The Day Dad Gave Me Away

She pressed her lips together. Jake shifted beside me, and I felt his hand settle at the small of my back.

“I was wrong,” she said. “I want to say it plain, so there’s no mistake. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I should have believed him. I should have believed you.”

“Connie,” I said. My throat was tight. “I know you were scared. The bills. I know.”

“I was scared,” she said. “That part’s true. Every time I open the mailbox, I think, this is the one that sinks us. And I told myself the power of attorney meant I had to say no to everything, so nobody could ever say I wasn’t careful with his money.”

She looked down at the envelope in her hands.

“But that’s not all of it, and I’d be lying if I let you think it was.” She took a breath.

“Your mother’s picture is still on the piano. Her recipe box is still in the cupboard. Nine years, Haley, and some days I still feel like I’m a guest in that house. And when he promised you that money, he said he’d put it away for you. Like it was from before. From her.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d never once thought of how that house must have felt to her. I’d been too busy keeping my mother’s picture where it was.

“So when he got sick, and I had the say,” she went on, her voice very small now, “some mean little part of me liked having the say. About one thing. And then today he said her mother and I, in front of the whole county, and I sat there waiting to mind it. Waiting to feel second.”

She shook her head. “And I didn’t. I was just proud of him. And ashamed of me.”

She held the envelope out again. “Please. He wants you to have it. It was always his to give. I just made him wait.”

I took it then. My hands were shaking almost as badly as Dad’s had been at the altar.

“Use it for his therapy,” I said. “Or the stair lift. Connie, you need it more than we do right now.”

“No,” she said, and for the first time all day there was a little bit of her old bookkeeper’s firmness back in her voice.

“Absolutely not. He would never forgive either one of us. Pay off whatever you put on a credit card for this wedding. I know you did, so don’t tell me you didn’t.”

Jake laughed, a short surprised laugh, because she was right. We’d put the roast beef and the kegs on the card.

I hugged her. I’d hugged Connie before, at Christmas and on birthdays, the stiff kind of hug you give a stepmother. This was not that kind.

She held on to me in the corner of the fire hall, in her sage dress, and I could feel her crying into the shoulder of my wedding gown.

“Thank you for driving him,” I said into her hair. “Every Tuesday. Sixty miles. I know what that cost you. I know you didn’t even know what for.”