“Listen, Stella. You go watch television and maybe we’ll get some ice cream when I get back. Wouldn’t that be nice?” His question was marred by a long, loud Natty Light–induced belch. He looked down the hall, waiting for my mother to appear, but she was too tired for that.
“Why don’t we go for ice cream now?”
“Can’t just now.” He was already at the door.
Tamika, my friend at school, once told me that sometimes you could get someone to stay if you told them how much you loved them. Did I love my daddy? He was my daddy, so of course I loved him. I definitely wanted him to stay. I took a deep breath and said, “Daddy, I love you, and I would like for you to stay here.”
He paused, hesitating at the door. “We’ll go when I get back. Just you and me.”
A promise of ice cream, one that might never be fulfilled, was not a declaration of love. If I could love him because he was my daddy, then why couldn’t he love me because I was his child?
As an adult, I understood more about addiction and how the allure of shoe models could beat out a trip to get ice cream with your daughter.
But that didn’t explain why he couldn’t say even a half-hearted “Love you, too.”
Something broke in me that day, a tie for my worst day ever.
I turned on the television, but the more I thought about it, the more unfair it seemed that my mother could work so hard only to have my father take her money. But what could I do about it? I was a kid. I’d played the only hand I’d been dealt, and my love hadn’t been enough to keep him home.
That’s when snippets of overheard conversations began snapping together like puzzle pieces.
You see, eavesdropping was my passion. As an only child, there wasn’t much else to do. Not much earlier, I’d overheard my father talking to one of his buddies about how he had the hots for a particular dancer at the Taj Mahal, and I had filed that information away, not even sure what I would do with it.
Now I knew. If someone did something wrong, you called the police, right?
I found an honest-to-goodness phone book, and I called the local police department. Even then, I knew it wasn’t a 911 situation. Fortunately, the woman who answered the phone was a mother herself.Once she’d determined that I wasn’t in immediate danger, she patiently listened as I explained that my father had stolen my mother’s money and probably gone to a strip club called the Taj Mahal because he wanted to see a girl named Amber.
Not only was this woman kind, but she was also smart. The vast majority of adults wouldn’t have taken me seriously, but she asked my father’s name. Willie Stark rang a bell as someone who might have a warrant or three out for his arrest, so, after she hung up the call, she went searching for any possible warrants. The rest, as they say, is history.
My father went to jail. My mother carted me off to Nana’s and then spent more of her hard-earned money on Daddy’s legal fees. Eventually, she got tired of standing by her man. I lived with her a little while and met Skip’s owner. Then, when she ghosted me, I went back to Nana’s, where I stayed until I graduated from high school.
Mom never told me to my face that I was the reason why our family was broken up, but I overheard her tell Nana that I’d ruined her life.
Nana had immediately hissed, “For heaven’s sake, Marie, she’s achild. She was trying to protect you.”
But the damage to our relationship had been done, and that day was the other in a tie for the worst day of my life. From that day forward I became, in my mind, Stella Stark: the girl who doesn’t deserve nice things because she ruins lives.
As for my father? He served his time and then moved to Florida. I actually met Ken when I hired him to find my father. He was a better PI back then, or maybe he was motivated to take advantage of the fresh-faced college student who’d walked into his office. It was hard to say.
The end result was that he found my father. By then, Willie Stark had a new family, including a different little girl he took for ice cream.
He met me at an ice cream shop in Pensacola and bought me a caramel sundae before he told me as gently as he could that he didn’t want to have contact with me. He knew he should forgive me because I was just a kid, but prison had been a horrible place. Seeing me remindedhim not only of how awful those years had been but also of how badly he’d failed his first child and his first wife. He just couldn’t do it.
Also, his new wife didn’t want to meet me and didn’t want me to meet my half sister.
I cried a lot in the days and weeks after leaving Florida. Then, one day, I found it hard to cry at all.
Tears seeped from my eyes as, in the present, I rolled over, willing the memories to leave and the painkillers to kick in. The pain was so intense that nausea had come to join the party.
Finally, my migraine meds kicked in, so I could slowly slip into oblivion.
Chapter 37
When I woke up the next morning, I had the pain at the back of my neck that always lingered after a migraine. BB was gone, but someone in my living room was speaking in a low voice.
Immediately, I was out of bed, looking for a weapon, remembering that my Taser was in the drawer of the coffee table.
Judo alone it would have to be.
