She’s sitting on the cold cement porch
steps, phone pressed to her ear and the weight of the world on her shoulders. I
see her lips moving, watch as she tosses her hair over her shoulder, and yet
all I hear is the sound of crickets chirping. A warm August night, the air
conditioning forming a comfortable buzz in the background, and I’m glued to the
windowpane, watching her conversation. I could open the window, get a little
glimpse of what she’s talking about. But I don’t. Instead, I trace the frame of
the kitchen window with the lights off. I scratch the top of the dog’s head. I
adjust my glasses. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. I watch, and I
wait.
I can’t see the tears in her eyes until
they’ve become stale. When she comes inside they’ve been reduced to a barely
perceptible glassiness. She isn’t even sniffling, and yet I know immediately
how the conversation went. “He didn’t give me the information, mom.” She says
it flatly. “He didn’t give me the information, and wouldn’t listen when I tried
to explain why I needed it.”
I shake my head. “We’ll figure out how to
submit the application without it,” I say, barely believing it as the words
come out of my mouth. “There’s no reason to try and pursue him any further.”
I look at my only daughter, and see the
wheels turning in her head. Watch as her emotions transform on her face, each
one as clearly recognizable as sunshine. Confused, worried, sad.
“He told me he wasn’t going to pay for
college, mom. Flat out said it, that in a couple weeks when I turn eighteen
he’s no longer financially responsible for me and so he’s done.” The tears are
fresh again, though I know how hard she’s working to keep them inside. I can
see it in her face, and I feel as if it’s me that’s been punched. Forgetting
all uncertainties about the financial burden that has been placed all the more
fully into my hands, I see the tears drip onto my daughter’s face and I picture
him laughing as he speaks. When you turn
eighteen in a couple weeks I’m done, Emily. Eighteen years and I’m tapped out. I
don’t have any more money to give. The confidence in his voice as he speaks
to one of the last remaining people who will listen. The cold hard truth of it
sinking into her innocent soul. She’s his only child, the only thing he’s ever
truly created, and he’s just told her that he won’t help her go to college.
That she’s on her own.
“We don’t
need his information.” I say with a perceptibly growing confidence. “Giving his
information would be a bad thing anyway. It would make him look like he was
paying for your school when he so clearly won’t be. Maybe this way we can get
the aid we actually need.”
I see her
face wrinkle for a second, taking in what I have to say and yet still stuck on
something else. “He suggested I go to community college for a few years first,”
she begins. “Then maybe I could commute to Loyola and pay my own way through.”
Her anger is growing and I feel the hint of another dagger. It feels sharp,
cruel, as if it’s being driven into my back. As if it’s my heart he wanted to
break. She looks up. “What’s so funny about that is,” her voice begins to
break, “is that he told me before that I needed to get far away from here. That
he went to HCC and it was the biggest mistake of his life. That he wouldn’t let
me make the same mistake.” She paws at the falling tears, angry at their
existence, at their irritating knack to make their presence known at the worst
times. “And now that it’s time for him to help me get to this somewhere else
and he’s telling me to go to HCC, pay my own way through, get by without his
help.”
“I know,
Em. It isn’t fair.” I fumble in my mind with what to say. “But we’re going to
get through this. I don’t care what I have to do, I’ll take out loans, I’ll get
a second job.” Or third, I think as I
remember Loyola’s price tag. She nods.
“But listen, Emily. This is really important. If I file this waiver, if
I try to get the aid this way, you’re not going to be able to talk to him for a
while, okay? Like the entire time you’re at school. We have to make it
blatantly obvious that he isn’t a part of your life anymore. That your
relationship with him ends the minute you turn eighteen.” She’s staring.
“Financial relationship.” I blurt out quickly. “It’s important that Loyola
knows you and your dad don’t have a financial relationship.”
She’s
nodding again. Taking in what I’m saying, agreeing to it. She has no idea what
she’s agreeing to. I have no idea
what she’s agreeing to. Not speaking to your father for four years? It’s a lot
to ask of a seventeen-year-old. Of course I love the fact that she’s agreeing
to it so easily. That after a single phone conversation she’s finally realized
what I’ve been observing for the past seventeen years. That after years of
waiting for him on the front porch she’s finally come to grips with the fact
that he isn’t going to show up. That she knows he isn’t worth the time she’s
always given him.
I’ve hated him since the moment he left
my two-year-old on the porch steps. Her little baby shoes kicking the cement.
the eyes on her sweet little Elmo backpack sad and tired. She packed her own bag for you I wanted to scream when he called
and said he wasn’t going to make it. You
don’t let a two-year-old down when she’s packed her bag. And yet I kept
quiet. I let him pretend to be there for her, kept quiet in moments that I
wanted to strangle her for being so blind. I’ve never gotten in the way of my
daughter’s relationship with her father. Not once. And though the taste of her
finally recognizing their relationship’s self-destruction is sweet, I feel
worse than if it had happened to me. Everything I tried to do to protect her,
and yet I couldn’t protect her from this.
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