AllFreeNovel
Share Us
After Isaac leaves, I pick myself up off the couch. Still more than a little drunk, I stumble my way around the house, picking up garbage and dirty clothes as I go.
My life fell apart when I was sober, so it’s ironic that drunk me is able to start piecing it back together.
As I’m cleaning, I can’t stop thinking about what Isaac said. Am I really turning into my father? Deep down, did I always know how much like him I am? That’s why I tried to spare anyone else from spending their life with me. I refused to treat the people I love the way he did.
Dismissive. Abusive. Manipulative.
I didn’t run away the same way Isaac did, but I did run away. And I’ve been running ever since. Even when I returned to Austin, I was never fully present, at least not with my family.
Which means all the things I wanted to say to him have been left unsaid. Years and years of resentment and anger and hurt have just been lying dormant inside me since I was a kid. And rather than face it, find closure, and heal, I’ve been silent.
But I’m done being silent now.
I’ve never been to a prison in my life. Growing up in a quote-unquote good Christian family, there was never an opportunity.
So, as I sit at the round metal table in the visitors’ center of the Hill Country Penitentiary, I feel more out of place than I’ve ever felt in my life.
After Isaac’s visit yesterday, I took a day to sober up and get my shit together. Then I drove up here with a headful of rehearsed lines I wanted to say to him. Right now, those lines are getting jumbled in my head. They sounded so eloquent when I practiced them in the car.
When the door opens, and they usher my father through the opening, I feel my stomach turn. He’s not in cuffs or chains, but there is a guard at his side. I hardly recognize Truett as he walks toward me. He’s a shell of the man he once was.
I used to think of my father as a mountain, strong and immovable. But now, with the dark circles under his eyes and barely any meat left on his frame, he looks like a weak, dying tree that could break with the smallest gust of wind.
His expression is guarded, staring at me with his brow furrowed as he takes a seat across from me at the table.
“What happened?” he asks, his voice a raspy crackling sound. For a man who once delivered sermons and shook walls with his verses, it’s just another example of how far he’s fallen.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Is it your mother? Is she okay?” He leans forward, his arms on the table as his gaze bores into me.
“Mom’s fine. Why?” I’m genuinely perplexed, and I hate that he spoke first. I wanted the upper hand in this conversation.
He leans back and narrows his eyes. “Why are you here?”
“I want to talk to you,” I say.
My father and I are strangers. I never realized it until now, but he and I have probably never been in a room alone together since I was a small child, and even then, I’m not entirely sure. We’ve never had a private conversation, and I can’t remember the last time he looked me in the eye as long as he is now.
It’s unnerving.
“I’m the only son who will still talk to you,” I say as the realization dawns. That’s why he thought I was here to deliver bad news. Adam and Caleb would both wring his neck before saying a word to him, so when he heard it was me, he assumed I was here to say something neither of them could.
He doesn’t reply to that. Just sits back and crosses his arms.
“What do you want, Lucas?” he mutters indignantly.
What do I want?
All the lines I rehearsed vanish as I stare at him across the table while two guards watch us in silence.
“Four sons and the only one who will talk to you is the one you hate the most,” I say with a hint of humor in my tone.
His brow furrows deeper. “I don’t hate you. How could you say that?”
This time, I laugh, and one of the guards tenses.
“You’ve hated me my whole life. That’s if you bothered to even consider me that much. Every time I opened my mouth around you, you looked ready to knock my lights out. Sometimes you almost did. Remember those times, Dad? When spankings turned into punches? All because I had the audacity to speak my mind around you.”
