As if sensing something in my tone, I could hear his voice soften slightly. "Can I not what?"
"Act like you have any right to speak to me about my father. You don't understand and you never will. So just... stop bringing him up. We have both done what we have needed to do."
The oven beeped, prompting me to dry my hands on my pant legs, grab the mitts, and fetch it.
"Prudence, I don't think you fully understand how unfair..."
"I said don't!" I shrieked, slamming the pan down on top of the stove, throwing the mitts, and storming past him toward the doorway. "Don't," I snapped again, low, lethal, as I disappeared into the hallway, taking the stairs at a dead run, then throwing myself into my room to worry the floors.
Fact of the matter was, I knew that. I knew it was unfair. My entire life, I had been trying to quiet the little voice in my head telling me to just... stop. Stop enabling him, stop paying his debts, stop trying to get him away from the tables before he lost every cent to his name, stop being there to take him in when he gambled away his rent and was tossed on his ass. Just... stop.
But the fact of the matter was, I couldn't.
I couldn't because my father was a bigger part of me than I was. He was everything. He was in every decision. He was in every worry, every hope, every plan for my future. Him hurting, suffering, sorting through the rubble as his life exploded around him because I didn't step in and take the wire out of the bomb... yeah, I couldn't live with that. Even the idea of it made my chest hurt.
But that didn't stop me from having a moment here and there, when I was tired, when I had a bad day at work, when I had to turn off the oven and go fetch my father, when I had to drain my bank account for the third time in one month... when the anger and resentment and sadness would overwhelm me. It was in those moments that I mourned the loss of a dream, the chance to open a little bakery and spend my days covered in flour and going home smelling sugar and cinnamon on my skin and never having to worry about loan sharks or debts or casinos ever again. To be, to put it plainly, happy.
Happy. It was a foreign concept. It was the stuff of fairy tales. It was for people who didn't have to spend every single moment of their lives with a knot in their stomach, just waiting for the next shoe to fall, the next small catastrophe to come barreling into their lives, terrified for the call that could one day say that the worry was gone for good. But only because my father screwed over the wrong kind of man, the kind of man who wouldn't tolerate not getting their money when they wanted it, the kind of man who would take his life as payment.
As Byron had been willing to do.
See, when Byron told me that I didn't know much about the men in our town, he was wrong.
Because he didn't know all the times I had to creep down back alleys with bile searing through my stomach lining to find my father beaten and bloodied by small-time loan sharks. He didn't know about the time when I was fifteen and home alone and one of the men he owed money to came to the house and forced his way in, grabbed one of my barely-there teenage breasts and shoved his hand into my panties before my screams roused Old Olie from across the hall, prompting her to come storming in with a bat and strong arms from lugging around six babies in her youth. He didn't know about the time I had to walk through a massage parlor, my shoes sticking to the floor and I knew exactly what kinds of fluids that were on my soles, to find the owner in a back room as he fucked a skinny Asian girl who couldn't have been much older than my eighteen years at the time in the ass while another woman, older, used-up looking shoved a dildo up his ass, and pay him back the five grand my father owed him, five grand I got together because I took a night shift stocking shelves at a department store and a weekend job waiting tables.
I knew all about the men in our town.
I knew what they were capable of.
I knew all-too well.
That was why I never gave up on my father.
Because a bullet in his brain didn't solve my problems.
All that would make me was completely and utterly alone in the world with so much guilt filling my gut that I could choke on it.