Two Truths and a Liar

IX • Do you forgive me?

Harley

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It had started with a promise.

A promise of change. An apology. a hope. That it would get better if I just gave him the chance.

"I'm so sorry," the right words came like cool water on a burn, exactly what I wanted to believe.

"I was upset and I'm ashamed for that. You know how I can't handle my alcohol, and you know how I felt when your mother left... it won't happen again, okay?"

How he felt when mom left. Sure. Call it an excuse, call it an apology. Call it what it was, what it really was, hidden under deep layers of lies: Him cheating with another. Being sorry for himself for not loving my mother the way he should have and drinking himself away. A finality. Mom saw through him and realized she was done and left us both behind, just like that. Like nothing could have been easier.

She left me after a long fight with dad, a packed suitcase, and a closed door. They'd met again in court, though I never remembered the exact details--always half forgotten behind a foggy pane of memory. But I still recalled his greyness, the constant aura of dishevelment and sickness. Days on the couch. Days doing nothing. Legal documents patterned the floors of our old house, dishes piled up on the kitchen counters. The lingering scent of alcohol and regret.

I remembered it all so clearly, yet still so vaguely at the same time. Something in me wished I could go back to that sweet confusion, when I never quite knew what was happening but knew the sun was warm and grass stains caked my knees and I could always ride my bike down to the neighborhood canal with my old friends. Their faces now had become a blur. A distant memory, just like mom's.

I believed dad. I really did.

But it might have just been the part of me that still believed in change and forgiveness. I had wanted him to cry, tell me he was sorry. Really sorry. That he was honest and that he could change.

As if.

We drove to the grocery store crammed into dad's pinto, radio spewing out news reports and radio hosts and the latest hits all choking up the car and spilling out its half-closed windows. We bought ice cream, a lot of it. Six 15 quart tubs of whatever flavor he could pull off the shelves, along with anything else sounded good at the moment. Bag steaks. Canned chili. Bagels. Chips.
I finished off the strawberry ice cream, thoughts lost to the world in a rerun TV show by the time we got home, the remains of dinner filling the kitchen with smoke and the living room air with the smell of a cheap frozen meal. It wasn't fun, but it was better. And then, for a day, for just a short while I thought I might finally heal.

Two days later was long enough for the feeling to run out, when two yellow envelopes addressed to dad showed up in the mail, bringing with them the bitter taste of the world I knew so well. I found it opened on the kitchen table, the air silent with the absence of my dad, the ghost of the past reminding me of that same feeling when she left, the door recently slammed shut, the house empty and silent.

I left it on the table, picking my way over to there front window to glance carefully outside, to the small cramped patio, the metal staircases crossing their way down to the parking lot below, where his car sat unmoving. Cigarette smoke leaking from the windows. A few minutes later he drove off. I headed back to the table with a rush, a frantic train of thought, and gingerly lifted the first envelope up and its contents out.

A sigh filled the fear-stained air. Fear which always seemed to smell just like dust, nicotine, and cheap AC units.

A loan rejection, a bill for something we'd have to pay back. A big one, too. But it was the second envelope that surprised me, sending something heavy plummeting down my stomach and kicking my heart rate back into a higher speed.

It was a notice.
Mom wasn't going to be paying child support anymore, and by the looks of it, we'd probably never be seeing her again. That was the last of the money we'd have left, unless dad could find a job in the next three months.
We were so far deep in debt now, how would he ever bring us out?
Could be ever help us?

***

It comes to a point where you take so much of another person's pain that you wonder if you've ever even felt your own. Of blood and bruise marks. Of tears down the drain.

My nose was already bleeding the second time he struck me, lapping down my chin like weeping through blood-washed eyes. Words cushioned every strike, running through my head and channeling through my veins and feeding my fears. Words spoken from the papers on the floor and the necks of beer bottles strewn across the kitchen table, words spoken from men in dark suits with neat clipped back haircuts and no idea of how much impact they made until they wiped across the face of another in a vaguely hand-shaped bruise. They never cared about us. They never did.

"It's your fault, it always has been."

Syllables that fueled every strike and fistfull of hair. I met myself, falling to the ground. Realized where I was when I was curled on the floor.

"If I didn't have to deal with you, things might be easier. If you pulled your own weight.

"If you even tried."

I am trying, I am! I wanted to say, I wanted to scream and stand up and take him by the neck and crush every word into his bones.

Can't you see, I'm hurting too?

But I just cried. Hid my face and let the tears slide down my puckered eyes and purpled flesh.

"Please,"

"Goddamnit, you..."

He drained the bottle in his fist and swayed precariously, staring at me through hate torn bleary eyes, and a drunken stare. "Why do you do this to me, Harley,"

They fell from his lips in a tumble, somewhat muddled and somewhat mixed. My depiction was that, what I thought he had said, what I let ring over my ears as I felt myself slowly lose consciousness, and slip beneath the cool dark waters of recollection.

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A.N. So Harley's got problems...

Thanks for reading chapter nine ❤️ Keep your head up, whatever you're going through will get better. We all fight our own battles, so keep fighting, you got this. Be sure to vote and comment! Love you all