Page 7 of Really Truly Yours
I expect the huffy snort that follows. He returns his attention to the near-shanty across the narrow, potholed street. Any other evening at this hour, Donny would be in his recliner, drapes open, keeping watch over the neighborhood, baseball game on the television. Tonight, by the time I cleaned up his dinner, he was fast asleep.
Elbows on his knees, Grayson looks up at me. “So. What else do you have to tell me?”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“But you would have if I hadn’t shut you down this morning, right?”
I shrug. “Maybe.”
“Then that’s what I want to hear, what you would’ve said if I hadn’t walked.”
You mean run?
My legs are quivery and beginning to ache. I grip an armrest and lower myself into the second chair, this one the cheap plastic kind that sits in a stack outside one of those everything is-a-dollar stores. I ignore the way Grayson’s eyes follow my old-lady moves.
Speaking of nobody’s business.
“Donny hasn’t told me specifics, just that he was a terrible father.”
“He was no father at all!”
I wait until the echoing boom settles. “Yes, he said that, too.”
Grayson jerks a hard nod, as if he needed to know Donny knew. “Go on.”
“He said he walked out on your mother multiple times. And you and your brother.”
Grayson’s cough runs rife with disgust. “I guess he gets a pass on leaving Tripp. At least Tripp wasn’t his.”
I drop my gaze and stare at my hands, the pinpoint scar from all the IVs last year still evident on the left one, at least to me.
“You know, I don’t even know how he fit into those early years. He was gone more than he was with us. There were lots of other men. I might have been little, but I remember that much, and my brother filled me in on the rest.”
For all my family’s dysfunction, my brothers and I were spared this particular misfortune, although what we got wasn’t much better. Everybody’s junk is different, but we all have it, at least on this end of town.
“I remember he was there my first day of kindergarten. We posed for a picture...” Tension oozes off giant shoulders. “And that’s pretty much the last thing I remember about Donald Grayson.”
“I’m sorry.” I am, although, given the sort of man Donny freely confesses to being in those days, Grayson and Tripp were probably better off, despite the curveballs I’ve heard life pitched their way soon afterwards.
Regardless of logic or reason, pain is pain. Sometimes, it stays strong, even when it feels like it should finally up and move along like everything and everyone else. The only thing a body can do is find a way to deal.
My body resorted to its own mechanism, and it was nearly the death of me. Not literally, but for a time, I wondered. Now, some mornings, I’m almost brave enough to peek at the future. It’s a nebulous gray and might even be an illusion. It’s scary, too. I’ve tried to think big, but for the life of me, I can’t envision myself anywhere except the seven-hundred block of East Fifth Street. A girl like me never gets far from a place like this.
Funny how little that thought bothers me lately. I’ve learned to appreciate what I have instead of lamenting what I don’t.
“You know, I’ve had a great life, and I’d unequivocally call Donny leaving a blessing, except it cost me my brother.”
From what I’ve heard, the blame for that doesn’t fall on Donny entirely.
The cricket turns up the volume, and another one joins in. A car with a bad muffler makes the corner and guns it past the house, bass booming and raunchy lyrics windsurfing through rolled down windows. I’m used to it.
This time, I’d like the earth to swallow me up.
I clear my throat when my words don’t succeed on the first attempt. “Are you going to go over there?”
At eye-level, Grayson looks over, a wry pull to his mouth. “You’re ready for me to leave.”
“I didn’t say that.”