Fractured from the Fall

Angry Love

THE PRESENT

It had been three days since she'd made love to Ford, and tried to abandon him, yet again. True to form, it had ended in a fiery exchange that Lily tried to block out with nightly vodka sodas, many nightly vodka sodas. Each evening, she found herself with a drink in one hand and the phone in her other, ready to call Ford, but she always chickened out and woke up passed out in her bed fully dressed in her clothes from the previous day.

On the first three mornings of her self-pity bender, she awoke to her father standing outside her half-open bedroom door. He never said a word. His furrowed brow said enough. He grunted a little, summing up his immense disapproval in the smallest of noises, then left Lily to her hang over.

On the fourth morning, she awoke to her father standing over her, arms folded in irritation. Lily couldn't read him. It was unlike her father to interfere in his daughters' lives.

"What?" she asked earnestly, unsure of what he wanted from her.

"Get dressed," he ordered.

"No thanks," Lily moaned as she rolled onto her stomach and pulled the pillow over her head, trying to drown out the daylight.

"It wasn't a request."

That got her attention and she removed the pillow.

Her father tossed her jean jacket at her. Lily's hand went up at the last minute, blocking the jacket as it hit her in the chest.

"Stables. 10 minutes," he said, then walked out and closed the door behind him.

Lily may have been an adult, but she knew better than to challenge her father's authority in his own home. He didn't lay down the law often, so when he did, she knew he meant business.

Lily dressed and pulled her unwashed hair up into a ponytail. She found some Advil in the medicine cabinet that had expired at least a year ago, but it was better than nothing. She washed it down with a few sips of coffee from the cup her father had left out for her on the kitchen table.

She made her way to the barn and opened the stable doors tentatively, half expecting Violet and Ford to be there as well: all three of them ganging up on her for some sort of intervention. But all she found was her father near the back, brushing the horses. Why would Violet and Ford be here, she thought to herself, you have to care about someone to want to intervene and they both hate me.

Lily grabbed a brush and joined her father. He didn't say a word, didn't even look up at her, so Lily just focused on the task at hand. Each long stroke of the brush felt therapeutic. She ran the bristles over the horse's mane, and was reminded of how she did this as a girl. It used to be their special thing, that she and her father would do together, after her mother died. Her father never spoke much, but she enjoyed the time they spent together. She loved being with the horses. She loved the smell of the old barn and the sound of the hay crunching underneath the horses' enormous hooves. It was her happy place, until it wasn't anymore. She just stopped going. Like most teens, she got busy with life or thought she was too cool to spend time with her old man. Who knows the reason, she just knew it ended, and the anger and resentment in Lily seemed to rise as time went on and without any sort of outlet to release the pain, it manifested itself in other ways: ways that she was only now beginning to understand.

"What's going on Lily pad?" her father's voice startled her. She was so entranced by brushing the horse, she'd almost forgotten he'd brought her here for a reason.