Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
I didn’t care about him, and he didn’t care about me. Except that wasn’t true. I cared so much it hurt. All I wanted was for my dad to approve of something I had done. I wasn’t the smartest person in the room or the friendliest, but that shouldn’t matter to a parent. I felt betrayed by him, and that drove me away.
All through my recovery, in the back of my mind, I wondered how he was getting on. Did he know I had been shot? Did he know I was back in the States? Would he care? I got my answer when he didn’t visit. He didn’t call or write or look me up on social media. I basically considered myself an orphan and would never have returned to Singer’s Ridge if I had any other familiar place to land. And yet there we were, face to face for the first time in eight long years.
“Son,” he said.
I turned away, leaving the door open. “How did you find me?”
He shuffled inside, and I looked back, hearing a difference in the way he moved. He was holding a cane, almost exactly like mine, leaning on it for support as he closed the door behind him. I watched him, not lifting a hand to help, and he stood awkwardly in the entryway.
We stared at each other in silence for a moment before I pointed to the table. “Do you want coffee?”
“That sounds great,” he answered, easing himself into a chair.
I found another mug in the cabinet and filled it. “I don’t have cream or sugar.”
“Black’s fine. That’s how I like it,” he said. I had a momentary twinge of regret when I realized I didn’t know how my own father took his coffee. It had been so long since I had seen him, and never as an adult. I wondered how he had injured himself, but something held me back from asking. I stared at him for a long moment before he finally answered my initial question.
“Mrs. Washington told me you were staying here.”
I sighed, but I hadn’t exactly asked her to keep my whereabouts a secret, so I couldn’t be upset that she had snitched on me. Still, our families had only been loosely acquainted, and I had assumed she would mind her own business. Score one for the Singer’s Ridge gossip mill.
“And Porter told me,” Dad added.
“Porter?”
“Gina’s fiancé.”
“Oh.” I had managed to stay in touch with Gina somewhat over the last year.
She’d texted me pictures of her baby, so I knew that the little boy was healthy and growing big. But she hadn’t mentioned anything about the father, and I never asked.
I hadn’t told her I was back in town either. So how had her fiancé found out? It must have come from someone I passed on my walk from the bus station. News spread like a virus in this town, and I doubted Mary Beth could keep her hands off her phone after she’d passed me.
I hadn’t seen Porter since high school and doubted I would recognize him if I saw him. I hadn’t been close to anyone back then. But he was making Gina happy, so I guessed he couldn’t be all bad.
“How’d you injure your leg?” I asked.
“It was a knee replacement,” he said. “Arthritis.” There was a pause before he dropped his next question. “I heard you were shot.”
I kept my face impassive, though warning bells were sounding loudly in my ears.
“How’d you hear?” I demanded.
“I was notified,” he answered easily. And there it was. He really didn’t care enough to keep tabs on me. The Army had told him. There wasn’t any emotion involved on either end, just an information dump.
“What are you doing here?” was my next question.
He sighed, glancing around the apartment in an effort to stall. “This is a nice place.”
I shrugged. “Landlady wants to have dinner every now and then. And apparently she wants to let everyone know that I’m staying here.”
“Don’t give her a hard time,” Dad said in a low voice. “I’m glad she told me.”
I let that one slide. If he had wanted to reach out, he could have done so at any point over the last eight years. There were times when I had felt alone out there in the desert. I would have welcomed his voice, even with his complaints about what I had chosen to do with my life. But there had been silence, and I had gotten the message loud and clear.
“Look, I don’t have anything to say,” I began, staring into my coffee cup.
“I messed up,” Dad blurted out.
I glanced up, not having expected something so honest.
He shook his head. “When you were growing up. I messed up.”
“I know,” I said, cutting him off. This wasn’t anything new. He had given me the same speech over and over again when I was a teenager. He was worried I wasn’t going anywhere good. He was worried I wouldn’t make anything of myself. He was worried that I wouldn’t live up to whatever impossible standards he set.