Chapter 6 - The Father's Hands
The house I grew up in was a single-story ranch built in the late seventies. The front porch still sagged slightly to the left, but the roof shingles were new—paid for by my "generous thirty-thousand-dollar inheritance."
When I pulled into the driveway, my mother’s car wasn't there. Only my father's old sedan was parked under the carport.
I walked up the steps, my knees trembling, and knocked on the screen door.
Inside, the television was muted. My father was sitting in his worn recliner, reading the local newspaper under the warm glow of a floor lamp. He didn't look up when the hinges creaked as I stepped inside.
"Dad?"
He folded the paper slowly, setting it on the side table next to his reading glasses. Then he held up his right hand.
The skin over his knuckles was scarred, swollen with the rheumatoid arthritis that had forced him to retire early from the machine shop. For three years, he had chewed on the left side of his mouth because he couldn't afford the dental implants needed after an infection destroyed his lower molars.
"I remember when you were seven," Dad said, his voice level and slow. "You lost your winter gloves at school. You were so scared I was going to be mad that you walked home in twenty-degree weather with your hands shoved inside your sleeves. When you walked through that door, your fingers were white."
I swallowed the lump in my throat. "I remember."
"I sat you by the radiator," he continued, looking not at me, but at the wall above my head. "I rubbed your hands between mine for an hour until the blood came back. I told you that as long as I was alive, you never had to hide a mistake from me. That whatever went wrong, we bore it together."
"Dad, I didn't want to hurt anyone—"
"You didn't trust us, Jessie," he said, finally turning his gray eyes toward me. "You thought that if we knew you had money, we would turn on you. You thought your mother and I raised children who would become parasites the moment there was bread on the table."
"No, Dad, that wasn't it—"
"That was exactly it," he said firmly. "You looked at forty-seven million dollars, and you looked at your family, and you decided the money was worth more than our character."
He stood up, walking over to the mantel above the fireplace. There sat the framed photograph of the five of us from a camping trip twenty years ago, all sunburnt and grinning by a lake. Next to it was the small brass envelope opener I had given him for Father's Day when I was ten.
May you like
He didn't touch the photo. He just stood there with his back to me.
"Your mother is staying at your Aunt Clara’s," he said quietly. "She doesn't want to see you right now. Neither do I. Leave your keys on the counter before you go."
