up today to find a bowl of trail mix and two glasses of Kool-Aid sitting in the middle of the hut on a tray.
Trey dropped an M&M into his mouth. “One week ago this minute, I decided I wanted to shoot hoops.”
“I always told you sports were unhealthy.”
“Maybe it’s just basketball.”
“I think he’d have been mad if you’d wrecked his car for soccer, too.”
“Yeah, probably. We should make a movie.”
That was a new one. “Of what?”
“The things you see in your head when the life’s being choked out of you.”
He had my attention. “You saw things?”
“Yup.”
“Like what?”
“An Easter egg hunt.”
“Weird.”
“You were there too.”
“What was I doing?”
“I don’t know. Just kinda smiling and looking at me.”
“Trust me—I wasn’t smiling in real life.”
“And I saw something orange. Really orange. Like, burn-your-eyeball orange.”
“It wouldn’t make a very good movie,” I said.
“No, you’re right.”
“You think he’s coming back?”
“If he does, I’ll kill him.”
His words made my stomach do a little thunk. That was the weird thing about my dad. I knew he was evil and capable of hurting us—I wore the bandages that proved it—but hearing Trey talk about killing him still made me feel not right. He may have sprained my wrist, but he was still my dad.
“Do you think he ever liked us?” I asked my brother.
“Nope.”
“I used to give him things to make him like me more. Like leftover candy from Halloween and clay bowls from art class. I even made him a macaroni necklace once. I was supposed to give it to Mom, but I figured he needed the cheering up more.”
“He never loved us.”
“You sure?”
He pointed at his neck.
“Right.” I didn’t want to push it, but . . . “It’s just that sometimes he was really nice.”
“Like when?”
“Like when we went to Disney World that one time. He let us go on all the rides we wanted and stay until the park closed. And when he took us out to movies ’cause we got good report cards,” I added, recalling more and more instances when he’d seemed a little less horrible. “He even bought us popcorn that one time when you’d gotten good grades and scored three goals in your soccer game.”
“And then he came home and made me stand outside the front door for three hours because I dropped the pickle jar when I was getting it out of the fridge.”
“Yeah, but we got popcorn.”
“He didn’t love us, Shell. He still doesn’t.”
“Maybe he’ll realize he does—because he’s away from us—and come back and say he’s sorry.” There was something light and fluttery brightening in my lungs. “Maybe if I send him a card or something—”
“What?” Trey came up on his elbow and glared so hard it made me shiver.
“Or maybe if I went to see him, wherever he is, and told him that we don’t hate him bad. We hate him like we hate the dentist—not like mass murderers.”
Trey looked at me and I could tell I should be quiet. His nostrils were flared and his eyes were squinty. He got up off the floor and took a few steps away, his hands on his hips, breathing like he’d just run up the stairs. When he turned around, his lips were curled in and the skin of his face looked stretched too tight. “What’s wrong with you, Shell?” His voice was hard, as Trey-less as the sneer distorting his features. It scared me bad enough to make my face feel prickly. “He’s out of our lives,” he said, and there was cement behind his eyes. And then his voice got really hard, like cold metal, and he said, “He’s gone. You hear me? Leave him wherever he is!”
He stood there, glaring, for another minute or two, then stalked back to the Huddle Hut, threw himself down next to me, and crammed a fistful of trail mix into his mouth, chomping hard and squinting at the sheet above us. “Leave him wherever he is,” he said again, more softly this time. A little faded. I put an M&M in my mouth, but my stomach didn’t seem to want me to swallow it. Maybe I was coming down with the flu. Or cancer. It wasn’t normal, anyway.
After a few minutes had passed, enough for me to sing “Eye of the Tiger” in my mind, I tried to reason with Trey one more time. Actually, I was probably trying to convince myself more than him. It just felt wrong not to have a father—guilty, somehow.