The Last Time We Met - #Completed

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two

The phone dropped from my hands and I found that I couldn’t breathe. I don’t know how long I stood next to the telephone with glazed eyes, but the next thing I know Kingsley is shaking me and I’m crying in his arms, demanding to see this morning’s paper.

“What happened?” He wanted to know. “What did Natty say?”

I couldn’t even get the words out. Saying them out loud would mean that they’re real. I slumped to the floor and put my head in my hands. The entire reason why I moved back to Minnesota from Colorado was because of my mother’s death a few months ago, and now, now my dad’s dead too? He wasn’t the greatest man, but he was the only one who understood me. I never got to say goodbye. I never got to ask him why he left us all alone.

“My father’s dead,” I sob into Kingsley’s chest.

“What?” he says, though I know he heard me clearly, even with my painful cries. “Jesse I—I…” what could he say, exactly? What could he possibly do to make this situation any better?

“Please don’t,” I tell him, and wipe away the tears that continue to flow out of my eyes despite my brain telling them to stop. “I just want to be alone right now.”

“Okay,” he said, rubbing my back. “Okay.” He stood up and walked away, leaving me alone, just like I had asked for. But I found that after he left, I felt worse, and empty without his arms around me for comfort.

How could this have happened without me knowing about it? I must be the worse daughter in America. Sure, he’s definitely not the #1 dad, but he was great despite my mother and his differences. He understood my tomboyish ways, whereas my mother wanted to suppress and change them. He got my weird artistic thoughts and encouraged them, buying me my first sketchbook and color pencils, paints and brushes, but my mother threw all of those things away and bought me a medical practice kit.

Even with my feminine problems: like when I first got my period. Though it was awkward, I felt more comfortable going to him about it than my mother.  When I had my first crush, and first (of very many) rejections, he was there to help me tell the boy off and later eat ice cream while I cried about how unattractive I was. He was the one who made me feel less insecure about myself. “There’s someone out there for everyone,” he would say. “You’ll find that perfect guy someday, kid.”

He was right. He was right about everything, and I was so wrong.

I cried and reminisced until I could cry no longer. When I stood up from the spot on the floor I had claimed mine in the last half hour, my body felt weak, exhausted. My legs and arms weighed a thousand pounds and my eyelids were halfway to the ground. It’s been so long since I’ve really been sad; I almost forgot what it feels like.

The rooms I passed on my way to the kitchen were all empty, the house silent and dimly lit. Kingsley must have decided to leave me alone, literally. Why did I send him away again? I ask myself while mentally slapping my brain. Why did I not let him stay and hold me while I cried in his arms and have him tell me everything’s going to be okay?

Sometimes I can just be so thoughtless, I sighed inwardly as I sat down at the island on one of the high stools. I forced myself to look at the corner of the counter and grab today’s Newspaper. My hands shook with fear and anxiety and I must have breathed something strange into my lungs because there was some kind of thick and heavy substance weighing down them.

This is it. The moment of truth.

I opened up the paper to the obituaries and took in a deep breath. In the upper fifth column from the left was a small picture of a handsome middle aged man. It was only in black and white, but I could tell that he had gotten a line of silver running through the top of his head sometime during the seven years. His smile was the same, big and cheesy with perfect boxy white teeth. The tip of his long, triangular nose was shiny and so were his eyes that I know to be the color of fresh forest moss.