He laughs.
Because the concept of a father being involved in raising his children is so out of his realm of comprehension. Right.
I stare at him.
He scowls. “You’re serious.”
“Of course I’m serious.”
“You would support some deadbeat asshole who doesn’t want to work?”
My mouth drops open. Snaps shut. Because my mother has never had a job. She didn’t even go to college. She is entirely financially dependent on him, and that’s exactly how he likes it, because it means she can never leave him.
Not that she’s ever shown any interest in doing that, either. That’s just my own pipe dream for her. My mother likes herhockey wife life just fine, she just wants there to be less strife between her daughter and her husband.
I realized that when I was sixteen years old, and I vowed to myself that I would never let myself get trapped in a similar dynamic. Being married to someone like my father is my worst nightmare.
A stay-at-home dad type would be my ideal, and I’d support him happily.
But I’m not justifying that choice to my father, so again, I just stare at him.
He sighs. “Just move home, Frankie. Stop being so stubborn.”
“Where ishomeexactly?”
His always hard-to-read expression is, of course, hard to read. “Don’t play dumb. It’s unbecoming. If you’re intent on training to be an emergency room doctor, the least you could do is be closer to your mother. She wants you to consider Buffalo for your residency.”
“You’ve been the coach there for a year and a half. I’m twenty-seven. How isthatmy home?”
“It’s where your family lives.”
Only my father could make that word sound so violent.Family. Like it’s a threat. I have to fight not to physically recoil.
“It has good hospitals,” he adds, although we both know that’s not something he cares about, and then adds the faintest of praise. “It’s a nice city.”
By that, he means he has an easy commute to the arena.
But I’m still stuck on the casual way he suggested that a city I have never lived in is my home, simply because it’s where he’s currently employed.
“I was raised in—” I start ticking the cities off on my fingers. “Chicago, not that I remember any of that. Minneapolis for a year. Then Edmonton, LA and Toronto. The place I remembermost is LA, did you know that? That’s probably why I decided to go to school on the west coast.Thisis my home. I haveonememory of sledding with you, either in Minneapolis or Edmonton. That’s it. And then the rest of my late childhood was a blur of moving. First, because you needed to keep playing hockey, even if it meant a new team every year. And then because you wanted to have a coaching career.”
I stumble over the last two words, because that would mean discussing Boston, and we don’t do that, even a decade later.
“So I don’t think it’s a huge ask for you to respectmycareer choices. But here we are, at a dinner I was reluctant to agree to, and you know that.”
“I know that your mother wanted this to happen, and I’m disappointed that you wouldn’t do that for her. Why do you always need to be like this?”
“Like what? Stand up for myself? I don’t like to be lectured, and you like to lecture, and it always goes like this.”
“Are you done?”
Hardly. “I’m not moving to a city where I’ve never lived, just to be close to a parent who has never in his entire life made any effort to be close to me, or to understand or listen to me. I’m not putting Buffalo on my match list, end of story.”
He doesn’t have a reply for that.
Of course he doesn’t. He never does.
I want to push my chair back and storm out, but that would give him a win. It would prove that I’m too emotional, too childish. He likes to give me enough rope to hang myself with, but I’m older now. More mature.
