Down to My Soul (Soul Series Book 2)(82)

“She did. Much better. I always knew she was too good for me.”

“On that we can agree.” I tap my foot against the trash can. Even now I have to fight the urge to apologize because he’s the one who first taught me to respect my elders.

“It should have been simple, Kai Anne. It should be, but things got so twisted around.” He leans against the work table and sighs. “I never wanted to be a preacher.”

“What?” I frown, recalling all the Saturday nights I saw him bent over the Bible preparing for his Sunday message. “But you loved God. You loved the church.”

“You’re right. I did love God.” He picks up my work gloves, flipping them from hand to hand. “I still do. And I loved the church, but I never wanted to lead it. Never wanted any of that. I came from generations of preachers. It was expected, and I was good at it.”

He glances up with an adult honesty I never would have recognized as a child.

“It was the natural progression of things,” he says softly. “My family wanted me to go to seminary. So I did. And then your grandfather wanted me to be his assistant pastor. So I did. And everyone wanted me to marry your mother.”

He licks his lips and tosses the gloves to the work table before looking back to me.

“So I did.”

“So you didn’t love her.” I want to wail because I know she loved him with her last lucid thoughts.

“I didn’t love her the right way. I loved her the best I could with what I knew love to be.” The callused hand he runs over the back of his neck makes me wonder what he does with those hands nowadays.

“Not the deep way?” My voice is hushed in this room with Mama’s jars where I suspect she stored her loneliness. Where I think she sealed her regrets. “Is that how you loved Carla? Deep cries out to deep?”

He knows exactly what I mean. Surprise flits briefly across his face. Maybe he’s surprised that an eight-year-old grasped that much about a Bible verse and that it stuck with me all these years. Did he really have no idea how much I adored him? How I lived for his every word? That I even felt a childish possessiveness of him with the people from the church who stole his time from me? I think of all the things I lost when he left, it’s that feeling I mourn the most. That my daddy stood on the stars to hang the moon. I’m sure all girls lose it at some point. I’m sure many think they never will. I can testify that when it goes, it’s gone forever.

“I guess you could say it was that deep cries out to deep kind of love.” He looks down at the shed floor. “It feels almost blasphemous to say it, though.”

“It should. To feel it for anyone other than your wife should feel like a blasphemy.”

He only nods.

“I know it won’t be enough, but I have to try to explain this to you.” He sighs, a small smile on his face. “Just about everything in my life felt like a trap, but Carla made me feel . . . free. I felt like myself with her for the first time, even though I knew it was wrong. There had never been anyone I could bare myself to. I could share my darkest parts with, but she saw them and loved me anyway.”

I hate that I know exactly what he means. I felt that with Rhyson almost from the beginning. My eyes settle on my phone on the work table. It holds my darkest secrets, and yet I’ve withheld it from Rhyson. If deep has ever cried out to deep, it does with us. The lies I’ve told, the secrets I’ve kept feel like such a betrayal I can barely stay in the same room with myself.

“All my life I hoarded my secrets and hid my true self from everyone around me.” His eyes focus on something in the past or something inside of him, but not on me. “I did all the things they wanted, knowing it wasn’t me. It wasn’t right. I never learned to stand, so when things got tough, I hid and then I ran.”

“You’re right. It’s not enough.” Frustration rips the next words from my mouth. “You felt trapped? By the church? By the town? By mama? By me? What had you feeling so trapped, Daddy?”

“All of it.” He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You don’t know what it’s like to want more and be stuck here.”

“I don’t know what that’s like?” I close the distance between us until I’m standing right in front of him. I’m no longer a little girl, but he still towers over me. I bang my fist on the work table. “I stayed in Glory Falls five years after I was supposed to be gone, and do you know why?”

I couldn’t stop the tears if I wanted to, and I don’t even want to try. He needs to see.

“I stayed because Mama was diagnosed with ALS.” My voice breaks, catching on emotion. “And it was a privilege to take care of her ‘til the day she died. I wouldn’t trade one day of it. What you call a trap, I call love, Daddy. I realize now you wouldn’t know the difference.”

“Kai Anne—”

“Tell me, when you heard she died, did your sympathy card get lost in the mail?” My words ooze venom and disdain. “Along with my birthday cards and all the money we could have used to survive?”

“I sent your Mama money and she sent it back every time telling me to bring it myself. We divorced, Kai Anne. My address was on every letter. She knew where I was.”

“That’s a lie.” I mean to screech it, but it comes out a creaky whisper.