Taste | Changbin

Chapter Sixty-Two

With that single sentence, something inside Lennon disconnected. Time seemed to freeze. The air had been sucked out of her lungs. The words rattled around her head and no matter how much she wished she would have stayed upstairs a few minutes longer, she couldn't. She had heard the news and there was nothing she could do to take it back. 

"Are you okay, sweetie?" Mrs. Hanson asked. 

Her sickly sweet voice pierced whatever fog had fallen over Lennon. She blinked her glazed over eyes and tried to snap back into reality. She struggled to fill her lungs with air. It felt like someone was squeezing them. "Yeah, I just didn't know. We got into a fight and I left his house." 

Thump! Thump! Thump! The sound of thuds as her head hit the stairs one by one after her father jerked her off of them. Down, down, down she fell until everything had gone black.

"I left Delaware and the United States. I ended up moving to South Korea where I got a job with an entertainment company. I'm a makeup artist for a band and I'm only here because they're on tour." 

The clothes in her bedroom had been tossed everywhere. The reflection of herself that she caught in her mirror was broken. Pieces of the mirror had been cracked and they coated the floor. 

"I didn't know, nobody ever told me, nobody contacted me. I haven't been to Delaware in months." 

Her father's fists clenched down at his sides. His chest had heaved up and down like an angry bull. Face scrunched up and eyebrows narrowed together in anger. She told him that he wasn't going to help her pay his unpaid bills. "You can and you will or you'll be living on the streets!" 

"I'm so sorry, I thought you knew. I figured you must have been doing something important that weekend. There was a funeral and everything about a month ago. Someone must have put something together." 

"Don't you dare walk away from me you bitch!"  That's exactly what she had done. She had turned around and walked away.

Lennon swallowed hard and let her eyes fall to the floor. "It was probably the construction crew he worked with. They were all really close and when my mom died, he became closer with them. He leaned on his co-workers for support." She left so many words unsaid. "I hate to ask, but how did he die?" 

Mrs. Hanson made eye contact with her husband. He pressed his lips together not wanting to say the words. Lennon's father's death was a tragic accident. He couldn't believe he was going to be the one to give her the details of her father's passing. 

"They found him face down in a ditch. Dolores and I came back to town for our high school reunion. We're getting older, so there's not many of us left. We were staying at a friend's house for a week leading up to the event. It was in the paper one morning and on the local news." 

Lennon ignored him and continued up the stairs. She knew if she gave him time, he'd calm down and drop the conversation. She got to the eighth step before the pounding footsteps caused her heart to sink. She started to turn around to face her dad.

"They ended up running an autopsy. It had been raining a lot that week. Your dad's blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit. The police assumed he had been drinking at a bar down the road. At some point, he tried to walk back home and he ended up passing out. He was along the edge of the ditch and he..." Mr. Hanson paused trying to say the words. "He fell into the watery ditch face first where he drowned." 

The ghost of her father's fingers tightened around her wrist and jerked. Instead of tumbling down the stairs, she fell into an ocean of grief. Guilt filled her lungs and she choked on it. The same thing that he consumed day after day after day, it had finally destroyed him once and for all; alcohol had killed him.