My fingers tighten around the steering wheel. “Sorry.”
“Seventy bucks isn’t gonna ruin you, kid.”
He’s right, it wouldn’t. I could send it right now. I could open my banking app, transfer the money, and it wouldn’t set me back in any significant way. But that’s not the point.
Because it’s never just once. It’s never just seventy bucks. It’s the next thing, and the thing after that. It’s the calls and the guilt and the way he always,alwaysmakes it feel like I owe him something, like I should be grateful he even stuck around after my mom divorced him.
A muscle jumps in my jaw. “I can’t,” I say again. “I won’t.”
“You never let me starve before.”
I close my eyes. There it is. The gut punch. The thing he’s been holding in reserve, waiting for the moment he needs to twist the knife a little deeper.
Because even though he hasn’t been a real father to me in years, he knows I remember what it was like. Not when we all lived under the same roof, not when Mom was still trying to hold everything together. But after. After she finally kicked him out.
After the excuses ran thin. After the broken promises stopped being something she was willing to piece back together. After he ended up in that run-down trailer out on Ashwood Road, parked on some old friend’s property, surviving off whatever odd jobs he could scrape together between drinking himself to sleep.
I remember the first time I saw it. The sagging porch steps. The busted screen door. The way everything smelled like mildew and stale cigarettes. I was sixteen. Mom told me I didn’t have to go. That it wasn’t my responsibility. But I went anyway.
Because he was still my dad. The man who raised me and taught me how to throw a spiral and dive off the deep end. And back then, I didn’t know how to separate loyalty from love.
I’d show up once a week with groceries. Canned soup, sandwich bread, packs of ramen. The bare minimum. Nothing that would stretch my part-time paycheck too thin. But enough.
And every time, he’d laugh, like the whole thing was funny.
“What, you don’t think I can feed myself?”
But there’d be nothing in the fridge except a half-empty bottle of whiskey and an expired carton of milk.
He knows that, even now, even after everything, there’s still some part of me that hates the idea of someone going hungry when I could do something about it.
Because back then, I couldn’t just watch. I couldn’t stomach the thought, even when it wasn’t my job to keep him afloat. Even when he never once deserved it. And that’s what he’s counting on now.
That I’ll still be the kid who couldn’t walk away.
But he’s not starving. And I’m not that kid anymore.
I exhale hard through my nose. “You’re not gonnastarve.”
“Right. I forgot you’re all grown up now. You’ve got it all figured out, don’t ya?”
I clench my jaw, gripping the wheel until my knuckles ache. I should hang up. I shouldn’t have bothered to answer in the first place.
But then he sighs, voice dipping into something closer to familiar. Something softer. “Look, I get it. You’re busy. Just—” A beat. “Just come by to see me soon, alright? We’ll talk then.”
I press my lips together. It’s unfair. Unfair because I know, no matter how much I want to be done with this, no matter how many times I say no, there’s still a part of me that will always care.
And he knows it, too.
I close my eyes. Swallow down the sharp thing lodged in my throat. “I’ll see you soon,” I mutter. And then, before he can say anything else, I hang up.
There’s that silence again. Immediate, heavy, and suffocating in its finality.
I drop my head back against the seat, jaw tight, breath shaky. Before, a moment like this would have sent me into a bit of a panic. A spiral I couldn’t crawl out of for days.
But lately, I’m not feeling much of anything at all. Just tired, a bit numb. And I think, in a way, that might be even worse.
14
