Down to My Soul (Soul Series Book 2)(83)

“It’s true. I tried a few times, but she told me to stop if I wasn’t coming home.”

“So you stopped because you were never coming home, right?” I blink at these damn tears that tell him too much. “And me? You never thought to reach out to me? See how I was doing?”

A mixture of emotions passes over his face. It looks like guilt. It looks like regret, but I don’t know this man anymore, so I won’t presume to know.

“I didn’t know what to say after so long,” he finally says. “I wish I had been strong enough to face my mistakes. To face the church and the community.”

He looks down at his boots.

“To face you and your mama.”

“I wish you’d been strong enough not to f*ck another woman.”

We both flinch at the vulgarity dirtying the air between us. The last time he saw me he was teaching me scripture, and we were bonded by love. Now all we have is this biological link and a collection of memories that feel like lies.

“Carla was pregnant,” he says softly. “For a long time I resisted what we felt, but eventually, it was too strong, and we gave into it. When she got pregnant, I—”

“You have a family?” I cut in, so braced for his answer, the muscles in my back and neck and arms ache.

“Yeah, we had a little girl.” I think it’s involuntary, the smile and tender look that soften his rocky expression.

Jealousy rocks me. He stayed for her, but not for me. He chose them, but not me. He loves them, but didn’t love me. Not enough.

“Pictures?” Tears water the question. “You have pictures of her?”

He flips through his phone for a minute and hands it to me. Photo after photo of him with his new family at ball games, during the holidays, on vacation. And then finally the one that punches right through my heart with brass knuckles.

His daughter, the little sister I’ve never met, at a dance recital, and him right there with her perched on his knee.

I just can’t. I hand him the phone. I gulp back a knot of emotions that have gotten so tangled up over the years I can’t separate the love from the hate, the bitterness from the regret, the resentment from the longing.

“There was a little girl who used to wait for you to come back.” I sniffle, swiping at the tears that defy my every attempt to hold them back. “I used to think, if I just do well at this dance recital, if I just make the honor roll, if I get the lead in this play, he might come home.”

I drop my head into my hands, tears slipping through my fingers, sobs tumbling past my lips.

“If I can just be good enough, he might come back.”

I lift my head and laugh, cheeks wet.

“And I was right because here you are. I finally made it, and you finally came back, but you know what?” I look at him, even though the tears in my eyes make him a wavering line. “I may be good enough, but you’re not.”

It’s his turn to be teary eyed. He opens his mouth and then clamps it closed. What can he say to me that will make it right? That will erase Mama’s years of back-breaking work? Of denying herself so I could have? He wasn’t worth her love. And even though maybe on some level, just about every step I’ve taken to get where I am was to prove something to him, to draw him back to me, he’s not worth mine either.

“I think you should go,” I choke out, turning my back on him, an echo of what he did to us all those years ago.

“Kai Anne, let me just say one thing before I go,” he says, voice husky with tears. “I know you’re mad at me, but I’m not giving up,”

“Oh, I think you will.” A harsh laugh abrades my lips. “Giving up is what you do best.”

“I understand if you want nothing to do with me, but you have a little sister who would love to know you. She’s your only blood left in the world, after all,” he says. “I’m leaving my number here on the table.”

For a moment I think he’s gone, and I almost let it all go, but then I hear one more broken whisper before he leaves for good.

“Bye, baby girl.”

I train my eyes on the hands fisted around each other at my waist. I didn’t get to see him leave the first time, and I don’t want to watch him go now. I hold it together until the door closes behind him, and then like the ballerina Mama gave me years ago, I shatter. I’m strewn, my broken pieces so myriad, I could never put them back together into what they were before he re-entered my life. I cry for that little girl who held on to her delusions about her father for too long, and for my mother who loved wrong and only once in her whole life, and could never let go even when that love let go of her.

I sob for hours, or it could be only minutes. I shed a billion tears, or maybe it’s just a few. This is a vacuum that has sucked away all sense of time and reality. In Mama’s shed, I’m suspended in pain and lost in regrets. Hers. Mine. Daddy’s. They’re all here. I pour them all into this room, into these jars, and it’s only once I’m empty that something begins to fill me for the first time. An understanding that I couldn’t have had without this pain at the hands of my father.

Train up a child in the way he should go.

This, like so many of the lessons from my father’s Bible, revisits me.

As a little girl I expected my father to do just that. To train me in the way I should go, but it’s only now that he’s unpacked his life, his mistakes, his weaknesses that I see he did exactly the opposite. Everything he modeled for me was all wrong, but in many ways, I was trained by his failings. Tutored by his mistakes.