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Dad’s second wife wasn’t a complete mystery to me growing up. She was the mother of my sister, a daughter that Dad still had legal rights and obligations to. Said rights and obligations were sometimes hotly debated, however, which created a tension no one could discuss but all felt in the air. But even still, there were times when the custody and child support debates weren’t so fraught, and she–Sharon, if I remember her name correctly–would bring Charity right to the house instead of meeting Dad in some sort of parking lot.
I knew when she was coming not because I understood the nuances of a custody arrangement or even the straightforward pattern of every other weekend that the judge involved eventually forced the two of them to accept. I was young, after all. There was only so much my limited faculty of reasoning could handle. But what I could understand was how my mom made herself scarce during these handoffs. Charity didn’t mind her, but Sharon did. And I suppose there is some explanation for that. There’s something within each of their psyches that explains these reactions, but I don’t care about that as much as I should.
I probably lacked the appropriate amount of care back then. There was a degree of social awareness that I just didn’t seem to have. Mom had once told me to make myself scarce when Sharon–Miss Sharon–was around, but even with that explicit directive, I still snooped, creeping up to the front window and watching the whole exchange unfold. Mom’s admonishments made the whole sight more fascinating, more alluring, than it would have been otherwise. She laid the groundwork for the temptation I was always going to succumb to.
And yet, there was also something inevitable about this fascination. Miss Sharon was the mother of the half-sister who wanted nothing to do with me, and she was conventionally beautiful. Miss Sharon was the sort of woman I always wanted to look like: tall, golden skin from a good tan, long eyelashes, and luscious lips, as the magazine said. Her hair was a darker type of blonde, not quite brown but not the golden yellow that so many women strive to emulate, ensuring she would always be unique but would still have the prestige. She had all the grandeur of beauty but didn’t pay any of the prices. So, of course, she was the envy of many.
During these door-to-door hand offs, Dad would step outside to greet his daughter and ex-wife. It didn’t matter how old Charity had gotten or how she rolled her eyes at the sight of him. It was a part of their routine that he would never willingly let go of.
“I can get my own bag, you know?” she spat as she pulled out her two backpacks–one for school and one for her overnight stay.
Charity didn’t keep much at our house. She didn’t want to. Everyone else respected that, except for me who wanted scraps of her to cling to when she wasn’t there.
The handoff might have been particularly painful for her, I now know. It was a glimpse of the coupling that brought her into the world and maybe a taste of what her life was like before their not so amicable divorce. Regardless, I saw it that way. When Dad and Miss Sharon were talking, I could see the pieces of each that made my sister. She had Miss Sharon’s hair and eyes, but she had Dad’s thinner lips. She had her mom’s shoulders, but they hunched over the way Dad’s did when she was irritated or upset.
And when Dad was talking to Miss Sharon, I would see the way his eyes lit up like Charity’s did when her mom came to get her. There was genuine joy there, almost relief.
“I’ll always love your mother,” Dad once said to Charity.
They were sitting out on the back porch. The heat of the desert sun was making its retreat, following said sun over the horizon where it had set less than an hour before. It was a scheduled departure, though I’m sure that the most recent screaming match between Charity and Dad had made that departure a welcomed blessing for the sun. I, myself, had wanted to crawl out of my skin just to escape it, but in the aftermath, that same skin was desperate to know what would come next for the two of them.
The stakes were impossibly high. Charity was 17. She didn’t have to keep coming over. She didn’t want to keep coming over. But Dad still loved his daughter. So, in theory, they were at an impasse. What lay on the other side of it would define the rest of their lives.
So after Charity had gone out to the backyard to cool off, Dad set a timer for fifteen minutes, and when it sounded, he followed her. And after another fifteen seconds, I simply followed him.
It was a conversation I wasn’t meant to listen to, rationally, but lacking any grounded sense of social etiquette, I thought I was duty bound to observe it. I genuinely thought that was how it goes. You see it play out on sitcoms and in movies: the heartfelt moment between the flawed parent and the child they were desperate to know. It’s the conversation that had been lingering in the air between the two of them the entire story. And while it won’t fix everything, the audience walks away from that scene knowing that at least the first step in an incredibly long journey has been taken. So the human impulse to be hopeful can take over, which is enough to give the audience some sense of closure. After all, they don’t have to live with the consequences like the characters do.
“You guys used to scream at each other all the fucking time,” she snapped.
Dad didn’t flinch at her cursing. She had long since started showing off her talent for it, and the shock of those words in her mouth had long since worn off.
“Yeah, well, love doesn’t always equal marriage, Kiddo,” he said.
She didn’t ask if that meant he didn’t love my mom. In hindsight, I’m surprised she didn’t. What better ‘fuck you’ to your stepmother than to get your father to say that he never loved her, but Charity didn’t really hate my mom, only me. And there was no good way to get at me in that conversation.
“Look, I’ve been putting off this conversation with you, I know,” Dad said. “It’s not because I think you aren’t smart enough or mature enough to handle it. It’s because I don’t know what to say. Your mother and I had something special. We got together, and there was magic. Everything in the world lined up, and for all of our flaws, we made you. But that doesn’t mean we could make a marriage work. And you know, if you ask the church or some evolutionary scientist person, they might have an explanation for why that is or insist that she and I had to stay together. I don’t know about that. But I do know that you’re amazing, and I would do it all again to make you, to have you here on this Earth with me and your mother. Even if your mother and I can’t always be in the same room anymore.”
I slipped away after that. That was when I realized that I had no right to hear that conversation: that moment of touching brilliance between a philosophical father and the daughter he struggled to understand. And I tried to banish the memory of Dad talking to Miss Sharon in her car long after Charity had stormed into the house. I pretended that I didn’t see the smile on his face and twinkling eye that matched the ones I had heard about in my mother’s stories. I pretended I didn’t hear Charity and Dad argue about what caused that divorce or that I didn’t have some vague understanding of what ‘cheating’ was. I pretended that I didn’t hear Dad talking on the phone to his first wife, long after their daughter Leah had grown up. Then again, the tie wasn’t fully severed, I supposed. Leah still had a life to live, and even if she didn’t want me to be a part of it, our dad was in a different category entirely, but the conversation didn’t seem to be about her but the circumstances that made her.
“I still love you, you know,” Dad had said.
But it might have been nothing. It might have been just like what he was telling Charity: that there was a different sort of love there that was incompatible with marriage, that didn’t intrude on what my mother and he had. But I didn’t stay to find out. I slipped away again, disappearing into my bedroom where I wanted to stay for the rest of time.
It was just too much for me. It was something I didn’t understand. Maybe it was an innocent conversation, and maybe it wasn’t. I could see it going either way, but time never brought much clarity.
After Chris dropped me off at the fellowship housing, I sat on the couch, staring at my phone, hoping for a text from Ellie. I knew I could have started the conversation, sure. It would have been a little awkward given how much time had passed and how many of her messages I had ignored, but it could still be done. It just didn’t feel like the right thing to do. It felt like it was too late, like that ship had sailed, and I had to accept whatever the consequences were, no matter how painful they were.
“Why did you and Leah’s mom divorce?” I once heard Charity ask.
That time, I was allowed to be in that conversation. Charity had asked it in my presence, and it had come up almost innocently. But this was the day after her and Dad had their heart to heart, so in some ways, this wasn’t an innocent question, but I could pretend that it was.
Dad still felt the weight of the question, however. He sighed before he answered. His dark eyes stared into the middle distance for a moment too long.
But he did answer. “We just drifted apart, her and I. We got married too young. High school sweethearts often aren’t really meant to stay together. We weren’t, but we tried anyway. Except we didn’t know who we were yet. And as we grew up and into ourselves, we also grew apart.”
“What does that mean?” Charity asked.
Her tone was getting colder. To her, the ambiguity was a sign of war. It was a sign that Dad didn’t care if she really understood what happened or not.
He nodded, understanding the accusation latent in her tone. “I was working a lot,” he said. “The pay wasn’t great for someone with a wife and a young kid, so I had to work a lot of hours. Then I was doing mail away courses, which... I guess you kids would call that online school, but either way, it was a lot of work. Then I actually broke into the tech world when it was the newest field and there was big money to be made, but that required a lot of traveling.”
Charity snapped to the point. “So you were just an absentee dad.”
Charity carried raw rage in her chest wherever she went. She was still angry about everything. Hence the accusations and the biting tone. Or maybe she just enjoyed watching Dad and I squirm, I’m not sure.
“If she wants to call me that, it’s Leah’s business,” he said.
And we would never know if Leah did want to call him that. She was never around.
“But all the more reason to not have kids when you’re young,” he said. “You can have the best of intentions, but you might not have the ability to follow through.”
“You could have, though,” Charity reminded him, snarkily.
I never understood what her point was in fighting a battle that wasn’t hers. Leah was our sister, but of the three of us, I was the only one who ever seemed to care about those details. I love her like a sister. I would have fought for her if that was what she needed me to do, but it wasn’t what Charity was doing. Charity just seemed to want blood in the water.
To her surprise, Dad nodded, “I could have. I was never all that great at staying in touch with people, and it turned out my kid was no exception. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what happened.”
The admission defanged Charity almost immediately. She didn’t have anything else to fight for. There was no other cause that warranted the bite. She curled her lips and stayed silent.
But I was left with those words. They clung to my own tendencies, the inherited mess bestowed upon me but nature and nurture. I wasn’t the type to stay in touch or to make a relationship work. And maybe I could try being better going forward, but as I looked at Ellie’s name again and the sea of unanswered messages, I realized that being better also meant having to accept that sometimes it was just too late. There were some losses that can’t be undone and are meant to haunt us forever.
And maybe Ellie would be that to me.