With the Father

by Jenni Moen

  He lowered his head and exhaled heavily.

  “Right. You can’t tell me that.” I shook my head, exasperated.

  “People don’t come to confession like they should. The people who need it most are the ones I never see.”

  My head snapped up. “But you’ve been here for almost two and a half years.”

  “I have.”

  “And he never came? Not even once?”

  “Had it been going on that long?”

  I raised my eyebrows in answer. “For at least a year that I know of.”

  He shook his head sadly. “It’s hard, but it’s not our place to judge. Even now.”

  I knew he was right, that I had no business sticking my nose in this mess, but I didn’t care. Besides, though he was saying one thing, his guarded and murky eyes told me he was thinking something entirely different. “I didn’t view their marriage through her rose-colored glasses, but I’m still incredibly disappointed. And angry.”

  Paul steepled his fingers over his bowl. “Marriages are rarely what they seem, Kate. They all have their ups and downs, and what goes on behind closed doors is usually pretty surprising.”

  “If something had been wrong, she would have told me. They were happy. She was happy.”

  He was quiet for a few seconds. A few seconds too long. “I thought so, too.”

  “I’ve known Jonathan for more than ten years. A third of my life. And I didn’t always like him, but I never thought he’d do something like this.” Paul remained silent. “And now I can’t help but wonder what other secrets he was keeping. I’m doubting everything he ever did.”

  “You think there was more going on than an affair?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I’ve been going through the stuff in his office and things don’t smell right. Something makes me think that this is just the beginning.”

  He unsteepled his fingers and leaned back in his seat. Staring at his lap, he said nothing. I would’ve thought that seeing someone else take the news as hard as I had would make me feel better, as if I weren’t alone in all of this. However, when Paul looked up, the misery and anguish on his face shocked me. It compounded everything I was feeling. It was almost as bad as if I’d just told Grace the news about her husband.

  Paul wasn’t taking the news as hard as I had. He was taking it harder. It was more than the reaction of a priest who was worried for a member of his congregation. It was more than the reaction of a concerned friend. This was the reaction of a man who had a vested interest in at least one of the parties involved.

  He pushed away from the table and stood to leave. “I’m sorry, Kate, but I need to go.” His words were broken and labored. His green eyes, no longer sparkling.

  He turned away and took several steps before I found the courage to say it. “When did you realize that you were in love with her?”

  He paused but didn’t turn back to deny it, effectively confessing his own sin. Father Paul was in love with my sister.

  It was just one more secret in a town full of them.

  REVELATIONS

  Grace

  I pushed the eggs around the pan, waiting for them to harden. For me, they were perfect, but my dad didn’t like runny eggs. I checked the foam carton to see if there were two more to make for myself.

  “What’s on your agenda today?” my dad asked from the table.

  I laughed because, after the past five months, the thought of me having any kind of agenda was exactly that – laughable.

  “Could you put some flowers on your mom’s grave while you’re at the cemetery?”

  I froze where I stood at the stove as it dawned on me that I hadn’t gone to the cemetery yesterday. For the first time in months, I hadn’t gone. What’s more, I hadn’t even thought to go. Guilt washed over me. How could I have forgotten? I scooped the eggs onto a plate and mentally ran through what I’d done the day before.

  Flowers.

  Coming back from the dog park, I’d stopped mid-step in the backyard. My mother’s flower beds were overgrown after an entire spring and summer without any attention. I’d gone into the house, put on some work clothes and then spent the afternoon eradicating weeds. When I stepped back to admire my handiwork, I realized that I’d pulled out every living thing, creating an expanse of dreary nothingness. Something my mother would have hated. She would have preferred the weeds to nothing.

  Determined to do something about it, I grabbed my keys and my wallet and drove to the nearest nursery where I bought ten pallets of flowers. I’d spent the rest of the day planting. Afterwards, I was tired and dirty, but I fell into bed feeling like I’d actually accomplished something. I’d been so busy all day that I never even thought about what I hadn’t accomplished.

  I would go today. “Sure Dad. No problem.” I slid a flowered plate of dry eggs in front of him.

  “Are you going to eat with me?” he asked, concern etched in the deep wrinkles across his forehead.

  “Yes. I’m making mine next.”

  As he brought the first bite to his mouth, he looked like he was questioning whether I was telling the truth. “You don’t eat enough,” he said after swallowing. “You’re wasting away.”

  I was actually quite hungry. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “Oh, but I do. All I do is worry. About you. About your sister.”

  “What’s for breakfast?” Kate asked, whirling through the kitchen as if on cue. She was dressed in a pencil skirt and a fitted button-down. She looked as if she had a real job to go to and not an office to clean out.

  I looked down at my t-shirt and nylon running shorts. Maybe I would put on real clothes today. “I take it that you are going in today,” I said, turning back to the stove.

  “Yes. Just for a couple of hours. I’m having dinner with Maddox tonight. Just friends,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” I said.

  My dad huffed and stood from the table. “Thanks for breakfast, Grace. It was delicious, but I’m getting out of here before this conversation turns south.” He walked to the sink and placed his plate inside, having already inhaled his breakfast.

  “What do you have planned for today?” I asked. I was never really sure what he did during the day, but I’d noticed that he was around less and less. I hadn’t pressed him about it. I was just glad that he wasn’t hanging around the house in his bathrobe until noon. I was happy to take over that job.

  “I’m headed to the coffee shop to meet the old guys.” He grabbed his keys from the counter, and the backdoor slammed behind him a few seconds later.

  “What do you think they talk about?” Kate asked, sliding into his vacant chair with a full cup of coffee.

  “The old guys? Who knows. The weather. The price of gas. Their ailing body parts.”

  “That’s the truth,” she said, taking a sip. “How was the park yesterday?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “Paul said he saw you there.”

  “Father Paul?” I asked.

  “Yes, I worked at the kitchen last night, remember?”

  “Oh. Right. Yeah, he was there with Chubs.”

  “Chubs?” she said, laughing

  “He has the biggest basset hound I’ve ever seen.”

  “And that’s his name? Chubs?” she asked, laughing. “That’s funny. He continues to surprise me.”

  “What? That he has a sense of humor?” I asked, though I hadn’t found him to be all that funny yesterday. Of course, it was hard to make a conversation about lost soul mates funny.

  “I’m meeting him again today. Aurora and I are going to head over there in a few minutes. Do you want to go?”

  She shook her head and looked out the window into the backyard. “The flowers look good. Dad said you did that.”

  I followed her gaze to the beds full of pink and purple impatiens. Larger hydrangeas of the same colors stood in the shadier corners of the beds. My eyes traveled to the
pool. The bright morning sun glinted off of its glassy water. “It was depressing. I didn’t want to go out there.” I took a breath before I made the commitment. “I’m thinking about swimming again.”

  Her eyes were wide and questioning. “Tanning or training?”

  “Training.” Not that I couldn’t use a tan, but I needed to fix the inside before I fixed the outside. “I think I might try to get in shape for a fall triathlon. There’s a big one in Austin. I was thinking that I might sign up.”

  Kate’s eyes lit up. She probably saw this as progress. “You need to start running again, too, then. I’m going to go later this afternoon. Come with me.” She leaned in closer to the table, wiggling and squirming in her seat.

  Her energy was infectious and impossible to resist, and I wondered if maybe there was hope for me yet. This was definitely an improvement over feeling like I was dead weight and that I was dragging Kate down. She deserved a real life. One that didn’t involve hanging out in a house of fading memories with a sixty year old widower and a thirty-two year old widow.

  “The triathlon isn’t until October, but I think Jonathan would be proud of me if I did it. He always said that he missed being able to go away, just the two of us, on race weekends.”

  “I’ll bet he did.” The sparkle in her eyes was replaced with a glower. Her hands gripped her coffee mug so tightly I thought she might break it.

  The change in her demeanor was unmistakable. “What’s that about?” I asked sweeping my hand in front of her.

  “Everything is always about Jonathan. Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan. I can’t remember the last time you did something for yourself.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Are you kidding? Of course, everything is about Jonathan. He was my life, and now he’s gone.” She sighed heavily and looked away unable to argue with me. “Can we please stop fighting over him now?”

  She leaned closer, pressing her hands flat on the table. “Fighting over him? What are you talking about?”

  “You were always jealous.” Apparently, fighting over him was exactly what I wanted to do. I wasn’t sure where the anger was coming from, but my blood was boiling. Heat flushed through my body.

  She squared her shoulders and stared at me. “Is that what you think? You think I was jealous of you and Jonathan?”

  “You wanted him but he picked me. For once in our lives, someone picked me.” The hurtful words spewed out of me as if I had no control over them.

  Jonathan had picked me. He could have had either one of us, and he’d picked me.

  We were floating the Guadalupe river with some of my sorority sisters when we met him during the summer before my sophomore year. Kate was a year behind me, and I’d brought her along so she could get to know my friends. I shouldn’t have worried about her. She’d always had more friends than she knew what to do with. She was the funny, pretty one. Everyone was always spellbound by her.

  However, Jonathan hadn’t been spellbound. When we’d stopped in Horseshoe Loop, we tied up to a group of guys that one of the girls recognized from school. Kate had immediately set her sights on the best looking guy there. He was funny and just as captivating as she was. They would have made a perfect couple. But, surprisingly, he wasn’t interested in her. He maneuvered his tube over to mine instead. ‘I think you were in my history class,’ he’d said. And just like that, history was made.

  We moved in together a year later. Three years after that, we were married. Twelve years later, I was alone again.

  “That’s ridiculous, Grace. I wasn’t jealous of you,” she said, whipping me back from my memories. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were wide. “I was worried about you. You settled down with the first guy that came along. I thought you could do better then. Now I know you could have.”

  I was incredulous. “Jonathan was perfect. We were perfect together.”

  “Nobody’s perfect. You put him on a pedestal. He could do no wrong in your eyes, but he was far from perfect.” She stood and stomped across the kitchen. Digging through her purse on the counter, she pulled out a stack of paper. She slapped it down on the table in front of me.

  She looked away, refusing to meet my eyes. Her shoulders sagged, and she slumped into the chair across from me again. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was soft. The anger from before was gone, replaced with sad resignation.

  I scanned the first page. The words swam before my eyes. It was a conversation beginning more than a year ago. The very first message was from Jonathan. When can I see you again?

  Not soon enough, she’d answered.

  “What is this?” I asked, my voice laced with disdain. Disdain for Kate. Disdain for what she was forcing on me.

  “Something I found on his computer.”

  I focused on the name at the top of the page and then silently scanned it from top to bottom. My already broken heart crumpled in my chest.

  I looked at her, blinking back the tears. “Who’s Hope? Are you Hope, Kate?”

  “I can’t believe you’d think that I’d do that to you,” she said, indignant and hurt.

  “Why are you doing this to me now? He’s gone. Can’t you just leave him be? Leave me be.”

  “I’m not trying to hurt you,” she whispered. “I just want you back, not the Stepford Wife that Jonathan turned you into. If you want to race again, do it for you. Do it because you want to feel alive again. If you can’t do it for you, then do it for Dad. Do it because he loves watching you cross the finish line. But don’t do it for Jonathan.” She spat his name out angrily though she didn’t look mad any more. Instead, she looked defeated and broken.

  I, on the other hand, was angrier than I’d ever been in my life. I got in one last jab. “They’re not even your parents.”

  She breathed a heavy sigh and looked away. “That’s not fair, Grace.”

  “Life’s not fair, Kate.”

  She shook her head and stood. After grabbing her purse from the counter, she walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob. “Don’t I know it?” she said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you, but I’ll be here for you when you want to talk.”

  As the door closed behind her, I gathered up the stack of papers and walked upstairs to my room. My eyes fell on Kate’s door, and I felt the first stab of regret. I’d been unfair. She was my sister in every sense that mattered. The sibling rivalry that had torn us apart this morning was real even if our DNA was different.

  I tossed the papers under my bed and opened the drawer in the table beside it. I pulled out Jonathan’s phone and pushed the button to wake it. The screen flashed and I stared at a five-year-old version of Jonathan’s face.

  There was no way he’d had an affair. His parents had been divorced. He’d sworn that he would never do that to his kids. There was no way that he would let us down like that. I rolled onto my side and sobbed into my pillow. The bed shifted slightly when Aurora placed her front feet on it. She barked once to get my attention.

  “Go away, Aurora,” I wailed, swatting at her.

  I laid there for what seemed like hours, heaving into my pillow. My chest ached for the man I’d lost and all of the memories that Kate had just destroyed. I wrapped my arms around myself and sobbed until my body gave out.

  When I woke, the morning sun was no longer streaming in through the window. I blinked the grit from my eyes and focused on the large magnolia tree outside. The summer heat was taking a toll on the white blooms. Soon the edges would be brown and the thick petals loose.

  As kids, Kate and I climbed the big old tree every summer. The limbs were close enough together that even the shortest little legs could climb them. You could go as high as you were brave. Kate had always been the more courageous one, encouraging me to follow her to the top where we’d sit for hours.

  She’d been drawn to the immature blooms and would peel the petals off the closed white buds like an onion. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she would ask when she’d get to the pod in the center with it’s curling yellow fingers and hard
, red stalk. ‘Just as pretty on the inside as the outside.’

  I, on the other hand, ignored the flowers in favor of the tree’s more mature fruit. I picked the red seeds one at a time and dropped them to the ground with a ‘he loves me’ or a ‘he loves me not’ for each one. Even as children, we’d been so different, her looking inward for happiness and me trying to find it in someone else.

  I reached under the bed, bumping into Aurora who was spread out on the floor. She snorted but didn’t wake. I felt around until I found what I was looking for. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, I began with the first page again and read until I couldn’t stand to read any more. I didn’t make it far.

  Before I left the house, I put it on Kate’s bed and hoped it would disappear while I was gone.

  FATIGUE

  KATE

  The house was quiet when I got home. Based on the empty driveway and the dark windows, I knew that the homebodies were out.

  I ran up the stairs to change my clothes and skidded to a halt when I got to my room. The proof of Jonathan’s indiscretion was laying on my bed. I grabbed it and tossed into a drawer of my dresser, not wanting to look at it any more.

  I had just enough time to sneak in a run and a shower before I had to get ready for dinner with Maddox. With one hand, I dug through the bottom of my closet for my running shoes while yanking a t-shirt off a hanger with the other. Minutes later, my shoes were tied, my hair was pulled back, and my headphones were stuck in my ears. I stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the house.

  I’d gotten all of a mile when the summer heat started bearing down on me. Even though I’d grown up here, I wasn’t used to it any more. It was a wet heat that permeated your lungs and saturated you from the inside out. As I ran, I ignored the stinging in my side and pushed myself harder, begging the pounding of my feet to drown out the thoughts that had been spinning around my head all day.

  The playlist that I’d put together for a thirty-minute run was on the last song when my stomach cramped up, forcing me to stop and walk. With my arms over my head, I tried to catch my breath. I looked longingly at the gas station as I approached and wished I had brought some money for water.