Harder (Caroline & West #2)(77)

There’s a neat pile on her desk of everything she got for Christmas today, stacked up and organized in a kind of display that she’s put on for herself. It’s such a kid thing to do, such a Frankie thing, it makes me feel too much at once.

Proud I could give her that stuff so she could have a good Christmas, the kind of Christmas kids are supposed to have.

Pissed at whatever my mom said to ruin it.

But over all that, just this pure hit of love for my girl.

I sit on the unmade bed.

“What?” she says.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re looking at me funny.”

“I was just thinking how much I love you,” I confess.

Her eyes dart away, guilty.

This is how it is with us now. I keep reaching for her, but I never seem to catch her. She doesn’t want me to. “What’d Mom say?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing. You talked for a long time.”

“We just talked about Christmas and presents and stuff. She’s living with Bo again.”

“I know. She told me.”

“She asked did I want to come home.”

“No.” The word is out of me before I know what’s happening. I’m standing, towering over Frankie. “No f*cking way.”

She shrinks back. I have to calm down, I know I do, but what the f*cking f*ck? What kind of person would do that—just ask Frankie does she want to come home, a casual question dropped into a Christmas phone call without checking with me first, without f*cking asking whether I thought it would be a good idea?

Who does she think she is?

That I know the answer only makes me angrier. She’s Frankie’s mom. I’m just a fraud.

“Tell me what she said,” I demand. “Every word.”

Frankie eyes me skittishly. “She said I could come home if I wanted. She said she misses me, and you probably …”

“I probably what?”

Frankie shrugs at the floor. “You have Caroline.”

“And that means what, exactly?”

Another shrug. “You don’t want me anymore.”

“Did I say that? Did I ever f*cking say that?”

“No, but you don’t have to. You hate me!”

“I don’t hate you!”

“You’re yelling at me. You’re mad, you get mad, you never used to but you do now, and I hate you! I want to go home. I miss Mom. I miss Dad.”

“You don’t f*cking miss Dad.”

“I do, too! He loves me!”

“Loved you,” I say. “He’s dead.”

It’s nasty. Such a nasty thing to say, but he was a bastard and she wants him more than me. It’s the worst thing she could say, the starkest evidence of my failure.

She wants to go back to Silt, and I would rather die than go with her.

I would rather die than send her.

Her face crumples. “I hate you!”

And then she’s facedown on the bed, crying again.

Caroline’s in the open doorway, saying my name. Her hand lands on my arm. I come back into my body, the aching tension, the bitter taste in my throat.

I hear myself. Everything I said.

I’m not a good parent. Not a good person.

I can’t become one—I don’t know how. Because Caroline’s wrong. It’s not about parenting books, patience, trying harder. It’s about me. I’m short-tempered and angry and violent because I was born this way, born to it. Fucking cursed from the start.

Both of us. Me and Franks.

When I try to touch my sister, she smacks my hand away. “Leave me alone.”

There’s nothing I can do.

“West,” Caroline says again.

“Can you sit with her?” I ask.

Because at least I can give Frankie that much. Someone who knows how to love her.

Someone who will say the right things when I can’t.


Because of the snowstorm and how everything happened with Christmas, Caroline decides not to stay over at her dad’s even for the few nights of break she’d originally planned. What she really wants, she says, is to drive down for dinner with her family and come back the same night.

She wants me and Frankie to come with her.

I have a feeling she’s scared to leave the two of us alone. She dragged us out the day after Christmas to shop sales and spend gift cards at the mall in Des Moines. Frankie hasn’t said anything more about moving home to Silt.

I’m trying not to think about it.

I’m not even angry. I just feel hollow, knowing I can’t give my sister what I want her to have. Not if she won’t let me.

Not if I don’t know how.

Caroline says I’m overreacting. She says my mom’s trouble, but we already knew that. She says I’m a good father, a good man, that everybody’s got flaws.

Caroline points out that I raised my voice, but I didn’t attack my sister physically, didn’t insult her verbally, didn’t bad-mouth my mother, didn’t hit anyone or throw anything, didn’t get drunk or high or shoot anybody.

This is supposed to help, I guess. Counting all the ways I didn’t f*ck up.

It doesn’t help. It makes me grateful she’s willing to talk to me at all when I’m such a truculent pain in the ass, but it doesn’t alter my conviction that I don’t have what it takes to be a parent.