I turned on him. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”
I sat down on the couch next to Lukas, close enough that our shoulders touched. He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t move away either.
Our father picked up his mug. His hand shook. “I’m not trying to erase anything. I’m trying to—” He stopped. Looked down at the coffee like it might tell him the word he was searching for. “I’m trying to say I’m sorry without making it worse.”
“He had ten years to say things,” I said. “He had every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every birthday phone call where he talked about the weather for forty-five minutes and then hung up.” incesto madres e hijos comics xxx 1
I didn’t sit. I stood in the middle of the living room, arms crossed, looking at the same brown plaid couch, the same glass ashtray on the end table, the same framed photo of the three of us at Busch Gardens in 1994. In the photo, I was seven, holding a stuffed dolphin. Lukas was eleven, already too cool to smile. And our father was young, with both arms around us, his face open and unguarded in a way I’d never seen him again after that summer.
“I’m not ready,” I said. It came out smaller than I wanted.
“That you, June?” My father’s voice, thinner than I remembered. Ragged at the edges. I turned on him
Lukas pulled out a chair. The legs scraped against the linoleum—the same linoleum our mother had picked out in 1997, the pattern worn smooth in front of the stove where she used to stand. “I came back because someone has to tell you he’s asking for you.”
Lukas drank. He’d always been the slow one, the patient one, the one who could sit in a deer stand for eight hours without moving. I was the one who left. Who went to college three states away, then farther, then farthest. Who changed my last name back to our mother’s maiden name two years ago, just to see if anyone would notice.
My father took a sip of his coffee. His hand was steady now. Our father picked up his mug
“You look like shit.”
Lukas came in with three mugs. He set one on the table next to the recliner, one on the coffee table in front of me, and kept one for himself. Then he sat on the couch, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and said nothing.