“Yeah, it was rough. That’s why I liked coming here with him, it meant I knew my mom was okay as he was out of the house, and I’d get to spend time with him while he was actually being a father, you know?” I glance at her again, and she nods, reassuring me. “He stopped bringing me here when I was twelve, because… well, that’s when I first stood up to him.”
“When you were twelve?” she says, “You were just a kid.”
“Yeah, but by then I’d seen how other families were, and I knew what he was doing was wrong. Shit, I just didn’t want him hurting my mom anymore. One night, I could tell he was getting ready to hurt her… I don’t know how I knew, I just knew… so I went and stood in front of her, and I stared at him, straight in his eyes.
“I didn’t need to say anything, he knew… And from that day on, he took it all out on me and left her alone. Shit, can you imagine my scrawny twelve-year-old ass standing up to a grown man like that, just staring him down.”
Elizabeth’s hand gently touches my face as she turns me towards her, her eyes brimming with tears.
“I’m so sorry you had to do that, Angel…”
She gently kisses my cheek.
“I’m sorry that your father did that to you and Sofía…”
She kisses my other cheek before resting her forehead against mine.
“Too much was put on you as a child, and you shouldn’t have had to deal with that.”
She kisses me on the lips and I feel my own eyes water for a moment, before blinking and shaking my head.
“Yeah, well, like I said, Frank’s an asshole.”
“He’s a piece of shit, and it sounds like he always will be,” she says, echoing my earlier words. “I’m glad he’s out of your lives.”
I nod. I can’t bring myself to tell her that he’s not, and that I’m stuck with him.
“So that’s my shitty story,” I say, “your turn.”
She clears her throat.
“Okay. So, you weren’t wrong when you accused me of having a perfect little life, I did.” She nudges me and smiles. “I was lucky, until I wasn’t. You were right, I grew up in Radbury Heights and we were well off, we had everything we wanted and more. I’d been accepted into college, my parents were still happily married, everything was, well, perfect.
“Then my parents were in a car accident. I remember being pulled out of class at high school and being told about the accident by one of the teachers. I have no idea how I got to the hospital, but I must have because the next thing I remember, I’m standing in a room, and they’re both in beds in front of me, hooked up to life support. It was all such a blur, I don’t actually remember the time passing, and I don’t recall what any of the doctors said to me.”
She pauses and takes a deep breath. I bring her hand to my lips and give it a soft kiss, holding it to me for a moment.
“We were waiting to see if they’d be able to come out of the medically induced comas they were in, which in the end they weren’t, and as I didn’t have any grandparents, or aunts and uncles, it was up to me to make the decision to end their life support.”
“Fuck. I’m so sorry.” I rub my hand down my face. “How long were they on life support?”
The thought of her going through all that without any family makes my heart hurt.
“Eight days, fifteen hours, and twenty-eight minutes.” She gives a sad chuckle, tears threatening to roll down her cheeks. “And the reason I know that so precisely, is because it’s all listed, in great detail, on the medical bills… that I’m currently trying to pay off.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” she sighs, “when I phoned the company my dad worked for to ask them for his insurance details for the hospital, I found out that he’d been let go six months earlier.”
“And you had no idea?”
“None,” she says, “he’d been unemployed for six months without me even knowing; and we’d stayed in our house, kept the cars, kept living and spending as we always had, and I had no idea. They’d racked up so much debt, when it came to settling the estate, I had to sell everything to pay it off—the house, the cars, any savings they had. I was left with nothing, and even then, I only just managed to pay everything off.”
“Fuck.”
“And of course, his previous employer had canceled his health insurance when he was let go, and my dad never arranged a new policy. So the day after I had to make the decision to end their life support, I got sent a medical bill for just over two-hundred-thousand dollars.”
“Shit, how much?” I instantly regret blurting it out like that, but I’m just so shocked.
