.

That little piece within my heart I reserve for my mother always hoped she’d reach out to me in kindness. It prayed she’d someday find the courage to tell me that I’d made it, and that she was proud. But that would have gone against my father’s wishes. Sick or not, she believes he rules and decides for the family.

It hurts. In many ways, I remain that little girl in the dining room packed with people, desperately trying to connect with a woman more concerned about what others would see than with the child who desperately needed her.

“Thank you for coming,” Momma says. “He’s been waitin’ on you to arrive.”

He has . . .

I follow her inside their bedroom. This was a place I’d only ever seen from the hallway. We weren’t allowed in my parents’ quarters. To them, it was sacred, not a place for nosey children with dirty hands and tendencies for destroying things.

One Christmas, my cousins and I dared each other to go into the room and retrieve one item as proof they’d been fearless enough to enter. Kirk made it out with my mother’s silver hair brush. It was the same brush Daddy beat Kirk with when he caught him. He’d never officially adopted the boys when my uncle and aunt passed, but he disciplined them as he saw fit.

Dark, parquet wood covers the floor. More paneling covers the walls. The room is huge, the four poster bed near the window practically swallowed by its massiveness.

I look in the direction of the bathroom. I don’t see my father buried beneath the thick burgundy and gold paisley comforter. But, apparently, he’s there.

“He can’t get up anymore,” my mother says, guessing correctly that I didn’t see him. “The medicine the doctor gave him robbed him of his appetite and he’s lost some weight. But he’s there.”

“Is that Becca June?” A hoarse and unrecognizable voice calls to me from the confines of the bed.

I knew he’d call me by my full name. Still, the name pokes through me, swimming through my veins like a river of glass.

“Yes, darlin’,” Momma replies, her voice louder than she would usually allow. “She’s come to see her daddy.”

For her to address him as such does a lot to me. None of it’s good.

“Tell her to come closer,” he says.

Momma motions me forward and turns to go. She doesn’t wait for me to accept the invitation. She simply presumes that I will, shutting the door quietly behind her and leaving me alone to face my fate.

I no longer have feet; cinderblocks have replaced what my shoes once were. I no longer have legs, just long rods of steel making it hard to bend my knees. I’m sick. It shouldn’t be this way. I should be throwing myself on top of my father, sobbing, begging him not to leave me, telling him to get better—pleading with him to fucking love me.

I shouldn’t be so terrified of a feeble old man. But I am. Once more, I’m that little girl, wanting more than anything to connect with her mother, only for this awful and dark house to close in around me, reducing me to nothing but a fragile, petrified being.

I hate it here. I want to leave. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to hear what he’ll say or have him use this last moment to cut me down.

A small dining room chair is placed in front of the bed. The seat cushion is thick, black velvet, allowing those who’ve come to pay their respects to be as comfortable as possible. There’re two more chairs by the window. But this seat is reserved solely for me.

I stop short of reaching the bed, stunned by the shell of a man my father has become. The round robust face that would flash fire engine red whenever he was angry is nothing more than loose skin and sunken cheekbones sharp enough to cut me. His wheat-colored hair, once peppered with traces of silver, is all but gone. Fragile pieces of silver poke through scattered places along his spotted scalp. The chemo destroyed everything except the cancer.

“Hello, Daddy,” I say.

I’m not certain he hears me. My voice is softer than the way Momma spoke.

Dark rimmed eyes scan my face. My clothes are neither flashy like I wear out to dinner with Hale nor conservative enough for church. They speak of how young I still look and how successful I became, despite how badly my father wished for my downfall.

Because I was bad.

Because I was disrespectful.

Because I wasn’t the boy he’d wanted.

Instead, I was a girl he couldn’t submit to his will, who became the woman who’d never succumb.

“I always knew you’d come back,” he says.

My entire body bristles, prepared for a fight I don’t want to have.

Until he smiles.

The corners of his mouth lace with genuine humor. I’m not sure how to take it. I steel myself for bitter words he’ll lash like a whip to scar me more, so I’ll never heal.

He starts laughing, loudly. It’s hard enough to cause him pain, and given his delicate condition, hard enough to crack his sternum.

He’s trying to be funny. With me.

Regardless of how he treated me, there was a side of him that drew friends and made him popular. “Your father is the funniest man I know,” Tim Robinson, our accountant, once told me.

My father was famous for being quick and clever, often bragging how his silver tongue was what had charmed my mother. It wasn’t a side I experienced firsthand. Until now.

My father is joking with me on his deathbed.

That silver tongue was one of the many things I’d inherited from him. I don’t think he noticed, unless it was directed at him. Then it wouldn’t cause him to laugh, but rather spur his anger and vengeance.

I battle with whether I should come back with something just as funny or maybe something wicked. No one has to tell me my father’s number is up. By the looks of it, death is mere hours away.

This is my final opportunity to be with him. I could leave on good terms or pound the last nail on the coffin, dramatizing the spoils of our horrible relationship. I can’t stomach either. I can’t yell at this frail man and demand to know why I was never good enough, why I had to be what he wanted in order for him to love me. I can’t even bring myself to say I forgive you. So, I say the only thing I can.

“I’m here like you asked, Daddy.”

“You’re not scrawny anymore, Becca June.”

It’s an odd thing to say. I always had curves. But the last time he saw me, I still had a thin figure of an athletic twenty-two-year-old. Maybe, like me, he’s struggling for things to say.

“No, sir, I’m not.”

“What’re you doing now?” he asks. “You married? Got yourself a husband and kids?” He gives me the once over only my father can. “Someone taking care of you?”

I almost mention Hale. But the only thing Hale takes care of is my heart and that’s not what my father is asking. “I’m not married. I don’t have children. I support myself, sir.”

My tone is respectful, the same way it would’ve been when I was a teen and wanted to make a point or explain what I needed. Back then, regardless of how softly and intelligently I spoke, depending on his mood, he’d either grant me what I wanted or scream at me for asking.

Old habits die hard. It takes everything I have not to flinch, expecting those cruel words or an inevitable blow.

“No one would have you?” he asks, frowning.

I should leave in a huff right now, turn on my heel so my back is the last thing he sees. Instead, I laugh. This man is honestly stunned some prince on horseback hasn’t picked me up.

“Sir, there were plenty of men who wanted me. I just didn’t want them.”

“You one of dem lesbians now, girl?”

My smile falters. “No. There just hasn’t been anyone yet.” That’s a lie. But I don’t want to bring Hale into this. I won’t risk Daddy putting him down.

My gaze travels to the window, where the heavy curtains swallow any sunlight that dares to bleed into the room. Here, in my parents’ room, only darkness welcomes darkness.

When I was little, I often looked away from my father, too scared to face him. When I stopped looking away, that’s when things really changed between us and the resentment and tension soared to unstoppable heights, leaving everyone else walking on eggshells until the next battle began.

I turn back to him. Only a second or so passed. It wasn’t enough for that feeling squeezing my chest to lessen. If anything, I receive an extra harsh churn when I look back upon his face. There’s nothing left of the strong and imposing man I knew. But even though he looks weak and feeble, he’s still that man capable of causing harm.

“Do you know the Cougars?”

Wrinkled eyelids tent over his hazy irises. “Of course, I do. They’re the best team in the league. Some big shot went in a few years ago and shook everything up, cleaning up a reputation they’d all turned to shit.” He frowns. “Why? You that guy’s secretary or something?”

“No, daddy. I’m the guy who saved the Cougars. I’m the one who shook everything up.”

He makes a face. “You weren’t stupid with all that money your grandmother left you, were you? When you spent it all at once, I thought you’d gone and messed up everything she tried to do for you.” He huffs. “At least you did right by her and what she gave you.”

His comments confuse me. I’d used the money Nana June left me to pay for college. There was plenty left over. When I left, I turned it over to Momma. It was her mother’s money, after all, and there was always a part of me who felt Momma needed it more than I did.

“I used it for my education,” I say, not wanting to rat Momma out. She’d obviously hidden it from Daddy. “The rest of my success came from hard work.” I cross my legs. “You never heard about me with the Cougars? Never read about me in the paper or saw me on TV?”

“Naw, I didn’t want to hear about you. Nothing good, anyway, only the bad.”

I frown, trying to understand how he can speak to me like nothing was ever wrong between us and then say something like that. “Why?”

His eyes moisten and it becomes the inevitable death of me. “So you could come back here, to me, to your family, Becca June.”

A tear dribbles from his left eye, followed by another.

The sour taste leaves my stomach, crackling like a dying ember until it reaches my throat and causes my eyes to sting beyond measure.

“You don’t get it, do you, girl?” he accuses. “You never have. You were supposed to need me. You were supposed to beg me for advice, seek me out so I could guide you—so I could make you into the lady you were destined to be.”

He coughs, the cacophony of words too much for his weakened state. “You were supposed to need me,” he says again. “I was supposed to be your hero. Just like every father dreams he can be.”

Those giant pieces of cinderblock I’d protected my heart with each time we’d fought, that beautiful indestructible wall I’d created to protect myself against his next blow or terrible word, cracks, falling apart and littering the ground.

It’s not an immediate destruction. No, my walls were stronger than that. But as they fall, piece by piece, behind it, the light bathed in forgiveness shines a brilliant light.

“You wanted to be my hero?” I stammer.

“Was that too much for a father to ask?”

“Then why did you treat me like you did?” I ask, my voice splintering. “Why did you hit me? Why couldn’t you just be kind? Why did everything have to be so hard?”

“I was trying to make you into what you needed to be,” he says, those awful tears falling with what remains of my walls. “The best way I knew how. Even if it wasn’t your way.”

“I was a good girl, Daddy—”

“Because I made you that way. Because you were too afraid not to be.”

He was right, but the harshness he used and the way he went about it was so wrong.

“Come here, child,” he says, his rusty voice groaning from the effort it takes him to speak.

I lean in, swallowing hard when his weathered and deeply wrinkled hand cups my face. His hands are cold, bone white, as opposed to bronzed by the summer sun. Blue veins run across them, sinking into the empty pockets near his knuckles where the skin sticks firmly against the bone.

I sob for all the years I missed that could’ve been good if we’d both tried a little harder. Had I not been so quick to judge and more easy-going, maybe he would have been more willing to listen.

Daddy lets me cry, allowing me to release my pain until I calm and his strength rebuilds enough to speak.

“Becca June, I’ve made mistakes. I’m not so proud to think I’m perfect. But when it comes to you, I did the best job I could.” This time, he’s the one openly weeping. “But it wasn’t good enough, was it?”

“Oh, Daddy,” I say. What’s left of my strength falls away, just like my carefully constructed wall.

“You left me. You left your momma,” he says. He shakes his head. “You’re still that damn selfish bitch you always have been.”

My tears evaporate from my eyes, my heart, from every cell of my being. The feeble old man I first saw, the one I pitied so badly I could barely meet his face, regains that rage I know and taps into that familiar cruelty.

“You’re exactly the trash I always feared you’d become.” He’s yelling, as loud as his vocal cords will allow. “You’re alone with no man, pretending to be something you are not. Successful?” He spits out. “If you didn’t look like you did, if you weren’t spreading your legs like you are, that football team would have nothing to do with you.”

He’s not done.

I am.

I stand on shaking limbs, almost losing my balance. I grasp the dining room chair to keep my feet and still my father screams.

“You’re a whore,” he says. “You’re nothing. No matter how bad I tried to save you—

you hear me, girl? That night, that was me leaving you!”

I abandon the room slowly, using the space separating me from the door to wipe my makeup smeared face. With all the care I can muster, I shut the door quietly behind me. It doesn’t quite muffle his screams, his rants, assuring me that everyone in the hall hears and heard the nasty and vicious remarks of his farewell.

The standoffish and perhaps mocking expressions I expect are not what greets me. Everyone present is aghast, horrified by the encounter and the indecencies my father continues to holler. Even Kirk, whose attention skips between me and the closed door, regards me with sympathy.

Everyone heard him. My only reprieve is that the reverend is mercifully gone.

My mother steps out of the room beside theirs, an armful of carefully folded towels tucked against her and her thin lips pressed into a line. “You shouldn’t have upset him like that. He needs his rest.”

My family’s eyes fly open, every woman present clasping her mouth. It takes everything in me not to lose my shit, my body quaking with the need to lash out. Matthew reaches for me as if fearing I’ll launch myself at my mother and beat her with my fists.

I don’t. Anything I do or say will harm me, not them.

If I scream at my dying father, no matter what vulgarities he throws my way, I’m the one who looks bad. I’ll be the black sheep who kicks him one last time, who smothers him with her filthy wool.

I refuse to take the bait from him or from her. So, I walk away. It’s the one thing I can do.

I don’t plan to stop. I don’t plan to return. They’ll bury him and all the darkness without me. But when I reach the top of the staircase, my mother’s final words hold me in place.

“He’s still your father,” she says.