“It’s scary to face how badly I failed you,” he said. “It’s scary to see how much of a mess I was. It’s scary to analyze all these things. Most especially when it’s your only child. At least if someone I was dating left me, I could find someone else to date. But there’s only one of you, Jess. You’re my only little girl.”
I shook my head, not because I disagreed, but because my father was going to make me drown in my tears.
“Thank you,” I choked out.
I heard sniffling on the other end of the line. My cheeks were now more stained than if I had run through a thunderstorm.
And you know what? It felt kind of nice. It felt kind of good to get some of this out there. Even if it had taken so much longer than it ever should have.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
“I’m sorry it took so long, Jess. You have every right to be mad at me and hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” I said with a laugh. “I just... it’s been a tough day. And you happened to be my target.”
“But everything you said was true.”
I grimaced.
“Yeah.”
“It’s OK, it needed to be said.”
A brief pause came where I finally had the chance to catch my breath. And boy, was that breath needed.
“Do you want to talk about what happened?”
I had sincerely forgotten that the way Phoenix had treated me this morning was why I was calling my father. At first, I wanted to just dismiss my father’s offering as something that would be too awkward to talk about with him; that wasn’t a conversation that the two of us needed to have.
But then I recognized the whole point of us chatting right now. It was to break through those self-imposed conversational barriers and get to the actual point of our dialogue. It was to have the tough but necessary conversations.
And frankly, at the risk of sounding too crass for my own good, who better to talk about bad relationship endings than my father?
“Sure.”
I recounted... well, not everything, obviously. My father didn’t need to know bedroom details. But I was pretty honest about how I had spent the night at Phoenix’s place, about how he and I had had a crappy first date and then a great one, and how I had told him that I was moving in two months, only to get scorned by him in the morning.
“So now, I don’t even know what I want to do,” I said. “I don’t want to do anything to get him back, because as far as I’m concerned...”
If you can get the good Phoenix, it’s worth trying again. But can you really get that?
I don’t think it’s possible. Not without including the asshole Phoenix, the scarred Phoenix.
“Right now, it’s about making sure I put myself in the best place. I don’t know what I want to do for a career yet, and I know doing it in Ashton and Springsville probably won’t be the final place, but not like Los Angeles is far. And I worry that if I just move for the sake of moving...”
“You’ll temporarily get the high of being in a new place, but you won’t truly have moved yourself.”
“Yeah.”
My father sighed.
“You’re probably not going to like my answer, Jess, but it’s the honest one.”
I need to stay here. Or I need to come home. I need to make things better with Dad first, and—
“I don’t know.”
Oh.
