Chapter 4 - The Anatomy of a Parasite
I booked a flight to Cleveland that afternoon. Mark drove me to the airport, kissing my forehead at the terminal curb. “Bring him home if he has nowhere to go,” Mark said quietly. “Nobody deserves to be eaten alive by their own blood.”
I met Kevin at a twenty-four-hour diner off Interstate 71. The late-afternoon sun hit the greasy vinyl booth, illuminating the kid sitting opposite me.
My heart broke the moment I saw him.
He looked terrifyingly like Daniel—the same sharp jawline, the same hazel-green eyes. But where Daniel carried himself with the smug, rehearsed posture of a man who owned the room, Kevin looked shrunken, like a plant kept in a closet. His collar was frayed. His sneakers were split at the seam near the pinky toe. Under his eyes were dark bruises of chronic sleeplessness.
He had a stack of folded papers between his trembling hands.
“You’re taller than the pictures he showed me,” Kevin said, his voice barely audible over the hum of the pie cooler.
“He probably showed you pictures from when I was miserable,” I replied, sitting across from him. “Here.” I slid a thick folder across the laminate table. “The full certified docket. Every receipt, every bank disclosure, every court order.”
Kevin didn’t open it. He just stared at the embossed seal on the top page. “He took my tax refund yesterday. Signed my name on the back of the check. He said he needed it to cover the property taxes or the county would evict us.”
“Does he work at all, Kevin?”
“He leaves every morning at eight,” Kevin said, his gaze fixed on his hands. “He wears a suit. But… last week, I went to pick up his dry cleaning, and the shop owner said his card bounced. Then I found three boxes of high-end wine in the trunk of his car. When I asked him, he threw a glass at the wall and told me I was ungrateful for everything he sacrificed.”
Kevin swallowed hard, tears finally spilling over his lower lids. “I work forty-five hours a week at an auto parts warehouse. I take the night shift because it pays two dollars more an hour. I wanted to go to community college for mechanical engineering this fall. But he told me if I went to school instead of picking up weekend shifts, we’d lose the house.”
“You are not his parent, Kevin,” I said softly.
May you like
“Then who am I?” he cried, his voice cracking into a ragged whisper that made the waitress across the counter look over. “He’s all I have left! If he’s a liar… then my whole life is a lie. My mom, my home, the reason I wake up every day… it’s all just garbage.”
“No,” I told him firmly, reaching across the table and covering his cold, shaking hands with mine. “Your father is a parasite. But you are the host that survived him. And today, we cut him off.”
