Fate Interrupted

21. Dad's Confession

Ren 

DECEMBER 2009

I swallow against the raw emotion welling up in my throat and wipe away the tears that are seeping out of the corners of my eyes. I just picked a scab on my heart that I thought was semi-healed over, and my body now aches again with the fresh blood of lost love.

I slowly stack everything neatly back in the box and sit there a few more minutes, just letting myself be in this bittersweet reminiscence.

The sound of Aunt Gina preparing to leave breaks me out of my meditation, and I make that motorboat sound of resignation as I stand up out of family duty to go wish her good night. I stop off in the hall bathroom to wipe away any smudged mascara that has undoubtedly accumulated under my eyes.

God, why did I have to cry? Now I look all emo, like the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. If I tip off Aunt Gina that something's up, her favorite game of twenty questions will commence. Come on, Ren, happy thoughts.  But Gina is luckily in a rush now to get home before she has to drive in the dark, so she hardly even looks at me before giving me a brief hug and wet kiss on the cheek and taking off. 

After Gina leaves, my dad helps carry the art to my car, and I grab my box from his bedroom and meet him out in the driveway. The sun has gone over the horizon, and a sherbet glow lights up the sky. He puts the art in the back seat, then takes the box from my hands, placing it in as well and adjusting it to hold the art from toppling forward.

"Hey, Dad..." I begin, realizing I never got an answer to my earlier question.

"Yeah, honey?" he says, still bent over in the back seat.

"How did you know that Gio's mom had died?"

He rises slowly out of the car, shuts the back door, and leans against it. "Oh, yeah. Um, it was..."

He pauses and looks guilty.

"What?"

He squints at me. "Are you still seeing Gio?" 

"No... I mean, I don't know. Why?"

Why is he acting so weird?

"Well, did you talk to him... about everything that... happened while you were away?" he asks me back, searching my eyes for some sort of clue.

"I don't know. We didn't talk a lot about it. What do you know?"

He sighs heavily and crosses his arms. "Well, Honey, um, I've actually spoken to him a few times over the years."

"What!" 

"Yeah, well, he's, uh... stopped by a few times." 

"What!" I say again in the exact same tone.

"Maybe we should go back inside and talk about it."

I can't seem to wipe the shock off my face as I follow him inside. He pats the sofa seat next to him, and I hesitantly sit down, looking at him with a furrowed brow.

"Okay," he begins. "So... I bumped into him downtown once after school in the first couple of months after you left, and... Ren, it looked like he was really struggling... emotionally, you know."

He takes a deep breath and lets it out. "So... I felt bad for him and invited him over to watch the game with me. You know, Honey... we used to be kinda close, too," he said softly with an apologetic face.

"What!" Apparently, this is the only word in my vocabulary at the moment.

I shake my head and pinch my eyes closed in an attempt to make the dizzying sensation stop, and then the next sentence just spills out of me. "Dad! Why didn't you tell me?"