Lilly
Icould hear my father’s footsteps from literally three rooms over.
Marble floors had a way of echoing that made the idea of privacy in a mansion-sized home impossible; rich people like my father liked to buy extravagant things, believing that it sequestered them from the rest of society. Rich people also liked to spoil their children with an endless supply of lavish gifts that they had never had as a child, thinking that it somehow made them happy.
Maybe if my father had actually listened to me once in his life instead of just thinking that what I wanted to hear was whatever he wanted to say, he could have saved himself a ton of money and time. But that wasn’t how my father operated; it wasn’t how he got to where he was. I may have loved him, but…
Sometimes, it would have been nice if I just had a father that treated me like an adult and not like his precious, glass-like child that couldn’t do anything on her own.
“Lilly,” he said in his fatherly voice. “Do you have a moment?”
I always have a moment, Dad. You won’t let me do anything else.
“I’m kind of busy right now, Dad, can it wait until later?”
I heard a hitch in my father’s breath, the hitch that told me he was holding himself back from saying something scathing. I knew the cycle. Be polite, cut me, apologize, treat me like an angel. Rinse, repeat. Over and over and over.
I dreamed of the day when the cycle honestly just involved “Dad not being present.”
“What could you possibly be doing that’s more important than talking to me right now, dear?”
I shook my head. Thank God he couldn’t see me.
“I need to work on my monologue for my next audition,” I said, even though I had none lined up. “I’m not going to make it to the big stage if I don’t ever have something lined up.”
“You have all day to do that, my dearest Lilly,” he said.
“To do it, yes, but I need alone time to mentally prepare.”
“No, you don’t.”
God, this is exhausting.
“Dad, I promise you I do,” I said. “Besides, you know it’s in the alone time when I come up with the best ideas for helping your club out, right? So maybe if I get that—”
“Lilly Sartor.”
Oh, God, he’s using my full name as if I’m some sort of petulant teenager. Might as well be for how he sees me.
“I am your father, and so help me as long as I live, I will be that way. Now open up this door.”
“Coming,” I said, groaning.
If I acted like a brat, maybe it was because I had no choice but to be for how I was forced to behave.
I opened the door. My father stood there in his normal red cut with the “Fallen Saints” logo embroidered on the back, but otherwise, he looked much older than he usually did. His eyes looked more sunken, the wrinkles on his face were more pronounced, and his beard had more white than usual. He had often talked in the last year about how this was his chance to paint Springsville in his image, but apparently, that was not going so well.
“How goes your monologue?” he said.
“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s fromFiddler on the Roof. It would be going better if I had some privacy, though.”
My father chuckled, brushed past me, and sat on the edge of the couch.
“You are a feisty one,” he said. “If your mother were alive, I think she’d be proud of how much you’ve turned out just like her.”
I folded my arms and didn’t say anything. The only way to make my father proud, apparently, was to do anything that made him look better or his little biker club stronger.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t come here to compliment you or flatter you.”
