Brutal (3 page)

What made me even angrier was that here I was on the first day with my stranger dad and I was already getting into a fight with him. I was doomed to conflict, but I couldn't help it. I'd spent years thinking about this moment, and those thoughts had never been good. They'd been full of Poe Holly giving her loser dad both barrels before she rode off into the sunset. “Whatever. I'm sure you know her so well because you were around so much?”

“Poe…”

“Don't Poe me. I get enough of that shit from her as it is. I didn't come here because I'm screwed up, I came here because she decided to not be my mom anymore. I'm expendable.” I stared at him. “Just like I was expendable when you left.”

He sat back, taking a deep breath. The counselor had a problem, and he could eat dirt for all I cared. Even though I felt rotten. He took a minute. “What's the solution to this?”

I looked at him. “What?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You think you're alone in this, Poe? That you're the only one dealing with preconceived assumptions about how you're seen? As much as you wonder how I see you, I wonder how you see me. Will you sit down?”

I looked at him again, wondering what his angle was. Then I sat. “I don't need counseling.”

He shook his head. “I'm not saying you do. You're saying you don't.”

“I know what this is about.”

“I'll tell you what I see if you tell me what you see. Deal? No counseling involved, no talk afterward. Just the truth of what we see.”

I took a drink. Now we'd see what the “truth” meant to him. “Fine. You go first.”

He folded his hands across his stomach, staring at me. “I see a young woman who feels betrayed by her mother, abandoned by her father, and manipulated by her circum stances. I see you love her and will defend her, but I also see that you've distanced yourself from her. I see anger and resentment toward me, and I see you searching for answers that are hard to find. I also see a smart, articulate, and passionate person who feels like she doesn't belong anywhere, least of all in a place like this, and a person who needs to make a statement to the world. I see you've been uprooted from everything you know, but I also see strength. I don't see fear, though I know you must have it.” He looked at me. “I also see a person who thinks she doesn't need help from anybody and a person used to taking care of herself. That's what I see.”

Whoa. When he said the truth, he meant it. I felt like my entire life had just been dissected, and I wondered if I was that see-through. I took a breath.

“Your turn.”

The truth. Crap. He'd called my bluff, and as everything boiled through my head, I got a little bit nervous, then mad. Fine. If he wanted it this way, he'd have it this way. “Okay. When I got off the bus, I saw average. Blah. A guy who lives alone and is lonely. I see you trying to be fake and full of crap to make me feel good about being here. Buying me things and making things perfect and cooking a great dinner to make me feel better about having a dad who didn't have the guts to have anything to do with his daughter's life for sixteen years. I see a guy who didn't give a crap
about anything other than himself, and now I know why you two split up. You're both exactly the same.” I clenched my teeth, trying to hold back the torrent he'd invited to the table. Tears of rage welled in my eyes even as I saw him flinch. Like I was physically assaulting him. It pissed me off even more. He was weak. “I see a coward and a selfish bastard who agreed to let me live here because maybe helping me will help him to feel better about what a crappy person he's been for my entire life. I see a guy who's worse than all the other guys my mom brought around because you didn't do anything but sit here and hide in your lonely miserable life for whatever stupid reason you have.”

• • •

I felt like bawling my head off because I wanted everything I'd said to be wrong. To be false. It would be so nice to sit at this table and pretend that this man was really my dad. That out of the blue, bammo, I had a nice new father. An addition to a wonderful life. But I didn't. The guy sitting across from me hadn't given a crap for sixteen years, and now a fish dinner and a few hot-key counselor words were supposed to fix it. No dice.

I wiped my eyes, not looking at him, but wanting to desperately. I couldn't. “I'm done.”

Silence. Then he spoke. “Very well.”

I frowned. He should be yelling at me right now for saying those things. He should be telling me none of it was true and that I didn't understand because I was a kid. Just like Mom always did. “So do we sit here like two idiots or something? Give each other big hugs and go back to pretending everything is cool?”

He shook his head.

I looked up, angry again. “Then what?”

He stood, picking up his plate and glass. “I'm going to do the dishes.”

Then he was gone, leaving me with the silence of not knowing what was going on in this awkward, uncomfortable place. If I had just said things like that to my mom, she would have spent the next hour and a half drilling it into me why I was crazy and how I was just looking at it all wrong. He just got up and did the dishes. I wondered how they ever got together in the first place, then picked up my own plate. The one thing my mom always said was that I could never let things alone.

He stood at the kitchen sink with his back to me, rinsing plates. The dishwasher stood open next to him. I walked in, setting my stuff on the counter. I put the rinsed plates in the dishwasher. “What just happened?”

He paused, looking out the window into the darkness. “I wasn't ready for that. I'm sorry.”

I wasn't used to this. By now, Mom and I would be going back and forth like machine-gun fire. “Are you mad?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I put the last dish in the washer. “Maybe I
should
go home. Maybe this just isn't going to work.”

“No.” He faced me. “Poe, what you just said to me hurt. Terribly. But I know it's the truth for you, and that's something I have to face. I knew in the back of my mind that those feelings would be there, but I wasn't ready for it. Maybe I hid from it. Hoped it wouldn't come out like this. Maybe I did hope you'd be different in that way.”

This is the part where I knew I should apologize, but I don't like those parts, and I didn't want to be anybody
other than myself. My mother never apologized for a single thing in her life, at least sincerely and I'd gotten used to it. “Why'd you ask for it, then?”

“Because the opportunity was there and I knew it had to be done. The sooner the better, I suppose.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Turn that knob. I already put the soap in.”

I looked at him. “What?”

He turned the dishwasher knob to the start cycle. “What I'm saying is that if you're willing, we move on. Not ignore, but move on. Take it step by step and see what happens.”

“You want me here?”

“Yes. I do. And it may be partly selfish, but I do. I want to know you. And I do feel as though I've got to make up for lost time. That's unavoidable.”

I nodded, nothing coming to mind other than sappy stuff, and this wasn't a soap opera. He was using all the make-everybody-feel-good adult-speak, but at least he was being honest. “Okay.” We stood there not knowing what to do next, so I told him I was going to my room.

He nodded, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. “I'll be in my study if you need me.”

With school starting in two days, we spent the rest of the
weekend shopping. I didn't have a thing for school other than a suitcase full of clothes. Dad showed me the town, which still reminded me of a painting, and I met a few of the locals working cash registers and restaurants. It took me all of a day to tell the difference between the tourists and the townies. Rich tourists have a tendency to look different from the people who serve them, even if the people who serve them make good money.

The main avenue of Benders Hollow was full of wine and gift shops, high-end restaurants, and a few clothes stores with nothing in them I liked. Dad told me the locals never shopped the main strip because the prices were high, so we spent most of our time twenty miles down the highway at an outlet mall. People didn't stare at me as often there, either.

We didn't talk much on Sunday, at least not about anything from last night, and I was thankful. I'd been thinking about it, though, and I knew he was right. I did feel alone and bitter and angry about a lot of things, but he was
wrong about one thing. I wasn't consumed by it. This was my life, and if there was one thing my mom taught me, it was that I was the only one responsible for making it different.

I did get new bedding, too. Dad also made me pick out an iPod, a docking station, and some cool speakers for my room, which I felt weird about but accepted, telling him I would pay him back. He shrugged it off and said that certain things were necessities in a teenager's life.

Monday night rolled around and I found out something important. My bathroom was big and the walls and floor were real tile, which meant awesome acoustics. I took a half-hour shower, working my voice through note patterns and bars and missing my band big-time. I'd talked to my buds the morning before and hated it because I was depressed for the rest of the day. Milson had come up with a new riff, hotter than hell, he'd laughed, and my insides crumbled. They'd told me I would be back and they'd wait, but I knew it wouldn't happen. A new singer would come along and I'd be history.

When I came downstairs after my shower, Dad wasn't in his study like he'd been every night after dinner. He was puttering around the kitchen scrubbing the grout lines on the counters with a toothbrush. He made my mom look like a slob.

I leaned against the entry and smiled. I wasn't sure, but I was also beginning to think he didn't have a funny bone in his body. He was dry as a bone in a desert. “Most people use those things on their teeth.”

He stopped scrubbing, holding it up and looking at it. “They work well for various cleaning jobs.”

I shook my head. “Joke.”

He smiled, setting it down on the counter. “Sorry. Are you ready for school tomorrow?”

I rolled my eyes. “Blah.”

“Don't like school?”

“Not really my gig.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Not big on social institutions.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I hear a philosophy in there somewhere.”

“Not really. I'm just not into being a drone.”

“How does an interest in school make you a drone?”

“Conformity. I don't need somebody to tell me what I should be.” I looked at him, remembering he was part of it. “No offense.”

He nodded. “Your mother mentioned your band.”

“My ex-band. And yeah, she thought it was cute until I took it seriously; now she just hates it.”

“I heard you singing upstairs. You have an amazing voice.”

“Not many teen clubs around here, huh?”

“None. There is the school choir. Award winning.”

“No thanks.”

“Don't like singing choir songs?”

“Actually, I like singing anything. I just don't like group things. Rules and stuff.”

“Give it a thought, huh? It might do well for you.”

“Is this the counselor talking or the dad talking?”

He furrowed his brow, thinking. Nothing was a simple answer for him. “The dad. I heard your voice. It is beautiful.”

Heat flushed my face. “Thanks.”

He picked up the toothbrush. “I can give you a lift tomorrow morning if you'd like.”

Though I wasn't the type to be concerned about what other people thought, having the school counselor take me to school on my first day was weird. “I'm walking. Thanks, though.”

He nodded. “We'll try to get you enrolled in a driver's ed course. Your mother said you didn't get enrolled in time back home.”

“If that's the reason she gave, then I'm sure that's the reason.”

“Ah. I see.”

I nodded. “I have a question.”

He smiled. “Go ahead.”

“What do you do in your study every night?”

“Write.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “Well, I'm working on a book. As a matter of fact, I started it the day you arrived.”

“You write?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Published?”

He looked down. “No.”

“Wow. That's cool. What's it about?”

He took a breath. “Well, it's about a girl who goes to live with her father.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Don't even tell me …”

He smiled. “Joke.”

I sighed. “I didn't think you had one in you for a while there. What's it really about?”

A guarded look passed over him. “It's a text on youth. A self-help book of sorts.”

“Can I read it?”

“I'm only twenty pages into it.”

“I don't care. I can read as you go.”

He smiled. “I've a feeling you might not like it.”

A self-help book for teens that a teenager wouldn't like. Standard procedure. “I'm not that bad, am I?”

He paused. “I'll let you read it if you agree to think about choir. At least check it out. Mrs. Baird, the choir teacher, is a nice woman.”

I figured there would be no harm in that. “Deal.”

“Good, then. Maybe we can both benefit. But one thing. You have to be honest if you decide to comment on it.”

I rolled my eyes. “No problem there. It comes out in uncontrollable spasms anyway.”

He smiled. “I've noticed.”

The first day in a new school requires three things. Paper,
pencil, and armor. I put my school ID card around my neck, grabbed my bag, and headed to class. If I could handle Oak Grove Preparatory School and the snobs there, I could handle a podunk wine town with a bunch of rich kids in it. They probably had wine-tasting raves in their parents’ sitting rooms and ballroom-danced to Mozart until bedtime. Ooh la la.

As I left the house and stepped on the front porch, I looked over and saw Velveeta standing at the exact spot I met him the first time. He had that big and goofy smile on his face and the same baseball cap backwards covering his wiry red hair, but he'd at least changed his clothes. Today's ensemble included an untucked flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off (he must have a thing for no sleeves), a pair of faded jeans, and Vietnam-era combat boots, half laced.