Chapter 54 Malena
Malena
My dad sat perched across from me at our kitchen table, his hands folded and an expression I couldn’t decipher on his face. Against my better judgment, when he showed up at my door unannounced, I let him in.
It’d been a couple of weeks since everything went down over Thanksgiving weekend. I was a week out from finals, and I hadn’t heard from my parents.
“So, what’s up Mr. Amin?” Cora called from the living room, where she was pretending to read her book.
When she heard the door open a few minutes ago, she meandered out of her room and planted herself on the couch. Now that Sabrina and Cora knew the full extent of what my home life looked like, I knew she wouldn’t be leaving.
My dad glanced over his shoulder and gave Cora a polite smile before turning back to me. He tapped his fingers along the folder in his hands.
“I wanted to see you and give you this.” He handed it to me. “I stopped by the bursar’s office today.”
Inside were two sheets of paper letting me know that my tuition was paid for next semester.
My nerves hissed.
“You think this fixes everything?” Was this some backward way of bribing me into compliance? I was supposed to forget everything that happened? “That I’ll just go ahead and do what you want?”
“No,” he answered resolutely.
“I’m just going to forget all the abuse over the years?”
He flinched because I named it. I said it out loud where someone could and would hear. We weren’t the type of family that talked about the ugliness. We yelled about it and someone—me—always knuckled under.
“Well, fine, it’s your money.” I wasn’t too proud to take it, but it wouldn’t be in exchange for anything. “You can pay for it, but it won’t change anything until you change.” Every demand I should have made over the last few years came flying out of my mouth. “If that’s not okay, then don’t—”
“We are your parents,” he said, his lips curving down. “We will always take care of you.”
My steadfastness wobbled. The words cracked down my sternum because I was still their kid. Despite everything, I still ached for them to want me.
I sucked in a breath to keep the tears at the corner of my eyes in place. “Okay.”
The room went still again.
“Getting you girls everything you needed… that was all we could see for a long time,” he explained. “We did what we thought was best.”
“Best for who?”
“For you. To protect you.” He said it so sincerely that I was sure, on some level, he thought that’s what he was doing.
“Everything I know about living, working, being a good friend, a good partner—” My voice hitched “Although that last one needs some work. All of that, I’ve had to learn by lying to you,” I told him bluntly. “In protecting me from the world, you made me unprepared to ever face it.”
The words landed heavier than I meant for them to, but they had the intended effect. The lines in his forehead sank deeper and his shoulders slumped.
“That wasn’t the intention,” he said quietly. I still couldn’t know if that was true because controlling me was pretty convenient for them. “And I don’t want to fight, Malena.” He steepled his hands together. “I just want you to know that you can come home. You can always come home.”
My lips wobbled. “Mom doesn’t—”
“Mom is going to do better,” he promised. “So will I.”
President Packham was right. Life was shades of gray. Right and wrong were fuzzy.
As a woman, I felt for my mom. I understood what she was trying to do: set me up in the best way she knew how. She was trying to make me perfect by someone else’s standards. She stole parts of my girlhood because those were probably the parts stolen from her and she didn’t know any better.
As a daughter—the person subject to the temper, the judgement, the unrelenting weight of her expectations—I was angry. Angry with what would have happened if I hadn’t stood up for myself. I came too close to living the wrong life because of her.
Maybe one day that anger would distill down to something less volatile. Maybe I’d have a daughter of my own and I’d know how not to treat her. Maybe we’d be able to have a relationship, a real one.
I hoped for it, but I wasn’t leveraging my own happiness to get it. Not anymore and never again.
“I hope you do. But I’ll wait to see proof before I come home.”
“Okay.” He stood and nodded, walking to the door with his hands in his pockets. He paused at the threshold. “I do want you to be happy and safe. We just might have different ideas of what that is.”
That was probably as close to getting some sort of agreement with what I wanted.
“I’ll be fine, Dad.” I tapped on the headline on the paper. The one Cora refused to move from the kitchen table. There was also a copy on the coffee table and a stack of at least thirty in her room. “Turns out, I’m pretty resourceful.”
His chest puffed up proudly and he looked down at the paper. “I know.”