Chapter 4
When I returned to the graduate line, my best friend Maya grabbed my arm.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Is your dad okay?”
I looked toward the front row.
Dad sat alone, shoulders bent, flowers in his lap.
But his eyes were on me.
“Yes,” I said. “Now he is.”
Maya had known pieces of the story.
Not all.
She knew my mother remarried rich.
She knew Dad lived four hours away in a small town outside Knoxville.
She knew I spent summers with him until Mom started saying it was “disruptive.”
She did not know Dad had sent me money in envelopes when Mom told me he had stopped helping.
She did not know he drove to every school event and was sometimes told by Mom that the time had changed.
She did not know he once waited outside a closed gym for two hours because my mother had “forgotten” to update him.
I had learned these things slowly.
Painfully.
May you like
One missed event at a time.
Graduation was the day I stopped pretending it was misunderstanding.
