“I know, but I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
My eyes filled with tears.
“What happened?” he asked, going from sympathetic to ‘Who do I kill?’ in two seconds flat. That was my father – always jumping to the worst conclusion without any supporting facts.
“It’s nothing bad. It’s about a guy.”
“A guy?” Dad’s voice instantly turned hard and condemning. His fists clenched into balls. “What did this… thisguydo to you?”
“Easy there, Chuck Norris,” I said, grabbing his hands and uncurling them.
“If he hurt you, Mackenzie, I swear to God…”
“If you’re going to act like this, I’m not going to talk to you,” I warned.
My father took a step back and stared at me. He wanted to argue but knew better than to cross me. We had a different relationship than most fathers and daughters in that we were equals in every way. Well, maybeequalswas the wrong word, since most of the time my father deferred to my judgment. Thank god, because if I’d left it up to my overprotective father, the triplets would have been wimpy little balls of anxiety.
That’s not to say that my dad was a bad guy – he meant well, but after losing my mom, he took helicopter parenting to whole new extremes. Everything the triplets did was too dangerous or too messy or too loud. It was my job to remind him that Mom let me do this or that. Maybe he wouldn’t listen to me, but he always listened to her. And although I’d only had my mother in my life for a short time, I was very much her daughter. In fact, I basically became her, or what I remembered of her, in order to give my siblings the childhood they deserved. So if I sometimes had to step in and remind my father to act like a grownup, that was a dance we’d been swaying to our whole lives.
His face relaxed. He laid his hand gently on mine and said, “Sorry. Tell me what he did.”
“It’s not what he did to me, it’s…it’s what I did to him,” I whispered, lowering my head in shame.
“Oh,” he replied, still looking flustered. “I’m confused.”
“I really liked him, Dad. So much, and…”
“And what? What did you do?”
“I lied to him. I betrayed him.”
My father exhaled, looking immensely relieved, as if it made everything better knowing that his daughter was the bully and not the victim.
“And now he hates me and there’s no way for me to turn it around.”
“Did he feel the same way about you?”
“I… no… I don’t know. Maybe. He was hard to read. At the very least we were really close friends.”
“But isn’t that what the game is all about? Backstabbing people in order to win?” he asked, as if he really didn’t see the problem.
“He was my ally. I turned on him, and the worst part is… he never would have done the same to me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh, I do. Kyle’s loyal to a fault. He trusted me one hundred percent.”
“So if you didn’t want to betray him, why did you?”
“For us. For our family.”
“For us? Why in the hell would you do that for us?”
“So you wouldn’t have to work so hard. So you could find a good woman and have love in your life again. And so Cooper and Colton and Caroline could have a secure future and have money for college. And… and… I did it for myself because…” I stopped myself before I said too much.
“Because what?”
“Nothing.”
