Page 88 of The Best Shot

CeeCee and I walked out together.

We got in the car, shut ourselves inside, and didn’t move.

The quiet settled. The exhale after a storm.

CeeCee leaned her head back against the seat.

I rested my hands on the steering wheel but didn’t turn the key yet. The porch light behind us flickered once through the windshield and went steady.

“You okay?”

“As expected,” she said. “He was sweet, like he could be. Asked about the baby. Says he’ll give me money to help with the doctor visits.”

“That’s a good thing, I guess.”

“I asked him for a divorce.”

My head whipped to her.

“He blamed you,” she said. “Said this wasn’t really me talking. That you’d been in my ear.” Her mouth twisted. “He used to complain about you. Said you were difficult. Judgmental. Always holding something over his head. I didn’t know what he meant, and I didn’t ask too hard, because he was my husband and I thought taking his side was what I was supposed to do.”

She looked down.

“There are a lot of things I let myself not ask too hard about. But tonight he said it like I was stupid. Like I needed someone to explain my own life to me.”

“CeeCee—”

My hands tightened around the wheel before I forced them loose and pressed them flat against my thighs.

“He’s not wrong about me having issues with him,” I said. “He’s wrong about everything else.”

“I know that.”

We sat with it.

And I didn’t say that for most of my life I’d believed, on some level, that Shaun was right. That I was the problem.

I’d loved my father, but Shaun had hero-worshipped him. Built himself around him. What a man was. What our family was. What was possible.

And one Sunday afternoon after church, I told the truth about a woman in a blue dress, my father’s arms around her, and me in the hallway with my choir folder, not understanding what I was seeing.

Before that Sunday, Shaun had been the one I went to first.

I ran to him with scraped knees, with school problems, with thunder shaking the windows.

He’d act annoyed every time, like I was a job he’d been assigned against his will, but he always made room.

So when Dad left, I went to his door first.

I don’t know what I thought he’d do. Let me in, maybe. Tell me it wasn’t my fault. Sit beside me in that angry silence until the worst had passed.

Instead, he looked at me like I was something rotten, and slammed the door in my face.

CeeCee turned to look out her window.

I started the engine.

The radio came on low, a man rapping about blood and loyalty.