Chương 10
“He told me not to disrespect him.”
“And you walked away.”
“I said I didn’t want to talk anymore.”
“What did he do?”
“He grabbed me here.”
She touched the inside of her upper arm.
“Hard?”
“Kind of.”
“Did it leave a mark?”
“For a little while.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hours?”
“Maybe.”
“Did anybody see it?”
“Sophie.”
My hands went cold.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Emma’s face tightened again.
“I thought you’d tell him not to do it.”
“That’s what I would’ve done.”
“I know.”
The words were not cruel.
That made them worse.
I stared at my daughter.
“What did you need me to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
She looked down.
“I wanted you to make him stop being scary.”
The coffee maker clicked behind me as it shut itself off.
Somewhere outside, a lawn mower started.
The ordinary sound made the kitchen feel more unreal.
“I’m sorry.”
Emma’s shoulders rose.
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have.”
She looked at me then.
“You knew he yelled.”
“Yes.”
“You knew he broke stuff.”
“I thought the lamp was an accident.”
“But you knew about the pantry door.”
“Yes.”
“And when he gets mad in the car.”
I swallowed.
“What happens in the car?”
“Nothing.”
“Emma.”
“He drives fast.”
My pulse changed.
“How fast?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he speed when he’s angry?”
She nodded.
“Has he done that with all of you in the car?”
“Yes.”
I put both hands flat on the table.
There were too many memories arriving at once.
David complaining about slow drivers.
David accelerating hard after arguments.
The girls going silent in the back seat.
Me telling him to calm down.
Him saying he was fine.
I had treated the driving as irritation.
The girls had treated it as danger.
“Did he ever threaten to hurt himself?”
“No.”
“Threaten anyone else?”
“No.”
“Ever say he’d take you away from me before yesterday?”
Emma shook her head.
“Did he say anything about Grandpa?”
“All the time.”
I frowned.
“What?”
“That Grandpa thought he was better than everybody.”
“Dad barely talks about David.”
“I know.”
“He said that to you?”
“Sometimes.”
“What else?”
Emma hesitated.
“He said Grandpa looked down on him because Grandpa worked for the government and Dad was in sales.”
I almost corrected her.
Then I stopped.
That was how David understood my father.
Not exactly poor, not exactly useless, but diminished.
Retired.
Bureaucratic.
A man who once had an office somewhere and now fixed fence posts and wore old shirts.
“Did Dad ever tell you not to talk about Grandpa?”
“Not really.”
“Not really means yes.”
“He said Grandpa was weird about money.”
I stared at her.
“What does that mean?”
“He said Grandpa probably hid money from Grandma.”
I almost laughed from disbelief.
“Your grandfather gave your grandmother access to every account they had.”
Emma shrugged.
“I didn’t know.”
Of course she did not.
She was twelve.
She should have been worrying about homework and whether her friends were excluding her from group chats.
Instead she had been carrying around fragments of her father’s resentment like grocery bags nobody noticed.
Dad appeared in the doorway.
He took one look at us and stopped.
“What happened?”
I looked at Emma.
“That’s her story to tell.”
Emma immediately shook her head.
“I don’t want to.”
Dad nodded.
“Then you don’t have to.”
He turned to leave.
“Dad.”
He looked back.
“Can you take the other girls upstairs for a little while?”
His eyes moved from me to Emma.
“Yes.”
“No questions.”
“I heard you.”
He returned to the living room.
A moment later Grace protested loudly that she had not finished looking at Nathan.
Dad told her Nathan was unlikely to disappear before lunch.
Grace apparently considered that possibility worth debating.
Emma gave a tiny smile.
Then it vanished.
“Are you going to tell Dad?”
“Grandpa?”
“Yes.”
“Not without talking to you first.”
She nodded.
“Are you going to tell the lawyer?”
I hesitated.
“Yes.”
Emma looked uncomfortable.
“Why?”
“Because she needs to know what has happened in this family.”
“Will Dad get arrested?”
“I don’t know.”
“But grabbing me was a long time ago.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
“I know.”
Her eyes filled.
“I don’t want him to go to jail.”
“I know.”
“He’s not bad all the time.”
“I know.”
“He takes us for pancakes.”
“I know.”
“He came to every soccer game.”
“I know.”
She began crying.
I reached across the table.
She grabbed my hand.
“He helped me with science when I didn’t understand circuits.”
“I remember.”
“He stayed up until midnight.”
“Yes.”
“So what am I supposed to do with that?”
There it was.
The question I had been avoiding for years, spoken by a twelve-year-old.
I squeezed her fingers.
“You don’t have to do anything with it right now.”
“But if he’s bad—”
“People aren’t only one thing.”
She wiped her face with her sleeve.
“He hit you.”
“Yes.”
“He scared Sophie.”
“Yes.”
“He grabbed me.”
“Yes.”
“And he still loves us?”
My throat tightened.
“I believe he does.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Sometimes love doesn’t make people safe.”
Emma stared at the table.
I heard Dad upstairs telling Grace she could not jump from the bed to the dresser.
Grace argued that she could because she had already done it.
Life had apparently decided to continue without permission.
Emma drew a crooked circle in a water ring on the table.
“Are you scared of him?”
The honest answer took longer than I wanted.
“Yes.”
She looked up.
That frightened her more than anything else I had said.
I reached for her.
She came around the table and folded herself carefully against me.
I winced.
“Sorry.”
“No, come here.”
She hugged me higher, around the shoulders.
For a moment I smelled her strawberry shampoo and the faint detergent scent of her pajamas.
May you like
I remembered washing that same hair when she was three and screaming because water had touched her forehead.
The memory hurt in a completely different place.
