CHAPTER 42
It was late when Sean drove me back to the shop to pick up Dad’s truck. Not curfew-breaking late, but near enough. Just as we passed Pep Boys, I knew something was wrong. The lights were on at the shop even though I’d turned them off.
I went a little pale when we turned into the parking lot and Sean’s headlights illuminated Dad standing in the open garage bay.
“Did you call him?”
I shook my head. I’d turned my phone off when Mom showed up, but when I turned it back on, the screen lit up with missed calls. Lots of missed calls. Most from Dad.
As soon as he parked, Sean reached for his door, but I stopped him. “You sure? ’Cause I don’t mind getting yelled at.” He looked back at Dad standing directly over the spot that had previously held my Spitfire. “And you are about to get yelled at.”
“It’ll be worse if you’re there. And I need to tell him everything.”
Sean touched my hand as I opened my door, squeezing it. “Hey.” He waited for me to look back. “He loves you. I do too.”
I couldn’t dwell on that look and those words, but later I was going to let myself think about Sean and… Yeah. “I’ll call you.”
Sean’s headlights passed over us as he backed out, leaving me to walk the dozen or so feet to the garage in relative darkness. I used every shadowed step to fortify myself for what I had to say.
Everywhere my eyes touched, a memory lay fresh on the surface. And the memories weren’t of me crying over dirty hands or wishing I could take ballet; not one. They were of racing creepers with Dad on slow days; eating calzones with one hand so we wouldn’t have to break for lunch on busy ones; Dad holding me up to stand on a bumper and inspect an engine; the first day I walked into the shop and saw my name on the board by itself, not alongside Dad’s as his helper; realizing no matter how many hours I spent sliding across the floor in my socks, I’d never be able to moonwalk as well as Dad.
And he was my dad. His nose had the same little bump on the ridge that mine did. He used to skate his finger down it and pretend the bump caused his hand to fly off my face, making me laugh until my belly hurt. And they were the same. My bump and his. It didn’t matter that his came from when he used to wrestle in high school and mine came from what amounted to a sperm donor.
“Dad?”
He was holding a piece of paper in his hands. The crease said he had folded and unfolded it at least a dozen times. He folded it again before answering. “You took the Spitfire.”
That ill-fated joyride with Claire felt like a lifetime ago. “I know I shouldn’t have, but—”
He gestured in the direction Sean had driven off and my obviously missing car. “Anybody hurt?”
“No.”
“And the Spitfire?”
“Hurt.” I didn’t wait for him to ask for details. Halfway through describing the leaking coolant, he cut me off.
“We’ll talk about that later.” He took his paper in both hands and stared at it. “This morning, about what your mom told you, I didn’t get to—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“Not to me.” Claire said it didn’t have to matter unless I let it, and she was right. Me and Dad. Nothing else mattered as long as it was the two of us. I’d always thought that, but I didn’tknowit until that year. Mom leaving the way she did, why she did; all of it had torn everything else away. It had poisoned Sean for me, given me a connection to Daniel that ended up hurting us both. Even my relationship with Claire had suffered as I’d withdrawn from her and just about everything else.
But I’d still had Dad. He’d still had me. When Mom had said she was going to take me from him, had tried to tell me he was never mine, I’d fractured head to toe. And I’d existed way too long in that fragile fearful state, knowing a sharp blow, a misplaced step, would shatter me.
But it didn’t matter. Only one thing did.
“Why did you send me away today?” My voice was that of a little girl. I heard it and felt it, the smallness, the vulnerability. “You said she could take me and you couldn’t stop her. Why didn’t we leave? Why didn’t we go to Oregon or anywhere that she couldn’t find me?”
I noticed his hand tightening around the paper he held. The skin between his brows furrowed. “I tried to forgive her. I tried. But when you were born, you looked nothing like me. So I stopped trying.”
I listened to Dad go on about the utter ruination of his marriage and the role he’d played, the one I’d never known about and still couldn’t fully blame him for. Not even after he confirmed some of what Mom had told me.
“I wasn’t a good husband when I had the chance, when it might have mattered. I needed today to think about what taking you from her would mean, because I stopped wanting to punish her a long time ago. How could I, when she gave me you?”
With that one sentence my world straightened. The ground was solid under my feet and I felt whole, loved by the person I needed most. He could have stopped then. I didn’t need another word; even if every other accusation she’d leveled against him was true, she couldn’t break us. Nothing could.
