“You’re wasting your life and your potential,” he starts. “All this is a hobby, Javier. When I was your age I had a mortgage, a wife, two kids?—”
“How’d all that work out?”
His jaw flexes. “Don’t interrupt,” he grits out. “You need responsibility and stability, and you’ve got a good head on your shoulders if you’d only apply yourself. We all know you’re perfectly capable. I know someone on the admissions team at Arlington College. Classes start next week.”
In the past couple years, I have been to an absolutefucktonof therapy. Some of it was awful and useless—I have, in fact, spoken aloud to my “inner child” and no, it didn’t help—but some of it was, honest to god, very useful and profoundly healing. If I’d listened to my dad, I’d never have done any of it.
Anyway, I can’t resist the emotional tug of his bullshit (a good head on your shoulders, he said), but at least I can see it for what it is: an order masquerading as an offer. I’ve spent quite a lot of time hammering out a plan for scenarios like this one.
“I’m happy with the way things are,” I tell him.
My father is completely stone faced. “Javier,” he says, already disappointed.
“I’m content,” I go on, trying to recall bullet points I wrote down once. “I’m in a good place. I have a support network. I do activities that I enjoy and find meaning in.”
His lips are getting thinner by the moment. “You’re working two dead-end jobs out in the bumfuck backwoods and living in a—I don’t even know what,” he says. “That’s not a life. That’s an existence. An embarrassing one.”
My father has never visited my apartment in Sprucevale, the bumfuck backwoods town where I live. He’s never met any of my friends. He’s never seen my artwork, that I’m aware of.
But he’s right that I have two jobs—three, if you count freelance work; guess he doesn’t know that either—and live in a tiny mountain town, and it makes the rest of what he’s saying feel right, too.
“I have a cat,” I say, because I think Zorro was on that bullet-pointed list I wrote.
“Keep the cat, fine,” he says. “If next week is too short of a notice, you can also start in January. Stay with me until you can find a suitable place. My townhouse is too big for one person anyway.”
“No.”
His mouth is a near-perfect line. “Think about it.”
“I don’t need to.”
He stands. “Do yourself a favor for once, Javier,” he says, radiating disapproval. “I’d appreciate an answer within a week.”
I cross my arms over my chest and then immediately uncross them because that’s a sign of weakness and uncertainty. Guess who taught me that. “I don’t want your favors.”
“You haven’t given it any consideration.”
He says it likes it’s free, not an offer that’s got so many strings attached it’s a fringe. I can tell that making it an offer, and not an order, is costing him; I’m thirty years old and he hates that I don’t call himsirany more. I’ve spent enough time trying to please someone who I’m fundamentally ill-suited to pleasing—someone who came in here, told me my happiness is trash, and then tried to order me around.
Everything his bullshit has put us through, and hestillthinks he knows best. My father has spent my life watching me do what he wants, only to fail. As far as he’s concerned, it’s because I never did it right in the first place. Small wonder I gave up trying.
Except there’s a squirming, writhing, desperate-to-please part of me that wants to say yes and try again because maybe this time I’ll get it right and he’ll be pleased with me.
“I’ll think about it,” I lie, and hate myself for it.
“You do that,” he says. “This is a good chance, Javier. It’d be a shame if you wasted another one.”
God, I want to tell him off. I want to spend an hour shouting at him, starting withYou don’t understand meand hopefully finishing withAnd now get out.
I don’t do that, though. I just think about it while we stare at each other for what feels like an eternity, then gesture at the papers on the table. “I need to finish what I was doing.”
“Of course. Well. It was good to see you.”
I want to say,Was it?But I manage to say, “You, too,” and then we watch each other for another moment because this is where many family members would hug each other. Neither of us moves.
Instead, the front door opens, and we both turn to the kitchen doorway.
A moment later, my mom enters through it and then stops short, her gaze flicking from me to my dad. Oh, fuck.
