down next to him, several inches between us. I am wondering where my mom is and if she knows he’s here, and then he says, “Your mom asked me to talk to you….”
For some reason my mind goes immediately to Shane and the hayloft. Please don’t let them know. It is the worst thing I can imagine, because my life so far has been reasonably quiet and reasonably uneventful, which is apparently why I can’t write with any sort of feeling. I’ve never even had a cavity.
And then my dad clears his throat and begins talking in this low, serious voice, which is not at all like his usual voice. And as he talks, he starts to cry, something I’ve never seen him do before.
I’m thinking, Stop this. Don’t cry. Not you. Dads don’t cry. Which is stupid, really, but there you go.
I think I say, “Don’t cry.”
Or maybe I say nothing.
Because he is telling me that he doesn’t love us anymore, my mom and me.
That the past eighteen years of my life—
the eighteen years that make up my entire life—
have been a really horrible joke and that he never actually loved us at all, not once,
or that maybe he did for a tiny while but love dies when the objects of that love are as unlovable as my mom and I are,
and unfortunately, it’s our fault that we can’t be his family anymore.
That he needs us to go far away so he never has to look at us again because our mere presence makes him ill. He’s still talking, but I’m not listening. I’m too focused on the way the tears are rolling into the stubbly beard on his chin and disappearing. Where are they going?
“Clew,” he says. My nickname. The one that only he calls me. Our special name, the one just for us and secret bakery runs before school and secret ice creams before dinner and driving too fast and watching scary movies. All the things my mom is too momish to allow. Even though all my life it’s always been Claudine and Lauren, Lauren and Claudine, the Llewelyn women, because Mom never actually took Dad’s name, and we’ve always been more Llewelyn than Henry. Which basically means we believe in possibility and magic instead of always looking at the practical (i.e., darkly realistic) side of things.
Meanwhile, my dad has stood on the perimeter, not as much like us, watching and applauding and joining in as much as he can. All my life, everyone loves us, the two Llewelyns. Everyone, apparently, but him.
“Clew,” he says again. “It’s not because I don’t care about you.” Even now, at this moment, as the floor of my room is disappearing, as I’m staring down, past my feet, wondering how I’ll ever stand again, he can’t bring himself to say love. As in It’s not because I don’t love you.
And then he says, “I just can’t have a family right now.”
And maybe he says none of this, really, but it’s what I hear. And at that moment I stop looking at his tears and his beard and I am staring at the place where the floor used to be. All I can think is how one minute the floor was there and now it’s not. How you could go through an entire day, every day, not thinking about the floor or the ground because you just assume it will always be there. Until it isn’t.
* * *
—
The real conversation goes more like this:
Dad: “I need to talk to you.”
Me: “Okay.”
“I don’t want you to think there’s anyone else. It’s important that you know that. But your mom and I are separating, and she asked me to tell you because it’s not her idea; it’s my idea.” He looks away when he says this. And then: “I just can’t do this right now. I can’t do it.” Followed by: “It isn’t you and it isn’t your mom. It’s me. We wanted to stay together for your senior year. We didn’t want to uproot you. For the next two weeks, we’ll stay here together in this house, and then we’ll separate.”
When he says separate, I think of a heart being cut open, of limbs being sawn off.
“But yesterday you drove me to school.” What I mean to say is, Yesterday we were normal. We ate thumbprint cookies and rode in companionable silence and drove faster than anyone on the road.
“It’s something that’s been building for a while,” he says. “We’ve just