"I'm Not Crazy"

XXI.

I was always afraid of Franklin.

Even the first time that I met him, I remember cowering behind my mothers skirt. I remember believing he was too tall and too broad to be human. I remember wanting my dad.

It was maybe natural to compare him to my father. I did a lot of that initially. The more he was around, the more I was astounded by the differences between the two of them, but eventually I had to stop. Even as a child, I had enough presence of mind to know that I would never get the peace I craved at home if I kept wallowing in the loss of something so gentle. Franklin was his own breed of man. He was cold, harsh and callous. Acceptance was the only way through that.

Unfortunately, that meant I never did find much to like about him. I never broke out of whatever fear he instilled. We simply cohabitated in the very severe power imbalance of his making.

I was trying very hard not to look at the lifeless shell that was Matthews animated corpse at the table. Unfortunately that limited my options. My mother was back in the kitchen grabbing the food like a dutiful housewife. Riley was to my right, and since we'd arrived together I couldn't very well stare at him. That would have been rude. That meant I was left with Franklin.

He'd come in shortly after Riley and I had settled at the table. I thought I'd freeze or cower when he walked in, but instead I'd found myself possessed with a sort of false confidence. I'd greeted him. I'd politely introduced Riley, who had managed to swallow down his shock at the way Matthews face ended in a gaping hole just enough to shake hands. We'd all sat down again. Now I was faced with the reality that I was now in the same room as Franklin for the first time in a very long several years.

He was older than the last time I'd seen him. I thought I was maybe 15 or so, and it had been in passing at a caseworker meeting. His face had more lines and his hair had thinned and grayed since then. His eyes were grayer in a cold type of way, and more absent than I recalled them ever being before. When he looked at me my throat felt tight, like he was about to speak with that booming angry voice of his.

I could feel Riley's knee bouncing under the table, closer to me than he should have been. It was bad etiquette and I knew my mom was noticing. I had caught myself pulling the collar of my top up multiple times whenever I'd catch the gaze. I should have known better than to dress like that, in the red sweater than Bryn had loaned me. Bryn was pretty and delicately curvy in the right places. I was thin enough that it was hanging lower than respectable in a Latter Day Saints respecting home.

It was the same way I should have known better than to bring Riley. Who was I to be bringing a man home? It looked positively scandalous. I hadn't even asked. I'd just informed them I was bringing him when asking for the correct address, and I'd taken my mothers unquestioning answers as some type of permission. It was ludicrous. What did they even think this was?

Nobody was really talking. Franklin was choosing to be silently brooding, looking up and down at Riley and I as if evaluating what we measured up to be. I was staring back defiantly as if to provide him with some evidence that I was still the same slow child of whom he'd previously shared space with. The only sounds truly permeating were the clinks and mutterings of my mother as she finished dinner tasks. She was talking to us and herself at the same time, saying something about how she was almost ready, and she was oh so dreadfully embarrassed to be keeping us waiting. Mostly, I think she was trying to nervously fill the silence so that we weren't stuck listening to the thing that was Mathew and his gurgling breaths. I wondered how many hours a day she spend listening to that. Did Franklin still work? Was she still the caretaker? I had the thought that I should have known that. Why didn't I ever have relevant conversations with her?

The silence kept going beyond that, and Riley's knee seemed to be bouncing almost violently faster by the second. Then he simply couldn't take it anymore.