Always

Chapter 45

“You should be begging for her forgiveness, not mine.” I gestured toward my mother.

“I know, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few hours,” he explained.  I looked to my mother.  Her expression no longer was filled with the seething anger I was now experiencing. 

Instead, she looked tired, resigned.  My heart sank a little further as I realized what that meant.

“You’ve already forgiven him?  Already?” I repeated incredulously.  How could she get over it so easily?

“Joey, there’s a lot you don’t know…” she started.  I raised my eyebrow, urging her to continue.  “Honey, we’d been fighting for the past… year or so now.  We weren’t on good terms, not at all.  We were hardly even together.”

I felt like I had been punched square in the chest.  All of this was new information to me; neither of them had ever so much as hinted that things hadn’t been okay between them, much less that they had practically been separated. 

What else had they neglected to tell me?  What else was I going to discover on this nightmare of a night?

“That’s why you’re never home, isn’t it?  Too busy hanging out with someone else?” I shot at my father.  He just nodded, eyes to the ground, ashamed.  Good.  My entire body felt stiff. 

I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down.  “Now what?”

“I’m gonna be home for a while,” he said.  “Try to work things out with your mother and see if we can fix everything that’s happened between us.”

I stared at him, processing, before nodding slowly.  As mad as I was at both of them for leaving me out of the loop and at my dad for cheating, I couldn’t help but feel relieved at his words.  I loved both of my parents, and didn’t want them to get divorced. 

I was a firm believer in doing everything you could to make it work with the person you were with, and would have been even more upset if I had found out they were just going to call it quits without really trying.

A small part of me was also happy that this meant my dad would be around more now, which irritated me.  I wanted to hate him.  However, despite his shameful behavior lately, he had always been a good father to me, and I missed him when he was gone.  I still had a lot of processing to do, but for now, I supposed this was as good as it was going to get.

“Okay,” I said simply, my hard stare softening slightly.

“Okay?” my dad repeated, hoping I really meant it.

“I said okay,” I said irritably.  Obviously this was going to take me a while to get over.  He stepped forward and reached out his arms, attempting to hug me.  I allowed him to wrap his arms around my shoulders, but didn’t respond to his touch. 

I stood there, unyielding, arms crossed firmly over my chest until he released me and gave me a sad look.  Looking at my mother, I saw that she had a similar expression on her face.

With that, they both exited my room, leaving me standing planted to the floor, still trying to wrap my mind around what had just happened.  Now that they were gone, my brave, strong attitude seemed to be crumbling. 

How could my dad do that to my mom?  To me?  It was so unlike him, so unexpected, that I still didn’t believe it was real. 

I needed Harry.

Without a second thought, I darted out of my room and ran down the stairs, and out the front door, not even bothering to tell my parents where I was going.  They had just dropped a bomb on me; I at least deserved to be able to get some space from them without questions.