Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 92743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Until the day she wasn’t…
I was alone and terrified for hours until Gramps showed up with the news that Dad was in the hospital. He was as surprised to learn that Mom was gone as I was, but his surprise didn’t last as long as mine.
Gramps has been a lobsterman since he was seventeen and a gossip probably even longer than that. He knew the ugly story months before I did, but I eventually put together the pieces from scraps of things overhead whispered around school and down by the docks.
Apparently, my father went drinking that night, as usual, only to run into my mom at a bar in the next town over. It sounds like the start of a 1970s song about drinking piña coladas and getting lost in the rain, but it didn’t end with my parents realizing there was still a spark between them.
Because my mother wasn’t alone. She was with Weaver Tripp, a man about a decade her junior, and they weren’t sharing a drink as friends. Apparently, that was clear from the moment Dad walked in.
My dad is usually a happy drunk, but that night he showed his violent side. He punched Weaver, Weaver beat the absolute shit out of him, and Mom dipped with her date, leaving Dad bleeding on the ground outside the bar. Dad, who’d already had several drinks at a different pub, pulled himself off the ground and got into his car to chase after them, but ended up running off the road instead.
He broke both legs and sustained a head injury serious enough to keep him in the hospital for weeks.
The therapist I talked to as a kid, after I moved in with Gramps and it became clear that I wasn’t snapping back from the family tragedy as quickly as he’d hoped, said it was possible the head injury was the reason my dad was so different after the accident than he’d been before. It wasn’t that he didn’t love me anymore, but that he simply wasn’t capable of taking care of me or communicating the way he had before he cracked his head open like an egg.
I wanted to believe her.
I really did.
But in my gut, I knew it was Mom leaving that closed my father’s heart to everything and everyone, including his own daughter. He loved her so much. Even when I was a toddler, I remember being a little jealous of the way he looked at my beautiful mama, like she was an angel come to earth, better than all the rest of the people in the world put together, too perfect to be real.
She wasn’t perfect, of course. She was just really pretty, and men are dumb when it comes to beautiful women. I understood that sometime around thirteen or fourteen, and it made me have even less respect for my broken father.
You don’t stop being there for your child because you’re not with her mom anymore.
You should love and take care of your babies no matter what.
Gramps gets that. Gramps has never let me down or stopped loving me, even when I ruined his truck by putting diesel fuel in it instead of regular gas or when we had a knock-down-drag-out fight about me staying to help him on the boat instead of going to college. He wanted me to get out of Sea Breeze and “make something of myself.”
I told him the only thing I wanted to “make” of myself was to make myself useful to the people I love. Gramps needed me on the boat. His arthritis was getting too bad to haul traps in all day on his own, and I had good friends in Sea Breeze, friends as close to me as sisters. They weren’t going to college, either. Elaina was opening a cat café with an inheritance from her grandmother, and Maya was going to work for her parents in their rental property business. My family was here. No matter how much I loved taking pictures or how proud I was of landing a scholarship to art school, that made the decision not to go to college an easy one.
Eventually, Gramps came around to seeing my point of view and we’re even closer than we were when I was a kid. He’s not just my grandpa or surrogate parent, in many ways, he’s my best friend. He just gets me, in a way not many people ever have.
Until this morning, I would have said nothing could come between us or damage the bond we’ve forged over the past sixteen years. But that was before I slept with a Tripp, the same Tripp who wrecked my family and ruined his son.
The thought makes my stomach roil again.
“Everything all right?” Gramps asks, frowning over the rim of his cup. “I haven’t seen you that green since I made liver for dinner last winter. You didn’t drink too much last night, did you?”