Fault

Part 6

Dad told me about the divorce while we were sitting outside a Dairy Queen, chocolate ice cream melting down the sides of our waffle cones. I should have known something was up. Ice cream was never free with my family.

"I have an apartment on the south side of the city. It's a one room dump but I'll get a pull out couch and you can stay over when I'm in town, okay?"

Chocolate dripped down over my hands and I didn't even notice. Dad's hair was getting white within the red, a change in the last few years as my mom's drinking worsened. He kept talking, as if he could throw enough words between us to soften the blow. For all his talking, all I could hear was that he was leaving me alone with my mother. I would be starting the fifth grade in a month and I would be on my own.

"I'll give you a key to the place, you know, just in case." He took a bite of his ice cream without expanding but I knew what he meant. If your mother gets to be too much, my door is open.

"Can't I just live with you?" I asked.

"I wish you could, Fallon, but your mom is having trouble keeping a job so I'm going to take that sales position we talked about. I'm going to be out of town for days at a time."

So not only would he gone from the apartment, he wouldn't even be in the city most of the time. Great.

"Besides, I don't think your mom can live on her own. She needs you."

It's only in the multiple times I've replayed that conversation in the years since that I recognized the fear in Dad's tone as he said that. I'd come to understand that the real reason I was left behind in that apartment with her was to be her caretaker, because he couldn't do it anymore. I wanted to hate him for it, maybe I even did for a little while, but I mostly just felt sadness for him. Sadness and an expectation of rescue someday.

He owed me.