Page 33 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

"I'm okay."

I meant it the narrow way you mean things you say to your father. The version of me he was talking to was the only version he'd ever asked to know.

"Good. Good." A small pause. "Work busy?"

"The usual."

"How's the house? Have you heard from Brad?"

"He keeps writing me about the equity. I keep telling him to talk to my lawyer."

"Hm. He always was a piece of work about money. Anyway." There it was. He went on quickly. "Listen, Lacey. I wanted to tell you something."

A pause he stretched on purpose.

"I've been seeing someone."

I sat down on the arm of the couch. "Oh," I said. "Wow. Dad."

"Her name's Carol. We met a few months back, at Eleanor's birthday, you remember Eleanor down the street, and we've been going out since. Should've told you sooner. I wanted to be sure it was real." A sheepish little laugh. "It's real."

"That's great, Dad."

Great. The word people use when they don't have a real one yet.

"She's a good one, Lacey." He was still going, all of it coming out at once. "She's funny. She listens. You know? She actually listens to me. Makes me laugh till I can't breathe. I forgot what that even felt like." He stopped, started again, like the words kept getting away from him. "I don't know how to say it. It's been a long time. Your mother, that was a long time ago now. And Carol, I don't know. I feel like myself with her. That's the only way I can put it."

He stopped, slightly out of breath, like he'd run somewhere.

"That's wonderful," I said. "I'm really happy for you."

The words came out fine. The ache in my chest didn't move.

"Yeah?" He sounded so eager I almost couldn't stand it. "You really think so?"

"Of course."

Of course I was happy for him. The man had spent more than two decades closed off, to me, to my mother, to any woman who tried to be in a room with him without catching the cold edge of his disappointment, and now somebody had come along and lifted it right off him, and he was blooming down the phone like a houseplant moved into the sun.

I was happy for him. And under the happiness, there was another feeling, almost foreign.

Anger.

I was angry.

Angry that he was happy. Bubbly.

Angry that I hadn't known, until tonight, that my father was a man capable of bubbly. Angry that Carol, whom I'd never met, was getting the version of him I'd wanted since childhood and been told didn't exist. Angry that she actually listens was a thing he could say out loud about a woman of three months, when he had never once listened to me.

He had never, in any phone call of my life, asked whether I was seeing anyone. Before Brad or after.

He was talking again. About Christmas, and Carol wanting to meet me. I made the sounds.

"Lacey?"

"Sorry, Dad. I'm here. That all sounds great."

"I'd like you to meet her. Tell me a good time for us to come visit."