Chapter Fifty-One

ON SUNDAY, I HAVE TO GO HOME.

When I walk into the house, I find everyone in the living room. Dad sits with his head between his hands, and when he lifts his face at the sound of my entrance, there’s real regret there. Real pain. There isn’t even a crack on the wall or ceiling anymore, like once again the house is pretending it never happened.

“Leighton. Thank you for coming home.” He says it like I had a choice in this.

I stand in the doorway, neither coming nor going, unsure of what I’m waiting for.

“I just want you girls to know that I’m really sorry, and I have no idea what came over me the other night. It’s been a lot of pressure with the company, things I don’t want to worry you guys with, and I think I was just bottling it all up.”

Mom moves to sit beside him on the couch. “Your father and I talked a lot this weekend on the phone, about how terrible his behavior was, and what needs to change around here so we don’t have a repeat of Thursday night. Starting with us keeping the house in really good shape so it doesn’t stress him out after a long day at work. And we have to watch heat and energy use and keep the bills as low as we can.”

Every word makes my jaw tighten more. Dad takes over, listing a few more things that are part of their grand strategy—but it’s all focused on this house, and us. Like it was only our actions that led to his outburst.

Campbell meets my eyes and gives me the subtlest shake of her head. She is thinking the same thing.

And silently asking me not to say anything.

But this isn’t a solution.

“And we are going to add some more fun stuff,” he says. “We haven’t been good at family time lately, being low on money and everything, but your amazing mom made a list of things we can do that aren’t too expensive.”

Now he looks to me, because Juniper is smiling and Campbell is nodding along, and Mom is holding his hand. We’ve all come back together, and he’s waiting for me to join the moment. To commit to their plan.

“Please, Leighton,” Mom says softly. “Can we just try?”

I bite the inside of my bottom lip, worrying it with my teeth.

“Okay,” I say. And there are a lot of things I don’t say.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. It isn’t a lie. He means it. He always means it.

Dad offers to make everyone dinner, and Campbell and Juniper offer to help. I make myself some coffee and go sit on the front stoop.

“There are so many,” Mom says as she joins me outside.

The tree in our yard is full again.

I spy Joe near the top, his gray feathers giving him away.

I try to remember the estimate that came with the thermal image of them.

“Well over fifty thousand now,” I tell her.

We sit in silence for a few minutes, sipping our coffee and watching the birds.

“He’s not a monster, Leighton,” she says. “He’s just a person. A flawed person, who has a lot of demons.”

“I know,” I say. But that’s not an excuse, I think.

“But that’s not an excuse,” she says, and I turn to her. Her eyes are still on the tree. “I know it’s been really strained here lately. I just want to believe that those good things can prevail. I still see that side of him. I see him fighting for it. Fighting for us. He spent the weekend sleeping on a friend’s couch, Leighton. He’s humiliated.”

“I don’t care if he’s humiliated.”

In fact, I like it. Most of the time it seems like we are the ones who feel all of his shame. “Where did he stay?”

I guess the answer before she says it, hope that I’m wrong.

“With Bill,” Mom says.

Officer DiMarco. Of course. It’s the only option awful enough to be true. Instead of protecting us, the police harbor him.

“He feels out of control,” I say. And it’s the truth, or at least what I can understand about it. All those promising futures closed off, and now this business is failing, and even though I think he must’ve hated his own father and some part of him resents the business, I know how stressful it is to fail. His anger is not some great mystery.

Maybe I never took his football dream, but I left the cap off the toothpaste so that it dripped all over the counter. I didn’t wreck his knee in that championship game, but I folded the towels wrong.

I didn’t steal his wife on purpose, but she loves us most, and he knows it.

Our family is a solar system of planets rocked off their orbits a little farther with each incident like the other night. We are moving around each other in increasing chaos, haphazard and violent, all of us bracing for impact. And I don’t know how to break away from it, because there’s gravity here, in between us. There are good things that bind us to each other.

I take Mom’s hand.

I see a fractured system, delicate and damaged, that could collapse right under our feet.

She sees home.