“Your daddy said he spoke with them. Don’t let him guilt you for that. He wouldn’t have been able to answer their call if he’d really been in the middle of somethin’. He just likes everyone to think he’s important.”
I rolled my eyes and settled on the edge of my bed while Momma went on about what a horrible person Daddy was and why she’d made the best decision to leavehim, but I heardus. Whatever had gone on between them was their problem, so I tuned it out, hating both of them for involving Cara and me in any of it.
Momma finally hung up, mumbling something about dinner plans, and I breathed easily again, but not for long.
“Calvin!”
Fighting for composure with a slow exhale, I dropped my head between my shoulders, then surged to my feet, leaving my homework where it sat on my desk, nearly completed, and hurried downstairs before Daddy had to call my name again.
Between my parents, I couldn’t decide which one I currently hated more. Daddy for his way of making me feel like a disappointment at every turn or Momma for her dismissal of us.
“Yes, Daddy?” I said when I slipped into his home office.
He had a near constant frown etched on his face, making him seem angry all the time, which he probably was. At my height, he might’ve had my same larger build if he’d ever work out. I got my blond hair and blue eyes from Momma, but everything from my features to my darker skin I got from Granny, Daddy’s momma.
He dropped the mail he’d been sifting through and narrowed a cutting glare on me before he flipped the sides of his suit jacket out to brace his hands on his hips and paced.
“Why did I get a call from the school today about you being in some sort of fight, Calvin?”
“I dunno.” I shrugged, unsure how to answer. Would he really want to know what happened? Or had that been rhetorical?
He stopped with a squeak of his oxfords on the hardwood and faced me. “Why didn’t they call your momma?”
Oh, that was what he meant? I shrugged again and mumbled, “She said she’d been busy.” I hated to admit it because of how he’d respond. He’d probably asked her earlier, and she wouldn’t tell him, so he’d used me to get the information, only so he could get pissed about it all over again.
“Of course she was. Too busy kissing some other man’s ass to be bothered with her own son.” He sighed.
My parents’ divorce was nearly a year old, but that wholetime healsgarbage hadn’t kicked in yet. At this point, I wasn’t even sure why Daddy was so pissed at her. They hadn’t been in love for a while, according to their many arguments on the matter.Momma had cheated on him, which I understood him being pissed over, but she’d claimed Daddy had cheated on her long ago when he took over as head trauma surgeon. His job became his mistress, and the rest of us got pushed out. I understood that too.
What I didn’t get was why they even cared any longer.Just let it go.Let it the fuck die already.
Daddy pinched the bridge of his nose. “I count on you, Cal, to be a responsible adult. I’m busy, and you know this. I don’t ask a lot from you, and this is what I get in return?”
Didn’t ask a lot? Fucking bullshit. He asked everything. I practically ran the house now that Momma had moved out. I took care of my younger sister, the dog, and the grocery shopping. Thank fuck we had a cleaning service that came by once a week because I didn’t have time for it. Not with football and homework, keeping my GPA high enough for college, laundry, and carting around Cara to her friend’s or practice oreverywhere. Jesus, I couldn’t wait until she turned sixteen and got her license. And why the fuck should I even have such a care? Because of my absentee parents, that was why.
I hadn’t asked Daddy for help in researching colleges or figuring out what was needed to get into schools with technical programs as prestigious as MIT—if I could make the cut there—because he’d never have time for it. He’d neverhadtime for it, and Momma had never understood it.
In ninth grade, we’d had a computer programming class one semester as an elective. The first time I’d fumbled through writing a line of code that duplicated a long string of text across the screen, I’d known that was what I wanted to do. I still had no clue in what industry I wanted to do it, but I had a starting point, a general direction, a dream.
Daddy didn’t care about dreams, though, and Momma didn’t believe in them any longer. When they’d given up on theirmarriage, they’d given up on Cara and me. I’d be damned if I’d ever leave Cara without my support the way they’d left us without theirs.
But none of that made it out of my mouth.
“Fighting, Cal? Really?” His tone implied his disappointment, but the scoff he added pissed me off.
“It wasn’t a fight,” I gritted out.
“I doubt the school has you in detention all week for no reason.”
I scrubbed a hand through my hair, the frustration of this moment compounding with the frustration of my earlier run-ins with Jack fucking Rutledge, the reason I was right here, right now.
“Look,” I started, which had Daddy widening his eyes at my disrespectful tone. Much more evenly, I said, “It’s not just me. The football and soccer teams hate each other.”
“Then why areyougetting in trouble? Huh?” He waved behind him as if the team stood there. “Why weren’t thirty other parents interrupted today to be told their kids were caught fighting at school?”
“It’s complicated, okay?”
Daddy snorted. “Nothing is complicated at eighteen.”
