“Are you okay?” Lincoln pulled his mouth from mine. His chest heaved erratically.
“Mostly.”
“And which parts aren’t mostly okay?”
I couldn’t collect all of that data quickly enough. “I don’t know... It’s dizzying, all of this.”
“The kissing, or the knowledge that I’m in love with you?”
“Yes. That.”
Lincoln pulled my face up to his with his hands on my jaw. Then he smiled against my mouth. For all the times that I’d seen that smile and what it had done to my heart—that was nothing compared to feeling it on my lips like this, curled against my skin.
Lincoln smiling on my face was going to be the death of me. That was just the reality of how things were going to end up.
And then I started worrying about Lincoln smiling on other parts of my body and what that might do. Or frowning. Even worse. What if at the point in which he saw me without my shirt on, he frowned? If his smile felt this good, his frown would ruin me forever. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to handle anything but a smile from that face, and even the smiles I couldn’t actually handle.
Things were not going very well in my brain.
Lincoln drew back.
“I’m sensing the parts that were mostly okay have now transitioned to being mostly un-okay.”
“No,” I blurted. “No. It’s all still in the okay category.” I needed my mouth against his. “Nothing un-okay.”
Holding me down by the shoulders, Lincoln halted my incoming kiss.
“You don’t need to be worried about me trying anything tonight, Eppie. This is as far as it will go, alright?” His head dipped to catch my eyes.
I sort of hated that his statement made me feel relieved, because it wasn’t like I didn’t want to take things further. Relief shouldn’t be an appropriate response to this. An appropriate response should be to tear each other’s clothes off and have passionate, no holds barred sex, right? I was three days shy of adulthood and Lincoln was already one year in.
And that’s what I figured came next, after the “I love you.”
“I know you’re not ready, and believe it or not, but I’m not, either.”
Even more relief settled in.
“You’re not? I mean... I don’t know... I want to, I do. And I love you. And Sam and Dan are having sex and I’m not even sure if it’s love for them, and it seems like if it is for us, then we should be further along than they are and—”
“Stop.” His finger touched my lips. “I’m going to withhold your first amendment right for a second, okay?”
I nodded, his hand still at my mouth.
“I love you, Eppie. And I love kissing you, and one day, if we do decide to have sex, I’m sure I’ll love that, too, no question about it.” His eyes. Jeez, those eyes. I could hardly handle them. “But believe it or not, there is a whole lot of in between that I want to do with you first.”
I ran through the bases quickly in my head, trying to recall what each one stood for.
“And I’m not talking about just everything physical, okay?” he said, reading me. “I’m talking about showing you I love you in every way I can, in every method available to me.”
Knees. Nope, I didn’t have them anymore.
I held on to Lincoln’s lean waist in an effort to stay upright.
“I’m going to show you I love you in what we do, and I’m going to show you I love you in what we don’t do, too.”
Not only did I not have knees, I didn’t have bones either. I was mush.
“Everything—absolutely everything—will be my I love you, Eppie.”
He bent forward to press a kiss on my lips, and I sure felt his love in that.
And I felt it on his hand and in his smile and on the breath that fell against my skin.
“So tell me,” he whispered into my hair, holding me pressed tightly against him. “Are there any un-okay parts left that I need to take care of?”
I shook my head.
“No, Lincoln.” Slinging my arms around his neck, I pulled him down to me this time. “For once, everything in me feels remarkably okay. Better than okay.”
“Me too, Eppie.” With one more slow, sweet and downright phenomenal kiss, he muttered the words against my mouth, “I’m finally okay, too.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dad said he’d be home in time.
He’d promised.
I looked at the clock once more and tried to ignore the fact that the minute hand had done a full rotation since the last time I’d glanced its direction.
He was going to make it. There was no way he’d forget.
I smoothed down the ruffle on the bottom of my dress with my hands and the sweat that stuck to my palms dampened the lace fabric. Marcie from school had taught me how to French braid this week during P.E. when we were supposed to be doing the sit-up challenge, and I’d attempted to twist my hair into something somewhat resembling a braid this morning. My ears wore the earrings I’d stolen from Mama’s jewelry box. They were the pearl ones, and though they were heavy on my ears, they looked so pretty. I felt like a mermaid who’d found the winning oyster.
Thirty more minutes passed. My stomach rumbled.
Just then, the phone in the kitchen rang. I raced to pick it up.
“Dad?” I practically shouted into the receiver, my breathing quick and fast.
“Happy Birthday to You! Happy Birthday to You! Happy Birthday, Dear Ep-pie, Happy Birthday to You.”
My heart sank. “Oh… Hi, Phil.”
“Happiest birthday, Eppie!” It was nice of Phil to remember, but his voice was higher than the one I’d hoped to hear, and his wish wasn’t from the person I’d wanted it to be from. “Am I interrupting your breakfast with your dad? I know you two had big plans.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat, wondering how it got there when I hadn’t even eaten anything to choke on.
“No. He’s not here just yet. He’ll be here soon, though, I’m sure. He promised.”
There was silence that followed. It was a thinking silence, I figured. Phil did a lot of those. Lots of pauses before talking.
“Well, I have something I’d like to drop by, if it’s okay.”
I wanted to tell him that he’d have to leave it on the doorstep, that I’d be gone with Dad by the time he drove over here, but instead I just said, “That’s fine.”
Twenty minutes later, when Phil’s Datsun pulled into the driveway, Dad still wasn’t home.
“Eppie.” Phil smiled at me so wide when I opened the door. His mustache looked like it would break into a million little hairs. “You look beautiful, my dear.”
I wanted it to mean something, but it didn’t mean enough. Phil wasn’t my dad. I just shrugged at him.
He held out a brown paper bag. “Brought you a little something.”
Giving him a questioning look, one that involved my furrowed eyebrows, I grabbed the sack from his hands.
“Apple fritters?” I asked after taking one out. I waved it in the air, almost annoyed.
“Eppie fritters.” His smile was going to crack that face of his.
“They’re not called Eppie fritters.” My voice probably sounded mean, and in truth, I felt a little mean.
“Sure are. You must not have been to Golden Barn recently. They changed their menu.”
He was right, I hadn’t, but I also knew that not all adults told the truth. I didn’t figure Phil was telling the truth right now.
“They did not.”
“Eppie.” Phil pulled the bag from my hands and took out a donut. He bit down on one and talked with crumbles of food still in his mouth. “If I was going to lie to you, it wouldn’t be about something as insignificant as a donut.”
“They’re not insignificant!” I shouted. I stole the bag from him again, this time quite angry.
He smiled even more, if that were possible. “Exactly my point. Such a delight, these donuts are. And now they have a delightful name to match.”
/>
“How did you know I thought that’s what they were called?”
Phil swallowed. “Your mother told me.”
My heart jumped within my chest. This time I choked on actual food. “When did you see my mother?”
“A few days ago. I visited her at Serena Vista.”
“How is she? Can I see her?” I knew I shouldn’t want to know the answers to these things, but I couldn’t help the questions from flying out of my mouth. “I mean, am I even allowed to see her?”
“Eppie.” Phil sighed, and he did another annoying thinking pause. “I’ll have to check on that for you. I’m not sure what the guidelines are. There is a level of safety involved here, considering what she was charged with. You’re still a minor, and these decisions need to be made by someone a little higher up.”
I gave him a puzzled look. “What’s a minor?” I hadn’t heard that term before.
“Someone under eighteen. Someone not an adult just yet.”
I did the quick math in my head.
Nine more birthdays from today and I wouldn’t be a minor anymore.
Nine more birthdays until I got to make my own decisions.
Nine more birthdays and I could finally see my mother.
In nine more birthdays, my world would be right again.
TWENTY-EIGHT
His newspaper was high above his eyes, just the grayed tufts of hair spiking out the top. Each time he would lift his mug to his mouth, I could hear the methodical slushing of liquid into it, a swallow, a throat clear, and then the settle of the ceramic back onto the tiled counter. I’d been working up the voice to speak. At some point he’d have to refill his mug, get up from behind his paper post. Then I’d pour out my plans to him. I’d tell him what I was going to do.
There was an endless supply of coffee in that cup, it appeared.
“Dad?”
The newspaper’s upper half folded back in on itself and Dad’s flat eyes met mine.
“Eppie.”
Go time.
“Dad, I’m going to visit her today.”
The cup was empty. Dad tried to drain more contents from it, but got nothing. He folded the paper into four quadrants, slowly, and lowered it in front of him like an origami placemat. Then he put the cup on it, directly in the center. Fingered at the handle. Twisted the mug side to side.
He waited too long to speak. I was going to have to say it again. He was going to make me say it again.
And then suddenly, “Why, Eppie?”
“Today’s my birthday.”
Dad moved to the sink and placed his coffee cup in the basin. He turned around, and then he hooked his hands on to the counter’s ledge, ankles crossed in a contemplative stance.
I didn’t look any different, that I was sure. Maybe a little zombie-like, since I’d been awake for the past twenty-four hours, unable to sleep. But I was certain I still resembled the same person. When you were little, people always asked if you felt any older on the day of your birthday. It was a silly thing to ask, but adults asked kids silly questions all the time. But right now, with Dad looking at me like this, it was as though I looked like an entirely different person on this day. He gave me the look reserved for a complete stranger. I glanced down at my arms, my legs, feeling like I was still the same, but not quite the same.
“Why now, Eppie? Why suddenly today?” One hand darted up in the air, slicing. “Why not yesterday? Or last week? Why not last year?”
“I wasn’t eighteen,” I half whispered, unsure.
The sound that gurgled out of his throat couldn’t be likened to laughing. But that’s what it tried to be, a laugh. Mockery echoing out of his thick vocal chords.
“That has absolutely nothing to do with anything.”
“Of course it does.” I was feeling defiant. I was feeling crumpled. How could the two coexist?
He shook his head fast. “Eppie, you could’ve gone years ago. All you had to do was ask.” His steel eyes softened. I didn’t appear to be as much of a stranger anymore. I was now an acquaintance, so it seemed. “I would’ve taken you.”
No, no that wouldn’t work. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
Dad’s hands and head dropped at once. “Where do you think I go everyday?”
Anywhere serving beer, I thought. Anywhere with a liquor license. “To the bars.”
“Before the bars.”
I never concerned myself with Dad’s comings and goings. Sure, I supposed he had a routine, but it didn’t pertain to me. I had my own routine to stick to. Sleep, school, homework, and the recent addition of Lincoln thrown into the mix. “Don’t know.”
It surprised me that I couldn’t feel the breath from his sigh reach me all the way across the room. It was that deep, that exhausted.
“I’m there everyday, Eppie.” His words were bland and his delivery tired. “I don’t always get out of the car. Most of the time I just sit, staring through the windshield. But she knows I’m there. I’m sure of it.”
I quickly reassembled my expression. Flipped my mouth and brows back up, widened my eyes from the slitted glare they’d adopted.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, wondering why my throat was strangling my words this way, viciously turning on itself. Why did even my own body revolt against this news? “Why didn’t you tell me you’ve visited her?”
My dad and I didn’t share much. But that much I thought we had shared: the fact that in nearly ten years, neither of us had visited a woman who used to mean everything to us. Who should have meant everything to us.
There were no bonds between my father and me now. They were all severed with that newest truth alone.
And now I was alone in this.
I stood up quickly from the barstool.
“Eppie.” He wished for his coffee cup, I could tell. Hands not knowing what to do, words not knowing how to form. The pacing from the sink to the counter, to the breakfast bar and back to the sink was a glaring red flag. He was a broken man. Maybe he thought he’d be able to collect the pieces of himself somehow, moving about frantically like this. How had I not seen that on the day she’d left, he’d been torn in two? Though what he just told me had finally severed any thin union between us, he’d been severed long ago. Cut completely in half. By her.
“Eppie.” He used my name once more, my nickname, not my given name, the one he’d always preferred. “What she did to you was inexcusable. Wrong. Absolutely just wrong.” A calm washed over his voice and his movements, some soothing balm to his senses. I couldn’t figure out where it came from. He wasn’t historically a calm man. “It was abuse, no way around it. She abused you, Eppie. Your own mother,” he said. “And I couldn’t protect you. Or maybe I just didn’t protect you. I don’t know. I should’ve seen it all sooner.”
The blame game was ugly, especially when it consisted of just one player. I didn’t like watching my father play it out with his current self and his former self—the one who could’ve done something to alter our outcome. We’d all lost in that game. Every single one of us.
“The first time I went, it was to get answers. Like if I prayed hard enough, the skies would somehow rain down truth on me. How could she do this to us? To our family? What was going on in her mind that made any of this okay? Like maybe if I’d given her more attention, she wouldn’t have sought it out in such a horrific way.” We exchanged expressions, blank and void, so I supposed there was really nothing to exchange at all, but it felt like something. “I didn’t get answers. I just ended up with more questions. Then it was like this big thing I had to solve. This great mystery to unfold. I had to put the pieces together. Then maybe it would make sense. Then maybe I would understand. Maybe in understanding, we’d all be able to heal.”
Dad’s Adam’s apple spasmed. His eyebrows drew together, close enough to look like a solid, dark unibrow.
“I’ll never be able to solve your mother, Eppie,” he said, worn down like he was admitting defeat. “I can’t solve her. And I think the rea
l problem is that she couldn’t solve herself.”
I sat back onto the stool.
Eight years of memories, followed by nearly ten years of void. It was like that void had washed over the memories, bleaching them. That’s what the time without my mother was. It wasn’t healing. It wasn’t a steady slipping of thoughts and remembrances. It wasn’t even forgetting. It was just bleach, oxidizing, changing the form of my original life into something else, something different, but not getting rid of it altogether. Not getting rid of her. I couldn’t get the stain of her out of my life. Time just burned out the bad, but the fibers still existed there. She existed in those fibers.
“I’m still going.”
“Right.” Dad’s thumb smoothed his chin. “I figured as much.”
I wasn’t sure he had the right to assume anything about me, but I let him keep it.
“I have to, Dad. For me. For my own answers. I have to finally accept this reality.” His posture and tone left no need for justification. Still, I felt like I should attempt to offer it, maybe more for my sake than for his. “Your answers are different than the ones I need. I need to do this for myself.” At some point in life, every teenager uttered this phrase to his or her parents, I was certain of that. No longer was the umbilical tether enough, you ultimately had to separate and forge your own path. I was ready for that inevitable forge. “I’ve been waiting so many years to do this, Dad. I have to do it.”
I never really took my father for a smart man, even though he’d attended a prestigious college and once held a lucrative job. Whatever intelligence he’d had was laced with alcohol and rage, dumbing down his thoughts and his voice as it slurred his wisdom. But I was good in school. I received straight A’s and praise from each one of my teachers, grade after grade. I’d always figured my education proved my brain’s worth, proved my worth.
But evidently Dad was still smart, or at least tragically wise.
Right now, when he looked across the room to me, his eyes pressed into mine. Then he said, “There is a difference between waiting upon something and putting something off, Eppie.” Then he paused, feeling so much like Phil before saying, “Don’t let your heart confuse the two, and only let your head make those types of decisions.”
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