Page 21 of Take Me Back
“What?” My response came out incredulous, and I ditched my briefcase on the kitchen table before racing up the stairs to my parents’ bedroom. The bedroom where I’d stand outside the door on Christmas morning to wait for permission to go downstairs and stare at the tree in all its glory.
I shoved open the door and skidded to a halt inside. My father’s nightstand was devoid of his regular stack of books, one of which had been the Bible for as long as I could remember. I spun around to his dresser and yanked open the drawers.
Empty.
His closet.
Empty.
His bathroom drawers.
Empty.
After twenty-nine years of marriage, all he left behind was seventy-three cents in change, a few stray buttons, and a broken hanger.
My mother shuffled down the hallway, her movements already labored from the disease.
I lowered myself to sit on the perfectly made bed, pulled my knees up, and wrapped my arms around them. “How? Why?”
“Sometimes the men we think are the strongest aren’t capable of bearing the burdens set before them.”
I jerked up my head to stare at my mother. “You’re not a burden. How could he—”
“He told me last night that he wasn’t sure he could bear to see me when I wasn’t me.”
That coward.I’d never understood how years of love could turn to hate in an instant, but if I saw my father right now, I’d be hard pressed to keep myself out of prison.
“How dare he?” I whispered, and it came out like a hiss.
“What’s done is done.” Mom was trying to be strong, but her voice quavered as she settled onto the bed beside me. She wrapped her arms around me, offeringmecomfort when her husband of almost three decades had abandoned her in her time of need.
If I ever had a question before about who the strong one was in their marriage, my mother answered it fully and completely.
“We’re going to be fine,” I told her, vowing it to myself at the same time.
“Of course we will,” she reassured me.
We both knew we were lying. Nothing would ever be fine again.
Twenty-nine years of marriage, and my father couldn’t manage to stick around through that last one because he didn’t want to watch his wife die.
* * *
Present day
When I finish, Dane’s hands are balled into tight fists despite the empathy in his eyes.
“He didn’t deserve either of you.”
“I’ve told myself the same thing, but it still hurts.”
I swipe at my tears and take a deep breath. Now that the dam has been breached, the rest comes pouring out.
“When my mom died, Benjie was afraid I was going to crawl into the grave with her. I wanted to. For weeks after we buried her, I went through the motions, but I was dead inside. ALS is a horrific disease because it steals everything from you. She couldn’t walk. Couldn’t talk. Couldn’t feed herself. She refused to go on a ventilator once her breathing became impaired, because she didn’t want to drag it out.”
Tears pour down my face as I recall those awful days. I would have given anything to ease her suffering.
“How could something so terrible happen to the best woman I’ve ever known? She was so good, so sweet. A better person than me, by far. She would take her old purses and fill them with the hotel toiletry bottles I brought back from business trips, protein bars, bottles of water, and some cash, and give them to homeless women downtown when she went out shopping. She volunteered every month at a soup kitchen. She never missed a Sunday at church except the morning I broke my ankle when I was twelve. It wasn’t fair! She shouldn’t have had to suffer like that.”
