“Your father is having a stent put into his heart, Tripp,” she snaps at me. “This is serious. You need to be with your family right now.”
“I need to beseenwith you, you mean,” I counter. “You need photos of your perfect little family gathered together in a time of need; really pull at the peoples’ heartstrings. How much do you think you could get in the collection plate for that?”
“Your father needs you,” she urges, and a laugh cracks through me that I can’t seem to stop from coming out.
Heneedsme?
Where the fuck was he any of the times that I needed him?
Where were either of them?
Too busy washing their hands of me as soon as they threw me out onto my ass with fifty bucks to my name, so I wouldn’t sully theirs.
“If he croaks, let me know,” I tell her.
“Your brother is arranging a flight for you,” she says.
“Guess he’ll be out a couple hundred bucks then, won’t he?” I ask, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. “See you at Christmas, Molly.”
I don’t offer her the opportunity to respond to me before I end the call, tossing my phone onto the couch and pushing my fingers through my hair.
Jules and Connor look to me expectantly, their brows stitching together as their features beg me for answers to questions they aren’t asking.
“They’re doing something to my dad’s heart.”
Julia straightens, stepping closer to me to wrap her hand in mine.
“Like, surgery?” She asks.
“Sounded like it,” I say with a shrug. “He had some kind of ‘cardiac event’ when I was little. It shouldn’t be a surprise the old thing’s not holding up too well.”
My feet carry me toward the edge of the living room’s carpeted floor, stopping short as a low burn settles into my chest and my lungs grow heavy.
The last time Edie was in a hospital, it was because her husband was dead.
The last time Brody was in one, it was because he was dying.
I’m not sure Graham’s ever been inside of one, outside of the day he was born.
The last time I was in one…
Blowing out a breath, I reach for my keys, discarded on the coffee table, and I offer a nod to my wife and our partner.
“I’m making a smoke run,” I tell them.
Connor hoists himself off of the couch to take the keys from my hand and slide them into his own pocket before patting me supportively on the shoulder.
“I’ll get them,” he says. Gesturing toward the couch for me to sit, he adds, “You get the wrong phone call, and you’re ridingasphalt, whether you think right now that it’ll bother you or not. It will.”
Jules offers him her quiet thanks as I shove my hands into the pockets of my jeans, my leg taking up a mind of its own as it starts to bounce in place.
I can hear myself, barely nineteen and shouting in the dining room that God doesn’t exist. I feel my leg pull up as I kick one of the carved wooden chairs onto its side. I hear my mom screaming‘blasphemer!’as I throw my defaced Bible onto the table. The one that I’d spent months combing through, highlighting and bookmarking every inconsistency and untruth. Writing in the margins the questions they’d never given me the freedom to ask out loud.
In my memory, I look to my dad, standing at the opposite end of the table with abhorrence behind his eyes, and I wish him dead. I beg the God that I don’t believe in to strike him down right here, right now, and prove me wrong.
And in the real world, a fiery burn settles into my stomach.
Chapter 32
