Chapter 18 #2
I don’t know what to say. Nothing’s quite appropriate for the gravity of what he’s telling me, yet I don’t feel it.
I don’t feel any sort of way at all, even though I know I’m supposed to.
There might be the vague sense of sadness, of losing what little remains of my family.
Of knowing that soon my childhood home in Watertown will no longer be there for me.
That this man, who I could never fall back on anyway, won’t be there for the holidays or the lunches or the odd times he would call me on the phone for one pointless conversation or another. Endings are sad, after all.
But mostly, it’s nothing.
Just nothing.
He’s not looking at me. He’s staring down at my mother’s marker—Annemarie Karvelas, Devoted Wife and Mother—and his face betrays nothing, either. I wonder what it feels like to know you’re dying, or if there’s a grim sort of acceptance to it.
When my mother passed, there was only my own grief, outsized and intense.
Too much to take in what anyone else was feeling.
My mother had been so sweet and gracious, had let me fall upon her with begging and tears, had been the one to comfort me.
Not the other way around. I would never know what she felt in those final, poignant moments. Fear? Despair? Any sort of peace?
There’s a lump in my throat now, and I swallow it back.
“She always coddled you.” My father’s wet, rasping voice, bringing me to the here and now. “Your mother.”
My gaze is fixed on her marker. I keep my mouth shut.
“I didn’t approve of it,” he goes on. “I told her it would make you soft. A boy needs a strong male presence in his life, he needs bucking up. But of course I could never say no to her. Most of the time.”
That isn’t true at all. He could. He did.
That anger he had, always simmering beneath the surface, and my mother was the pot lid to keep it from boiling over—but sometimes it did anyway, right onto the burner.
If he had too much to drink, if something at work pissed him off that day, if the Red Sox lost—there would be times, excuses.
There would be shouting and tears, a casserole dish upended to the floor, an entire salad splattered across the kitchen backsplash.
“You being the baby we prayed for,” my father says. “After losing so many. You were her little miracle. How could I tell her she wasn’t allowed to baby you a little? Always afraid something would happen, that she would lose you somehow.”
“She was the best.” I say it quietly, but fiercely. “Mom was the best.”
“She made you soft,” he counters. He leans heavily on his cane as he fishes around in his pocket, coming up with a handkerchief with which to wipe his mouth. “Even as you got bigger, she insisted on babying you. I told her, Annemarie, he’s getting too big for the nonsense—”
My head jerks up. “Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t you dare say shit about her. She didn’t do a single thing wrong. She’s not responsible for anything that’s happened, and I know that you know that. You really want to lay all of this at the feet of someone who isn’t even here anymore?”
The lump growing larger with every word I speak and I can’t even begin to swallow it back.
It’s been over fifteen years and I still can’t talk about her without coming apart at the seams, at least a little.
There is so much grief there, stifled and squashed down, never allowed to be truly felt.
A son’s love for his mother without any place to go. No avenue. No outlet.
“Then,” he says, “that boy.”
“Arin?”
He draws himself up, as much as he can muster, the cane planted squarely before him. Oh, he’s still proud of that one. Not a single ounce of regret for what he did, hurting and exiling someone for the crime of loving me. “You weren’t like this before—”
“I was, actually,” I interrupt. “He wasn’t the first. Not even close.”
“Then why are you the way that you are?” And the way my father asks it is so desperate, beseeching, yearning to understand.
“What made you like this? Why is Demi not enough for you? How is having a family not enough? This is a sickness. You want to throw away your beautiful wife and daughter for a man? What for?”
“Because I was literally fucking born this way!” I shout. “You have access to the fucking internet, why don’t you just look up why I’m gay? Why don’t you even try to understand or accept me? I’m your only son, Dad. So why don’t I mean anything to you?
Now he’s the one who’s silent, watching me with an expression I can’t decipher on a face that has aged about ten years since I saw him last, in the restaurant he kicked me out of.
“Just because of how I choose to look and live?” My voice bounces and echoes off the many gravestones, ricocheting between them.
“Because I’m not the big strong alpha male you’re desperate for me to be?
Because I don’t give a fuck about paying lip service in a church that thinks I’m an abomination and wants me to apologize for existing? ”
And I am crying now, my voice breaking on that last why, because that busted, bewildered kid inside me is here.
The one that could never quite figure out how to measure up in my father’s eyes even though he desperately wanted to, needed to.
Desperately needed someone in his corner when his mother was gone.
I just can’t help it—and in the moment I hate that softness in me, too, as much as he does.
The appeasing part of me that even cares.
“You let me down when I needed you.” I’m still going on about it, all the things I’d left unsaid for far, far too long.
I’m emptying my face here and now. “I was just a child. My mom died, and you—you left me out to dry, held me at arm’s length and nothing was ever good enough for you no matter how hard I tried.
You failed me, Dad. Not the other way around.
I was the kid, you’re the parent. I just don’t understand why. ”
My father regards me with very little emotion at all. Watching me break down like he always used to, and I wonder if he will backhand me for the tears like he did in the good old days. Scold me for being a coward. Tell me to tough it out. Grow a pair. Man the fuck up. Stop being such a bitch.
“Because, Luca,” he says eventually, “you disgust me.”
Okay. I know that already. This is something long-assumed, pieced together easily by all the abuse he doled out, by the things he said to me during those tender pubescent years and beyond.
The look on his face when he caught me with Arin, a look that lingered for years afterwards, even after I married Demi like he wanted me to.
I knew I was never anything to him—but hearing him say it in so many words hurts the worst.
“Is that all?” I say. I’ve managed to steady my voice now. “That’s all you feel about me?”
He hesitates, long enough that I think he will renege on his answer. Long enough for me to dare to hope that he might. And then, “Yes.”
And that’s it.
That’s all.
There is nothing else for me to say.
I turn and walk away. He calls after me: some false appeasement, something about how he’s just an old dying man who needs his only son to listen to him. Something about Aster, his grandchild, and when I hear that I do round back on him one last time.
“Listen to me. You are never, ever going to see my daughter while I still breathe,” I snarl at him. “I’m not going to let you poison her and hurt her the way you did to me.”
My father’s face is a horribly cold thing. “Then I suppose you and your daughter don’t want any part of your inheritance, either.”
“Are you disowning me?”
He doesn’t admit it, but the implication is enough. I turn away from him, and this time it’s for good. He doesn’t call me back to him, and I don’t wait around and hope for him to. I just don’t give a shit anymore.
I am done trying with him. I’m done.
And in the moment, it feels so fucking bad.