Click to Subscribe - By L. M. Augustine Page 0,28

other than to serve as his father’s slave?”

“You should be nice to me, you know,” he says, not looking at me. “My money is the only reason you’re alive.”

“Your money?” I laugh to myself as I walk over to the cabinet and pull out a pre-made macaroni and cheese. I pour into two paper bowls, one for me and one for him. “You mean your mom’s money?”

He doesn’t respond to that, and a glimmer of satisfaction races through me. Right now, I’m really too tired to even pretend to be polite with Dad.

It isn’t a lie, however. The only reason we still have a house is because of my night job at Starbucks, and also because my dad has convinced his loaded mother to send us money every month to keep us afloat in these “tough times” after Mom’s death. In reality, Dad doesn’t even seem to care about her death; he just wants his mom’s money. All he does is drink and sleep and ignore me. I’m not afraid of him or anything, but I just wish… that he could be normal. That he could not be so fucking useless. That he could treat me like a real son and that he could be a real father. That maybe, just maybe, he could’ve been there for me after Mom’s death.

But he wasn’t.

He never even mentioned Mom’s name, or anything to comfort me, before or after the funeral. Not an “it’s going to be okay,” not a “this sucks,” not an “I’m sorry.” He never brought it up, so neither did I. When I’m with him, it’s like it never happened, like I never even had a mother.

He’s claimed to interview for several newspaper gigs since her death, but I know he threw all the interviews on purpose. As long as his mom sends in money every month and as long as I do all the housework for him, he couldn’t care less about getting a job.

My dad wasn’t always like this, though. He used to be an okay dad, with a well-paying lawyer job and a smile that never left his face.

I haven’t seen that smile in so long.

I miss it, honestly.

But all of a sudden, about a year ago, he just gave up. He stopped caring. He quit his job, took to smoking and drinking and enslaving his family members. Things got hard for Mom, for me, for all of us, and my dad acted like he was the fucking king of the world. Mom should have left him then, and we all knew it, but her job didn’t pay well enough to support both her and me and we needed his money. Plus, both of us sort of secretly clung to the hope that Dad would get better again and we could go back to being normal, to being happy. To being a family.

I don’t really know why Dad stopped caring as dramatically as he did. I think it started off as depression from his and Mom’s marriage troubles, and then it just spread from there. Dad never said anything, never acted like he was any different than he used to be, and I didn’t have the courage to ask. So it was just that: a mystery.

I give him an annoyed look as I pour the water into the macaroni noodles, add cheese from the packet, and microwave both bowls. Dad doesn’t look at me; he never looks at me. It’s like the sight of his own son is too much “work” for him to undergo, and so he ignores my existence altogether. When the microwave beeps, I pull out the bowls, shove one toward him without meeting his gaze, and then bring my bowl to the corner of the kitchen as far away from him as I can possibly get. On today of all days, I am not getting into it with him.

We eat in peace for a few more minutes, neither of us saying a word—thank god—until Dad finally throws his spoon against the bowl and jerks back in his chair. “This sucks,” he says and slams the bowl against the table.

I roll my eyes. “That’s interesting, because you seemed to enjoy the exact same thing just fine last time.”

“I was being nice,” he says, tossing his newspaper aside. Finally, I look at him. Dad is tall, unshaven and thick-jawed, with a hard face, dark brown eyes, and a thin smile. He looks sad and rugged, his once jet black hair now thick and gray.