Something like admiration glimmers across Krimson’s face. He’s always craved stories about our father, always wanted to be strong, fearless, and powerful just like him.
“Sounds like a real stick-in-the-mud,” I say with a flat tone and blank expression.
Uncle Warrose burns me with his hazel glare. “You certainly have his sour, stick-in-the-mud personality. So go on, keep insulting his memory.”
My blood goes cold in my seat.
Mom usually lets me make dry comments or insults about my father in her presence because she feels bad I’ll never get to know him. She thinks this is a coping mechanism.
But Uncle Warrose has no such leniency.
“Why’re you sitting all the way over there?” Uncle Niles barks, changing the subject to relieve the tension.
Uncle Warrose does not tear his roasting glare away from me.
I slouch under the weight of it.
“I’m right next to you,” Aunt Marilynn laughs.
“Too far.” He scoops her up from her seat and plops her butt down on his lap. “Much better. Niles happy.”
“Christ,” Niklaus hisses, dropping his fork down with a clank.
Mom shifts around the table, serving everyone this weird, pancake-glazed cake. It’s an inside joke. Something about the prison for Uncle Niles’s birthday. Forks scrape against plates. The heat of the oven permeates the dining room in subtle waves.
“So, how serious is this, Niklaus? Love? Fling? Getting married soon?” Mom asks with a small laugh.
The redirection to the two people in the room I’m refusing to look at tugs at an old feeling that has been buried. Something that makes me feel small and insignificant.
It reminds me of a time when I was little, sitting at my father’s bedside, watching the snow fall across his frosted window.
I held that limp hand close to my chest, trying to go into the void like Mom. I was trying to find him in Ambrose Oasis. But to my immediate disappointment, I’m not like my parents at all. There isn’t anything special about me. And when I realized that I was holding the dead, limp hand of a man I would never meet…
I threw a fit.
I screamed and cried and destroyed his room. Dresser drawers were yanked from their slots, chucked into walls. Picture frames were shattered. Curtains ripped from windows.
And Uncle Warrose just happened to return home to surprise me.
He found me screaming cruel, cruel words in my father’s face.
All I remember after that was being held in his lap while I cried. He rocked me back and forth in front of the fireplace, singing a sad song, reminding me that he’s always going to look out for me.
Mabel Rose opens her mouth to answer. Her pink lips curling into a grin of utter happiness, like this is one topic she’s been eager to talk about. And clearly, she’s forgotten I’m in the room, sneering in her filthy direction.
“Fling.” The word comes out with such finality to it in Niklaus’s smooth voice.
Fling.
Mabel Rose isn’t subtle in the twist of her frame, creaking the chair as she gawks at his lean profile. The betrayal darkening her gaze is unmistakable. She’s mirroring the expression that has yet to slip from my grasp. That has yet to remove its dirty claws from my spine.
“Oh, okay.” Mom nods as she sits down. “Nothing serious then.”
I bite my tongue in sickened disbelief. It’s as if I’m meeting Mabel Rose for the first. A devious version of her. A liar. A soulless individual who takes pride in watching me burn.
How did I not see it?
Embarrassment hits me square in the face as tears glide over my eyes.
