Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Delilah
Antiseptic still burns my nose as our house comes into view. It stings with each lungful of air, reminding me where we spent the last forty-eight hours. Even though we’ve left the hospital, the hospital hasn’t left us.
“Can we go see Lucy? Just for a few minutes?”
I white knuckle the steering wheel over a new pothole the latest summer rain must’ve carved from the road. I brace myself, my tired, weary brain snapping to attention, as I say, “I don’t know if that’s the best idea, Dad. Lucy is…”
Busy? On a road trip? I want to lie, to spare us this conversation, but my mind won’t compute a solid answer.
“Damn it, I know she’s dead. I’m not stupid.”
I blink back tears and wonder absently if it’ll ever get easier to convince myself he doesn’t mean these things. That it’s not really him.
I doubt it.
“I never said you were.”
He meets my worried gaze, his own clearer than it’s been in days. Whatever he finds there dissolves the irritation in his voice. His face crumples, regret evident in every fold. “I’m sorry. I-I know she’s gone. I just wanna talk to her.”
I sigh. At the mouth of our driveway, I put the car in park and pull out my phone. Truett followed up his voicemail with a few more texts. Not pressuring or pushing, but merely offering to help when he noticed we stayed at the hospital longer than one day. It doesn’t matter that I don’t respond. He keeps showing up for me. Coming for me. Waiting for me to be ready to be found.
It’s his consistency, his care, that’ll be my undoing, when I finally have time alone to come undone.
As much as I know that cutting things off with Tru is the best thing for everyone involved, it takes every ounce of my strength to ignore the voice that tells me to call Tru right this second and admit I need him to get me through this. To hold me and tell me it’ll all work out. That I’ll make it, because I have to.
But Dad deserves to have one hundred percent of my attention. And Truett deserves better than whatever shell of me is left over when this is done.
I fire off a text, and hope beyond hope that me ignoring the rest doesn’t hurt him as badly as it hurts me.
Me
Finally out of the hospital. Dad wants to visit Lucy. Is that okay?
Truett
He’s welcome any time.
Truett
I made soup.
Truett
I can come by later, once you two are settled?
Me
I’ve got it covered, but thank you anyway.
I lock the phone and put the car back into drive, but not before a silent tear slips from my lashes.
The cemetery is cocooned in an otherworldly quiet. Not silence, per se. The birds still call to one another. The breeze ruffles the leaves here, too. But it’s muted. Delicate. Like nature knows to hold its breath for the souls laid to rest in what was once an empty hilltop meadow. I hold my breath too, as Dad makes his way through the opening in the iron fence. He settles easily into the bench at the foot of Lucy’s plot, like he’s slipping into an old pair of shoes. Familiar and formed perfectly to fit him.
I take the open seat beside him. Cold seeps from the stone bench through my jeans and into my skin. During her visit, Roberta brought a change of clothes and some toiletries for me to freshen up. A godsend, when I was in the middle of my own personal hell.
Fresh flowers are lying at the base of her stone. Beautiful white carnations, like the ones forever memorialized on his ribs. I think of Truett coming here all alone to sit with his mom, and my throat constricts. One day it’ll be me visiting my father. The thought swallows me whole, till it’s all I can see when I look around.
“Thank you, sweet pea.” Dad hums a breath, his gaze locked on Lucy’s stone. I let mine drift closed, afraid I’ll see his name if I allow myself to look again. His shoulder brushes mine, and he sighs. “It’s good to see her.”
He’s calm. The antibiotics helped, though the doctors said his confusion might come and go more frequently as he fully recovers. Still, he’s here now. I can’t think of another time to ask. “How did you two meet?”
“We went to church together. ”
My eyes fly open. “You? Church?”
“It was for Nana, mostly. I was in it for the fifteen minutes I got every day after service to play at the baby grand.” He smiles, gaze lost to memory. Sometimes he exists better there than he does in the present, it seems. Like this moment is blurry, but thirty years ago remains in hyper-focus. “Lucy sang in the choir. We didn’t talk for a real long time. Then, one day, she sat down with me and we played some beautiful music together.”
“Did you two date?”
“Oh no, her dad wasn’t having that. I don’t know exactly what his bone to pick with me was. Maybe he could see right through my paper-thin faith, or he saw the hard-on I had for his daughter?—”
“Dad!” I shout before catching myself. I know being a bit too honest is par for the course with dementia, but there are some things you never want to hear your father say aloud. Still, he looks guilty. Embarrassed. So I pat his knee and say, “I’m sorry. Go on.”
It takes a minute for him to find his footing again, to draw the words back from where they disappeared to, but when he does, his face softens around the memory like a candle set alight. “We couldn’t date. But we were friends. Good friends.”
“You wrote notes to each other, right?”
His eyebrows leap to his hairline. “How’d you know about those?”
“I found them in the box of your things from school. They’re in your desk if you’d like to read them.”
“Well, thank you for that.” He rolls his lips, tears pricking his eyes. “I’d forgotten about those notes. Lucy brought them back to me after finding them in a closet she was cleaning out. I couldn’t believe she held on to them for all those years.”
My heartbeat slows and my breath catches. “You must’ve meant a lot to her. ”
He nods. “She meant a lot to me, too.”
I don’t want to upset him. Not after everything that’s happened the last couple days. But there’s a question itching just beneath my skin, begging to be let out, and I have to know. Before it’s too late. “Did you two… was there…”
He blinks at me, confused.
I draw a breath and try again. “The affair. How long had it been going on?”
“It was just that one kiss. I—” His lips shutter closed. “I shouldn’t say j— ugh. ” He rubs at his mouth, his beard crinkling against his touch. “I shouldn’t say ‘just.’ One kiss is enough. I cheated. It was wrong.”
My heartbeat slows to a crawl. I shake my head, more at myself than at him. “All this time I thought Jessica caught you sleeping together.”
He barks a laugh. “I wish!” Silence swallows his laughter, and a grimace steals the joy from his face. “Sorry. No. We never slept together.”
He said that to me once, on his knees in the kitchen as he pleaded his case. But a part of me never believed him. Not with the rumors—and Mom’s accusations—filling my head with another story. Not until now, when he has no reason to lie.
I press my fingers against my temples, trying to make sense of it all. “But there were feelings before? Right?”
“For who?”
“For Lucy.”
He opens his mouth, a little sound of realization escaping, and nods. “Yeah.” The word is wistful. Breathy. “I’ve loved her my entire life. Or at least for every second she was a part of it.”
Now my head is really starting to hurt. “But you married Mom?”
His brow furrows. “Kimberly?”
“Yes. ”
“She was pregnant.” He mulls it over. “With you, as a matter of fact.”
A squirrel shoots across the cemetery, startling us both. My mind is at once spinning and holding incredibly still, trying to keep up while attempting not to move too fast and miss it all in the process.
I lay a hand over Dad’s. His skin is bruised where they gave him an IV, so my squeeze is gentle. “Were you ever happy?”
His lips curl upward, crinkling the corners of his eyes. “I was happy being your dad.”
“But not with Mom?”
His head drops. “Kimberly is a…difficult person.”
I snort. I don’t mean to, but it slips out. A flock of starlings evacuate the oak branches overhead, calling out their distaste. Dad chuckles, too, though there’s something broken in it. In us.
When the laughter subsides, it leaves behind a raw ache in my chest. I push my palm hard against my breastbone, but the pain remains just out of reach.
“Were you and Lucy together after Mom and I left?”
He shakes his head. His bottom lip warbles.
“Why not? There was nothing standing in your way. Waylon was gone. We were gone. Why not go after Lucy, if you had truly loved her your whole life?”
“The only person I love more than Lucy”—he glances up at me—“is you.”
I blink. “I don’t understand.”
He opens his mouth to speak, and the words stall. This time I’m not sure if it’s because of the dementia or because some things simply cannot be explained, no matter how hard we try. Like why neither of us stood up for ourselves when it came to Mom, or how we both ended up in love with a Parker. Across time and circumstance, I find myself walking the same path he did, right down to supporting him through the very disease that took his mom from him in the end.
There are no words for a pain like this. Him, looking at his past while I’m staring into my future. The two looking so painfully similar.
“I wanted you to come home, sweet pea. There had to be room for you to come home.” He turns to Lucy’s stone, and tears slip from the corners of his eyes. “Lucy… She understood.”
For me. Even when I had been so cruel as to cut him out of my life.
“I’m so sorry, Dad.” I lay my head on his shoulder. A trembling hand crosses over his chest to stroke my cheek. I suck in a breath and hold it, trying to capture it and this moment in the very same grasp. “I would’ve understood. I?—”
How do I explain to him that I think I know exactly how he felt for Lucy, because it’s the same love I’ve held for her son for my whole life? It’s the torch I’ve carried, one I didn’t even know my father passed on to me before today. One I never would’ve had if he’d gone after what he truly wanted.
One that still isn’t mine to keep, given the circumstances we’re in.
His hand drops to my knee. He pats it gently, like I’m a child again, being comforted even when I intended to do the comforting.
“It’s okay. It’s done.” He squeezes my knee. “You two are better than us in every way, and now you have each other. That’s all we could ask.”
But it’s not okay, I want to say. How do I go on, knowing my father gave up everything for me? Not only his life, but his one chance with the woman he loved. For the first time I see so clearly what Truett meant about my father sacrificing himself at the altar of everyone around him. At the altar of my happiness. The same way Truett accused me of doing for everyone else .
Like father, like daughter. No matter how much you might wish it wasn’t so.
Dad sighs, and I swear the weight of the world comes out on that breath.
“I’m ready,” he says.
“Okay.” I swallow past the lump in my throat and rise, dusting imagined dirt from my legs. “We can head back to the house. I’ll order some pizza and we can watch a movie. Maybe The Truman Show ?”
He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. There’s a resignation to his sloped shoulders. His solemn gaze. He’s looking right at Lucy’s stone when he says, “No. I’m ready to go to a home.”
The air stalls in my lungs. “What?”
“It’s time.” His breathing is rapid, and for a moment I’m worried I’m losing him, but his gaze is alert. Intense with passion rather than delirium. “I don’t want this for you. I never wanted this.”
“I’m happy to do it, Dad. I don’t mind at all.”
He chuckles under his breath, like this is exactly what he expected me to say. “I’m ready, sweet pea.” He turns to me and meets my gaze. “I want to go now, while I’m still me. Some of the time.”
“All the time,” I correct. “You’re you, even when you’re confused.”
He sighs. “I’m so tired.”
“Let’s go back, then. You can take a nap. I’ll order food.” I offer my hand to help him rise. “It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”
He doesn’t let my gaze drop. He grabs hold of my hand and repeats softly, “I’m ready.”
And perhaps he is. But I don’t know if I ever will be.