“Seriously?” Chris bites out. “Over a year, and the first words out of your mouth are ‘You look well’ and ‘How have you been?’”
“Son,” Dad murmurs, and Chris’s body gets so tight against mine that I have to wiggle out of his hold, afraid he’ll accidentally strangle me.
“Son?” Chris hisses, leaning across the table toward Dad, who now looks pale. “Are you fucking joking? I haven’t spoken to you since you told Mom you wanted a divorce. I don’t know you.” Chris points his finger at Dad’s pale face. “You’re not my dad. You’re not the man who raised me. The man I knew as my father was honest, and he loved his family. I don’t know who you are.”
“I’m sorry,” Dad whispers. Even as angry as I am with him, I still hate the pain I see in his features as he looks between Chris and me. “I’m sorry.”
My eyes slide closed, and tears start to build behind my eyelids. “Give us something,” I whisper before pulling in a deep breath. When I open my eyes, I look at my father, the first man I ever loved, and beg, “Please, make us understand what happened.”
“I don’t . . .” He visibly swallows. “I don’t have an excuse. I wish I did, but I don’t.”
“Chrissie and I are both grown. We understand people fall out of love; we get that relationships end,” Chris states, and I hear him pull in an audible breath before he continues. “What we don’t understand is you cutting us out of your life.”
“I didn’t want to hurt either of you, and I thought if I . . .” He jerks his head from side to side. “I didn’t think either of you would want anything to do with me after I left your mom.”
“Shouldn’t that have been our decision?” I ask, and he reaches for my hands on the table between us. I pull them away before he can grasp them and lean back, clasping them in my lap and shaking my head. “You should have spoken to us. You should have given us the opportunity to hear you out and decide on our own how to move forward. You didn’t do that.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he insists after a moment, sounding frustrated.
Anger fills the pit of my stomach at his tone, and I lean forward. “I don’t know about Chris, but I want you to admit you messed up.” Tears fill my eyes, which are locked with his. “I want you to tell me you’re sorry for not reaching out since you and Mom split up, and I want you to show that you understand how deeply you hurt me when you didn’t even call to make sure I was okay after I saw you with the woman you left Mom for.”
“Tammy,” he inserts.
My head jerks back in confusion. “What?”
“My wife’s name is Tammy.”
“Your wife. The woman you cheated on our mother with for God knows how long doesn’t factor into this situation,” Chris hisses, and Dad leans back with his jaw ticking. “What you’re not getting is that she means nothing to us, because you didn’t want her to. After you left Mom, you didn’t introduce us to her. And you sure as fuck have never given us the opportunity to get to know her. She is just the woman you married after you left our mother, the woman who knew you had a family but was okay with carrying on a relationship with you for however long before you decided to end things with your wife and marry her instead.”
“She wasn’t happy with the way things happened between us. And she wanted to meet you—wants to meet you,” Dad says quietly, holding my brother’s eyes.
“Yeah,” Chris begins, and I turn to see that his jaw’s so tight it’s clenching. “You wanna know the most fucked-up thing about this whole situation?” he asks, but he doesn’t give Dad a chance to answer. “If you had gone about things differently, I’d want to meet her too. I’d want to get to know her and see you two together.” He jerks his head from side to side.
“Chris,” Dad starts, but Chris shakes his head again.
“No, that’s the most fucked-up part about this whole situation. You have been so self-consumed that you’ve let the people who love you the most down, because you haven’t trusted them to love you in spite of your actions.”
“I want you and your sister to meet Tammy,” Dad states, and even though I’m not looking at him, I feel his eyes on me. “I miss you both.”
“Could’ve fooled me, considering you ran into your daughter with your new wife, saw she was visibly upset, and didn’t even call her after to make sure she was okay.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me,” Dad explained, and I look across the table to meet his sorrowful gaze. “I’m sorry. I wanted to call you; I just didn’t think you’d want me to.”
“You should have called,” I tell him, and he drops his eyes from mine. “I hate this,” I whisper after a moment, and his head lifts. “I hate that I miss you, hate what has happened, and really hate that you didn’t trust us to still love you, even if you weren’t in love with Mom.”
“How do I fix this?” he asks, and my heart hurts, because I honestly don’t know if there is a way to fix this. So much has happened over the last year, and I don’t know if I can forgive him for everything he’s done.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, and his eyes start to fill with tears.
“Dad,” Chris calls, and Dad’s eyes go to him, and so do mine. “You might not ever fix what you’ve done, but I do know that if you don’t try, you never will. It’s going to take time for Chrissie and me to trust you again, and the only way you’re going to rebuild that trust is by showing up and putting in the work. You let both of us down.”
“I know. Believe me, I know, because I let myself down too,” Dad says, looking defeated, and his pain-filled words slice through my heart. “I promise, if you two give me a chance, I’ll do what I have to do to fix this.”
“Just be my dad again,” I plead, and he looks at me. “All I’ve wanted from you over the last year is for you to be my dad.” I pull in a shaky breath. “I’ve missed you.”
“I miss you too, honey,” he tells me, looking at me, and then his eyes go to Chris. “I miss you too, son.”
“Then prove it, because I’d like you around,” Chris says, his voice sounding rough. “Chrissie and I will both at some point get married and start our own families. I’d like my kids to know all of their grandparents, and I’m sure Chrissie feels the same about that.”
I reach under the table and take my brother’s hand, giving it a comforting squeeze. His anger at my dad might be winning out right now, but there is no doubt after hearing his words or the tone in which he spoke that he’s been hurting just as badly as I have.
“I’ll prove it,” Dad agrees, sounding choked up, and then he glances around. “Do you two want to have lunch with me?”
Chris lifts his chin, then dips his head down toward me, and I tell him without words that I don’t want that—not yet anyway. “Sorry, we have stuff going on tonight that we have to get ready for,” he tells Dad.
“Right, sorry. It’s New Year’s Eve. I didn’t think.”