44. Greer
Greer
Mottled, early-morning sunlight spills across the hardwood and bleeds into the tile covering my father’s kitchen.
He’s where he always is—paper folded in half, revealing the Sunday crossword, and a mug of coffee beside it, steam still rising.
But there’s this other thing beside him that usually isn’t there—his ten-year medallion. He holds it loosely between his thumb and forefinger, tapping it into the worn wood of the table, a pen gripped in the other hand while he scratches words across the paper.
“Hi,” I whisper, raising my fingers off my arm where it’s wrapped around my rib cage. This old, stupid gesture of protection and comfort I can’t seem to shake.
His eyes cut up to me, features lit with surprise. He drops the pen and medallion, pushing his reading glasses up his nose. “Greer, I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Stella’s here, too. She’s upstairs,” I offer, because maybe he doesn’t want to be alone with me. I wouldn’t blame him.
“I tried to call. I’m worried about you.”
I make this sort of weird, strangled laugh that’s half a scoff. There’s a terrible irony there. I walk across the tile on tentative feet, pulling out the chair opposite his, and point to the medallion. I remember when he received that one. Stella made me go to the meeting, and I sat there resenting the entire thing. He was so proud. My rib cage ached the whole time, and I was so angry it all came too late. “You okay?”
He doesn’t look away from me. “I was at a meeting last night.”
“You don’t usually go on Saturdays,” I murmur, and the whole thing hurts. That because of me, because I fell in love, tried to erase all my lines and tear down the cage in my chest, I ended up hurting more than just myself.
“No, I don’t.”
The tears start before I realize, one tracking a path down my cheek until it splashes on the arm of Beckett’s sweater. “I’m so sorry, Dad.”
“Why are you sorry?” There’s a furrow across his too-pronounced brow bone.
“Your privacy was invaded and it’s my fault.” I press my hand to my chest, shaking my head, but the sob comes anyway. “If I hadn’t—”
He leans forward, stretching a hand across the worn wood of the kitchen table, nicked and scratched from years of Stella and me sitting at it, pencils scratching paper as we did homework, waiting to see if he was going to come home that night. “Peanut, I’m going to tell you something and I really need you to hear me.”
I don’t remember the last time he called me that, but I think little me lifts her head up where she lives curled in my chest. She tips her chin towards the sound, and remembers that, despite it all, her father loved her very much.
“It’s not your job to protect the privacy of my sobriety, and it never was. It wasn’t your job to try and fix my addiction, and it certainly wasn’t your job to give me part of your liver.” He slides his reading glasses down his nose, pinching the bridge, before he looks back up and shakes his head. “I have regrets—a lot of them. Getting behind the wheel with you two ... but agreeing to take from you like that might be number one. I would take it back if I could. I should have gotten sober and waited for a match that wasn’t you. But I was so scared to leave you and your sister. I was scared to die. I’m glad I didn’t—I wouldn’t trade these last years with you both for anything. But I do wish it wasn’t you.”
Little me perks up again, curious, because there it is, this thing I’ve wanted for so long. Longed for.
But there’s still that other thing, the hateful parts of me who I’m not sure deserve any grace at all.
“The things people are saying online—” I try, but I stop, taking a shuddering inhale instead.
His shoulders drop just a fraction, and he gives this resigned shake of his head. “It’s okay if some of them are true, Greer. Don’t let this”—he taps his medallion against the table—“take more than it already cost you.”
Little me knocks on my right ribs, along those old, shattered lines, and she whispers: See, he still loves you. It’s okay. You can contain multitudes.
My voice cracks. “I’m sorry I’m difficult sometimes. I know I’m harsh and I’m mean, and Stella’s always been the nicer one.”
This fond smile curves across his face, illuminating all the lines etched there. “You’re not mean. You’re just you and you’re different from your sister.”
“But if I hadn’t been rude to that reporter—”
The smile shifts into a laugh. “I’m glad you were. I worry about how much time you’ve spent sleeping. That boy came along, and he lit you up like the sun.”
“Like the sun,” I repeat with a tiny smile. Beckett is the sun , I think. Bright and beautiful. Warm and lovely. Keeping the weight of a whole planet’s atmosphere on his shoulders.
My brain peers out, and I think it looks at him, takes him in and studies him. All these too-frail, curved lines of my father.
“What’s sunlight for you?” I ask softly.
“You and your sister.” It might be a trick of the light, but the way the sun catches his eyes—just like mine—they look like they shine with all these unshed tears and all this gratitude. “It’s quite a gift you gave me. A second chance. The ability for my body to heal. For me to heal.”
A gift , my brain considers. Not a sacrifice at the altar .
Sunlight can be good for us. Maybe it can help us grow , it whispers .
“I guess I just thought that if I was alone—”
My sister chooses that moment to announce her presence, strolling into the kitchen.
“You’re not alone. I’m here.” Stella tips her chin up in triumph, brandishing a rolled-up poster she didn’t have before. “And he’s got half your liver, so have you ever truly been alone?”
I frown. “That’s not—that’s not how it works.”
Stella waves her poster around again. “Anyway, Greer has to go. All my old things were in a closet, so I made her a sign.”
Her eyes go wide, and she unrolls it with a dramatic flourish.
I feel my lip curl back when I see what it says, and all the rhinestones she stuck haphazardly to the surface. “I’m not holding that.”
Stella frowns, peering down at her handiwork before she rolls her eyes. “I don’t really think beggars can be choosers, but alright.” Neither of us makes a move, and she snaps her fingers. “I’m serious. Chop-chop. She has to go. We can work through years of family trauma after.”
She points towards the hallway with her poster before leaving us alone in the kitchen again.
If our father was confused by the sudden appearance and disappearance of his youngest daughter, he doesn’t let on. I think the corners of his eyes might wrinkle with amusement.
He pushes out of his chair at the same time as me, and when he stands, his shoulders curve inwards a bit, like he isn’t sure what to do. I’m not entirely sure either, all of it hangs between us, but I don’t think it hurts. It’s just sort of there.
Scars all along the story of our lives together, that are just that—old, healed tissue that might smart from time to time.
Something you learn to live with.
An awkward sort of laugh catches in my throat, and he smiles at me, softly, like he loves me but he knows he hurt me and he’s sorry.
I’m sorry, too.
A bit like a fawn on new legs, I take a step forward. And then another. And another.
And then for the first time in a very long time, we hug.
He presses a kiss to the side of my head, too-thin arms wrapping around me. “I love you, Peanut.”
“I love you, too, Dad,” I whisper against his chest, fingers digging into the worn flannel covering his back, and for the first time, there’s nothing straining against me—no claws scraping at my stomach, chest, or ribs to try and take back what we think belongs to us.
It’s not ours. It’s his.
A gift.