“I was just trying to?—”
“I know what you were trying to do. You don’t get to do that anymore,” he snapped. “Jonah?”
“Go ahead. I’ll handle whatever this is,” I told him quietly.
He was silent for a second. “No bullshit. You promised,” he reminded me.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
I ignored her. “No bullshit.” I wasn’t going to let her give me a task. I wasn’t going to let her manipulate me into dragging Micah into something he wanted no part of. And the same went for Caleb, though we all knew she’d only start leaning heavily on our youngest brother if Micah and I refused to give in to whatever she wanted.
Caleb had always been treated differently. He was the one son with some usable vision—though not much of it. Sometimes he wasn’t blind enough for her, so he was forgotten, and that created a whole new set of trauma that Micah and I couldn’t really relate to.
Of course, things might have been easier, and she might have reined it in a bit, if we’d had a father who gave even twowhispers of a fuck. But our dad found it easier to work eighty hours a week and let her handle all the kid stuff. I could count on one hand how many hockey or beep ball games he’d come to, only to leave ten minutes after the first whistle blew.
Caleb played goalball for a while, and I remembered Dad being in the stands for one or two of the matches. But nothing more than that. An absent coward was the kindest name I could come up with for him.
It had been about a year and a half since we’d last spoken, and I was struggling to feel any regret.
“…tired of this crap, and I’m going with him. I have a couple of clients coming by the shop to pick up pieces, and I don’t need to miss them for this.” I realized that Caleb was talking to my mom while I had drifted into my own head. His hand touched my arm after a second. “You good?”
“Go,” I told him. “Call me if you need me.”
I could feel the weight grow heavier in the room as my brothers left. My mom was somewhere to my right, staring at me. Her gaze was always just shy of tangible. It was the only time I ever understood the sighted phrase, “the weight of a stare.”
“Well. It’s just you and me?—”
“It isn’t,” I told her. “You can go to the UK and write your book and attempt to make yourself feel better for being a crap mom. But you didn’t need to bring us all together for that. So either you were just trying to get a reaction out of us, or there’s something we don’t know.”
I knew her too well to believe this was it. And when she sighed that heavy sigh that always came before more bad news, I hated myself for being right.
“It’s your father.” Her tone was grim.
I felt my eyelids blink rapidly. It was damn near involuntary—something I always did when she brought up something I didn’t want to deal with. “What about him?”
“He’s going to need help.”
I almost burst into laughter. “Mhm. Yeah, sure. With what? Making his morning coffee? Wiping his ass?” She’d also infantilized him for some fucking reason. She would have fit well into the 1940s for all that she spent time making his lunches and ironing his suits and…well, whatever the fuck else she busied herself with when she wasn’t up our asses.
But the silence that followed my question was thick, and I was full of regret for even asking.
“Eventually,” she said very slowly, “yes.”
“So not only am I going to get weird questions from people about how I wipe my own ass, but now I have to hear them wonder about how I wipe his?”
“Jonah,” she sighed out, and it was in that moment I realized she was being serious. This wasn’t her rising to my bait.
Fuck, this could not be real. “And why does he need someone to wipe his ass?”
“Jonah!”
“I’m being serious.” I reached up, rubbing at my eyes until my prosthetics dug into my sockets so hard it hurt. “Can you just, foronce, say what you need to say? You know I don’t talk to Dad. I barely talk to you.”
“After everything we did for you?—”
“Spare me. Seriously,” I said tiredly. “Enough of this martyr shit. Just…what is going on?”
“Fine. You want the gory details? He’s been sick for a while.”
