“Well,” she began, and I imagined her clutching her necklace—probably pearls—and worrying the gems between her fingers. “Are you coming home for Thanksgiving?”

It was still over a month away, but my mother was the embodiment of a housewife with her shit together.

“I don’t know,” I said, withholding the sigh.

“Dad might be joining us.” The statement from anyone else, anyone who was not my mother, would have sounded like a natural thing to say. But in the words my mother spoke, I heard what she didn’t say: So you should make sure to not upset him.

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure which was worse: a mother who loved me in the only way she knew how to but fell short in the honesty department, or a father who made his disinterest and disdain completely transparent.

“Maybe I won’t then.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice airy. I could practically see her worry through the phone. “We’d love to have you.”

The only “we” she could be referring to was Celeste and my father and it didn’t take a genius to deduce that the “we” was actually just my mother. Because as much as Celeste had guilt-tripped me for not attending our father’s birthday, she didn’t want me there anymore than he did. That was one of the many fucked up things about the situation: that they guilted me for not attending but if I had attended, I would have been ignored anyway.

“Yeah, well classes have me busy…” my voice trailed away.

“We haven’t been together as a family for years.”

Because of him. That wasn’t on me—that was on him. Years after my mother had insisted on not aborting her surprise pregnancy even though she was forty-five and hadn’t been pregnant in sixteen years, my father had sort-of/kind-of walked out on her, on us. He’d been off doing God-knows-what or who while my mother had raised me solo, her eyes always wandering off, thinking of him, mourning his absence, forgetting me at school or neglecting to brush my hair. She’d lapsed into a silent kind of depression, only getting her spark again when dear old dad showed up on the doorstep just as I was finishing middle school.

I pinched the bridge of my nose to keep myself from saying the things I wanted to say and instead said, “I’ll try.” I wouldn’t. “Maybe you all could come out to Boston.” They wouldn’t.

It seemed lying to one another and to ourselves was our forte in this family.

“Dad’s here right now, do you want to talk to him?”

I knew even if I said yes, he wouldn’t talk to me, because he just didn’t. His only form of communication with me existed solely in the glances he gave me. And the fucked up thing about my mother asking me was that she knew. She knew he wouldn’t talk to me, even if I wanted him to. She was an actress, starring in this scripted show where her husband wasn’t a scumbag, who loved his daughters equally. A man who stood by his wife, a man who actually spoke words to his youngest daughter.

But my father didn’t speak. He glared, he sighed heavily. He saved all his words for Celeste and my mom and spared not a one for me. Celeste and my mom were the way he communicated with me, relaying messages through them. I was a disappointment, a mistake; one he reluctantly supported financially as she grew up—as if that was all a child needed.

“He mentioned your tuition, you know.”

“Oh?” I asked, my interest far from piqued. I’d already moved onto the next thing to do: deciding which bill to pay on time and which one I could pay late. “Is he willing to pay for it now?” I couldn’t keep the bite of snark from passing through my lips.

“If you make some changes. He just wants you to use the money wisely.”

Anger and frustration warred with the feeling I felt all too well: inadequacy. I mumbled a goodbye to my mom and dropped my phone onto the couch. Rubbing the headache that was just beginning at my temples, I let loose a breath.

Since he’d come back into my life at thirteen and silently asserted his disinterest in me, I’d looked for attention elsewhere. It didn’t take a psychologist to conclude I had daddy issues. It was why I never chased a man; I hadn’t needed to. I’d kept them long enough until I was over it, leaving them to chase me. Clearly, that had done such good for me since I was wholly out of my element with Nathan, having no experience with a man who didn’t chase me when I still wanted him.

To my father, choosing to study creative writing was a waste of “good money.” Why spend money on something I could do since elementary school when I could focus my attention on something more worthwhile. His words.

My phone buzzed, a calendar reminder:

Write the monologue for Professor Easton’s class

Shit. The assignment was due Friday—as in, tomorrow. And I hadn’t even begun. Scrambling for my notebook, my thoughts raced on what to write. When I saw my mother’s face on my recent calls list, a thought came to me and I wrote and revised until three in the morning.

Chapter Fifteen

From my perch at my desk, I watched students filter in through the door, tapping my pencil against my leg. Adele usually came in just a few short minutes before class started, cutting it closer to being late, more often in the last week. That was my fault, I’m sure.

I didn’t pride myself on being an asshole, despite what my students probably thought. Saying what I’d said to Adele had been one of those necessary, horrible moments that I couldn’t take back. But the days got easier the less I looked at her, and the less I thought about her.

Until I picked up her paper and felt it slam between my ribs.

Ten years ago, maybe even five, I could have written that paper word for word. After thirty-four years of silence and minimal attention from my father, it didn’t hurt me the way it used to. But reading her words, I’d known they were hers before I really even noticed her name in the top left corner.

Laughter and chatter filled the air in the lecture hall while they waited for me to do something, anything. I kept waiting until the clock was two minutes past when I should have started. Only one student looked back at the clock and gave me a quizzical glance. The back door popped open, and Adele came down the steps until she got to her usual seat. She didn’t look straight at me, which was surprising; it was almost like she’d resigned herself to my disregard the previous week.

I cleared my throat, and she finally looked up at me, shock widening her eyes when she saw me looking back at her. Lowering herself into her chair, she tilted her head and I could almost hear the question like she’d asked it.

What are you doing?

I shook my head once, and stood up from my chair, pushing it back with an obnoxious scrape. The chattering slowly settled down while I walked to the middle of the open area in front of my desk.

“I had a lot of reading to do this weekend, going over your monologues. Not all of you failed miserably, which is wonderful. Now, what I didn’t tell you last week is that I typically ask students to come up here and read them out loud, almost like we were in an acting class.”

That gained me immediate nervous shifting in their seats, coughed out laughter, a few audible groans. I held up a hand, moving to lean up against my desk. “The reason I don’t tell you that ahead of time is because monologues demand honesty, as I told you last week. And I often find that if people think they can hide behind their computers, only plan on their horrible creative writing professor seeing the words, then that honesty is much more prevalent.”

Leaning back, I snagged the piece of paper off the top of the stack and looked down at it again, then looked up at the class. They were all staring raptly, probably all sweating a little wondering if their monologue was the one I was holding.