Licking my lower lip and trying to play off the hoarseness in my voice as anything but emotion, I continue. “The bartender knew my mother was dying. He knew we were on our own. He could have done a lot of things. He could have called the cops to remove my father. He could have locked the doors. But he wanted to humiliate him. He wanted to have a punching bag as payment for the debt my father owed him.”
I remember the way Dave looked at me that night when I left my father where he was and walked behind the bar to demand the key. He had a smile on his smarmy face. I knew he was a dick the moment I saw him, from his slicked back hair and the glint in his eyes. I’d heard around town that he liked to get the young women who came to his bar drunk and take advantage of them. I didn’t want to believe it though, not when I saw my father laughing with him other nights I’d come to get my drunkard of a father back home.
“I went to get the key and Dave tried to punch me. He was piss drunk. I was only a kid.”
“You never should have had to—”
“In the streets where I grew up, it wasn’t uncommon, Aria.” I cut her off before she can show me sympathy or even begin to suggest that I was too young for what I saw and what I was involved in. I’m not the only one who’s gone through this shit and I won’t be the last. Everyone leads different lives and there are no pretty promises or mercy for some of us.
“I grabbed the chair and I didn’t stop hitting him with it. The other guys there never got up when Dave went after me, but they did come for me. Not at first. Not the first time I struck him with the metal legs. The ring of the metal bashing into his head was louder than the basketball game playing on the one TV in the corner of the bar.” Aria remains silent, and I continue.
“They didn’t even get up when he fell to the floor. I didn’t stop cracking his head in with the chair. I couldn’t.” A lot like Aria tonight. I hadn’t made the connection until the thought hit me.
I remember how I didn’t even think I was breathing. I didn’t think it was real. I didn’t want it to be.
“I didn’t kill him that night,” I tell her and then kiss her hair. My grip on her shoulder tightens and I pull her back into my chest. “The other assholes there dragged me away from him, but the minute I was free, they let me go. I got my father after leaving Dave on the floor bloodied up and moaning.”
I can see each of their faces now, full of fear and disbelief that a scrawny boy had nearly killed the man on the floor. My chest heaved but the adrenaline took over.
I killed him a week later after my mother had died and we’d buried her. He came to get money to cover the hospital bills for his broken nose. Money we didn’t have, but he expected we would from the life insurance that didn’t exist.
No one else was home and I wasn’t supposed to be home either, but the guilt of leaving my mom that night kept me from going anywhere for days.
My mother died while I was gone, and I know if I had to put the blame somewhere, it should be on my father.
I know that Dave wasn’t the reason that my mother died. But as he stood in the doorway of our home, telling me that the life insurance money from my mother’s death was going to him, I lost it. I already knew there was no life insurance. There was no money. There was no helping my father, a man who didn’t want to be helped. There was no bringing my mother back.
I knew all of that. I also knew that the man in front of me didn’t care.
He didn’t care about any of that. And so, I let him into our home, grabbing the pistol my father kept by the door as I closed it. I walked Dave into the kitchen where my mother died on the hospital bed under the pretense of retrieving the check sitting on the counter. I shot him in the back. Just once, with shaking hands. But once was enough.
I didn’t stop shaking, not even hours after Sebastian had helped me throw Dave’s body into the river. He was the only friend I had and the only person I could turn to. He was older than me, stronger than me and he was there for me when I had no one. He didn’t stay for long though. He had his own demons to run from, and plenty of them.