“It was hard. Seeing him. Him talking to me,” she said. “At first, it felt like just a man sitting across from me, but he isn’t just some old codger. He’s my father. A man who was supposed to love me and make me feel safe, but failed me so spectacularly. And I don’t know what to do with that.”
Kristin shuffled a little closer. Sheryl wished she wouldn’t. She needed space. To breathe and to think. To finally deal with the sudden enormity of all the things she had never dealt with.
“I know.” Kristin slung an arm around her shoulders. “I know it’s hard, but not talking to me and… and hiding in your office all night long isn’t going to make things better.”
“I don’t know whether I love or hate him,” Sheryl blurted out.
“Probably a bit of both.” Kristin squeezed her shoulder tighter. “But what have you truly got to lose by getting in touch with him?” Kristin asked. “That you haven’t lost already?”
“I just don’t think he deserves it,” Sheryl said. She spoke in a tone that Kristin had seldom heard, a hangover mixed with extreme emotions underlying her words. Just like she’d seen Trevor age in front of her eyes during the timespan of a short conversation, Sheryl seemed to have grown smaller, her hair a little grayer, her wrinkles deeper. “Why should he deserve to die with my forgiveness?”
“He doesn’t, but it’s not really about that.” Kristin tried to feel her way through this conversation. She didn’t so much try to say the right things, but avoid the wrong ones. Sheryl was slowly opening up. All her defenses were down. Perhaps it was cruel to pounce on her as soon as she’d opened her eyes, but Kristin couldn’t watch her in agony one day longer. Sheryl wasn’t going to help herself, so it was up to Kristin to step in. Knowing that she was doing the right thing, didn’t make it easier, though. “This is about you.” Kristin paused. She’d been up most of the night while Sheryl slept it off, thinking about how to deliver the next phrase. The one it all came down to. The one that could, quite possibly, send Sheryl into a frenzied anger that she wouldn’t snap out of any time soon. “About what this has been doing to you. The drinking, babe.”
Sheryl didn’t say anything. She pushed the heels of her hands against her eyes. When she removed them, she turned her face away from Kristin. “That’s why, apart from it being such a shock, it was so hard to see him. I saw all my own faults reflected back at me.” A sniffle escaped her.
Kristin moved her hand to Sheryl’s neck and gently massaged her. The feel of her fingers on Sheryl’s skin reminded her of how little they had touched each other of late.
“In a way, I’ve become him. The very worst part of him.” Sheryl turned to face Kristin. Her eyes were red-rimmed and full of tears. “The exact thing I never wanted to be.”
“You haven’t,” Kristin said. “You’re an entirely different person.”
Sheryl shook her head. “Am I?” Her voice shot up. “I used to sit in a chair watching him the way you sat watching me this morning. Waiting for him to wake up, after I’d gone through his pockets to find some money so I could buy myself some breakfast. More often than not, there wasn’t any left and he sent me to the ATM when he woke up.”
“You are not like your father, babe,” Kristin insisted. “He was an alcoholic for thirty-five years. I would never let you become that.”
“Because I have you and he had no one.” Sheryl shrugged violently. “Well, he had me, but I was powerless.”
“The situation is so very different.” Kristin tried to look Sheryl in the eye, but it was impossible to hold her gaze, which kept skittering away.
“Maybe you’re right,” Sheryl said. “Maybe I have no choice but to go and see him.” She let out a long breath. “I’d best not wait too long if I want to have my say before he kicks the bucket.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sheryl had let Kristin set up the meeting, and she was letting her drive to her father’s place as well. It had happened fast, not only because Trevor had claimed he didn’t have long, but also because, if given too much time, Sheryl might have backed out. She didn’t want more hours to ruminate on it. To balance the pros and cons. To analyze the data the way she did after conducting a research survey. Her feelings were not data and her sad past had been analyzed to death already.
When they pulled up to the curb and Kristin parked the car, the doubts she’d been having since she’d given Kristin permission to call her father intensified. But she knew it was just nerves. Because now she was meeting her father on her own terms. There was no surprise effect to subdue the buried emotions that were bound to surface.