TruthSpite
Dad brought his work back to the kitchen for the third day in a row when I brought in my own skills I’d been learning.
He was dangling hooks of hope and one caught me, pricking as it pulled to show him, to show me, to show I was not all play, that I was doing good , and the world didn’t have to end.
It was dinner time and I wanted some breakfast food, so I cooked an egg scramble for us—not to be mistaken for plain scrambled eggs—with potatoes, onions, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and cheese. Some things Isolde picked up for me. Pouring in the eggs and watching the yellow flow through and fill the spaces between the rest was the most fun part.
Dad typed away and mumbled to himself, and I almost mumbled some sense to myself , until I felt another prick in the eyeing he gave me, the smallest acknowledgment, as I plated our food.
I knew he hadn’t eaten yet, so if he turned this down. . .
“Egg scramble,” I said when I carried our plates to the table, his slipping from my shaky hand with a light clang, that I quickly tried to cover up by putting mine down at the same time. “It’s good.”
His face was neutral as he now eyed his food, a single unemotional look that flipped mine around enough to almost sit down before grabbing us forks.
I tripped inside his balancing acts, and I had to remind myself I had stronger feet to stand on now.
I was chewing my first bite when he had yet to take his. Watching the rising steam, I told myself he was letting it cool, and the burn from that hope stung sharper than the one on my tongue.
“I learned to cook,” I told him, now through the burn in my throat. When it spread through my stomach, I realized I forgot to grab us drinks.
“I’ve been learning a lot,” I pressed to his silence, and still untouched food. “And I’ve been leaving the house and I’m still intact.” Though I’d never felt more broken than with him. “And I’m still your daughter.” The cracks showed in this one.
I stabbed a section of scramble, my voice raising in his quiet. “And I still know right and wrong.” What was actual right and wrong because nothing is as black and white as my dad. “I’m not corrupted. I’m not throwing away my future. I’m still gonna work hard and I’m still here”— why? —“and I’m still your daughter.”
My throat scraped, along with my fork, as those repeated words came out like punches to his chest to get through.
When he remained unmoved, my next bite tasted too salty. I knew I hadn’t added that much salt, so it shouldn’t have.
I wiped at my face, then said through my teeth, “I learned to keep Mom with me in the little ways I can, with no help from you.”
That was the real punch that put a teeter in him and a breath in me.
That he knocked right back out.
“You’ve been proving a lot to yourself?”
And nothing to you.
It was a realization I’d already realized, but couldn’t accept until now. I’d gone through all the stages, and they were pulsing through me again as I landed at the last one. A change. Every change.
It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do.
No success outside of my dad’s perspective of the meaning would make a difference in him.
Anything I tried to prove to him would prove pointless.
No matter how much I still showed up, he’d stay missing.
“What’s wrong with you?” Same question I’d asked before that still wouldn’t get answered, even as I waited for it. A slippery road took my mom, and now I didn’t have my dad.
When I was his daughter, I did.
I wasn’t his daughter. Not the one he claimed.
“You know what you’re doing and you’re still doing it,” I said, with another wipe at my face, my fork clanging to my plate. I pushed myself up and swiped up both plates, my voice almost gone. “Just admit you never wanted me to have a life.” I extended those six words to the ten, because that was easier than saying he never wanted me, period.
“Fine.”
The plates slipped from my hands at the counter and I caught them as I froze, because my dad really just said fine .
He sighed. “You can handle everything you want to now, so you can handle the truth.” A pause, another sigh, his tone tired. “I never wanted kids. All right? Your mom did, and when she got pregnant with you, I tried to adjust to the idea. Then you were born, and I just couldn’t do it. But you had your mom.”
Until I didn’t.
My knuckles ached around the plates, my chest tight, my entire world water.
“When she died, she left me with you all alone.” He said this like I should have felt sorry for him. “I did everything I could, anything I was equipped to do. You were all I had left—”
A noise sputtered out of me. “Someone you didn’t want.”
“You were all I had left and I did what I thought I had to to protect you—”
“Keeping me to your chest,” I started on a spin, cutting through the conviction of his defense. “Smothering me, just…giving me no room to do anything with anyone, neglecting me, ignoring me, not wanting to know me isn’t protecting me, so don’t say that to me.”
“You were all I had left of your mother,” he said now, but from an actual place of truth or from spite, I didn’t know but could guess, “and I needed some control. Losing my wife was out of my control.” He stressed that loss while losing the slightest control of his voice. “And I wasn’t losing you.”
I laughed, dry and aching. “Then life played a joke on you, Dad, because you lost me too.”
We weren’t hollering at each other. This was worse. We were released. Resigned. Accepting.
He slumped some in his seat with a nod at his laptop screen. “You can stay here.” He sounded tired again. I was just so exhausting for him. “You’ll still have food, clothes, whatever you need, but…”
“Fuck you,” I spat, but it was a blubber, a wet mess. I knew what I said, though, even if he didn’t. And it fueled my next move.
He had a prized wine he kept in the cabinet, and having one more thing to prove, I swiped it, right in front of him, and left him with the sight of what he had done to me.