Beneath the Surface(63)

“Just give me a minute. I’ll be back.” She waved off Kristin, feeling sorry for leaving her alone with her father, but it wouldn’t be the first time after all.



As she walked around the streets of Strathfield where she’d never been, Sheryl pondered forgiveness. Or, at least, trying to mimic it for a few minutes for the sake of her dying father. She had three options: not going back into his house and never speaking to him again; going back, saying something vague about having created a life well beyond any expectations her youth might have prescribed; and going back, looking him in the watery, fading eyes again, and trying to find something in her, a flicker of goodness, of love for a father she barely knew, and consider giving him what he really wanted: a piece of herself.

She sucked her lungs full of air, as though fresh oxygen had all the answers. She kept her face to the ground, to her feet falling onto the sidewalk, and thought about her mother. In the beginning, she’d looked at pictures of her, of the two of them, every day. She wondered what she would look like now, if she had lived. Would she have looked like Sheryl when she was fifty? Did it still matter? Sheryl was forty-seven; she’d lived thirty-five years without a mother. About the same without a father. She’d only ever had herself. This decision too, came down to herself, and to the person she had become.

She asked herself how she would want to have acted after it was too late. When she stood over his casket at his funeral—perhaps, if Trevor was telling the truth, only days away. If she went at all. She could choose to stay at home and drink instead, but even Sheryl’s jaded sense of irony couldn’t stretch that far. Would she break down? Regret not having spoken to him again? Or would her soul be wrapped in steel forever?

She passed by a bottle shop and, without even thinking about it, went inside. She looked around and decided on a can of Victoria Bitter, a large one. She took it outside and scanned her surroundings for a place to sit and drink. To think. When she couldn’t immediately find anywhere more suitable, she sank down to the curb in front of the bottle shop and, before opening the can, wondered if she was being the spitting image of her father. Did he sit like this on sidewalks getting wasted? Or was that too much of a cliché image of the alcoholic? Either way, as she sat there, pulled the lid off the can, and brought it to her lips, she could get a sense of his pain. Yes, he had been weak, and he had abandoned her in the worst way, making Sheryl believe that neither one of her parents loved her enough; all of that had happened and was unequivocally true. But Trevor hadn’t deserted her for no reason, and some shoulders weren’t built to carry that amount of pain and grief. He had made one wrong decision after another to numb his pain, and perhaps it had worked and drowned out a small percentage of it. But, Sheryl knew from experience, once he’d slept it off, the pain would have come back hard and fast and unrelenting, clobbering him half to death again. Every single day of his life. And who was she to judge?

She took one last sip of the can, crumpled it up still half full, and tossed it in the bin. Perhaps the truth had lain in a can of beer all along, because what Sheryl knew as she made her way back to her father’s house, was that to beat her own demons, she would need to find a way to forgive the man who had pushed her in this direction most. It wouldn’t happen today. Maybe not even before he died. But no matter how long it took, it was the only way.





Chapter Twenty-Eight





“We can cancel the dinner,” Kristin said. “Tell everyone you have a family emergency.”

“And do what?” Sheryl half shouted from the living room. “Eat all the food you bought ourselves?”

And drink the wine, Kristin thought. She glanced over at the wine fridge, which still held a couple of vintage bottles from her time with Sterling Wines, and was always fully stocked. She walked into the living room and sat down next to Sheryl.

“We can make it an alcohol-free dinner,” she said.

Sheryl shook her head. “This is my problem, not anyone else’s.”

“No, it’s not.” Kristin looked into Sheryl’s blue eyes. “Your friends will support you. You don’t have to do this alone.”

“Maybe not on the surface, but really, what can my friends do for me? How can they deal with stuff that is so inherently mine?”

“By showing their support and abstaining from drinking around you. At least in the beginning.”

“Abstinence is not my goal.” Sheryl straightened her shoulders. “I think moderation is more realistic.”

Kristin quirked up her eyebrows. “You do?” After they’d left Trevor’s house, Sheryl had made a few bold claims, like vowing to give up alcohol and sort out the mess in her head that drove her to the bottle and even try to find it somewhere in her heart to forgive her father, but Kristin had seen through all of that easily. Sheryl was processing the conversation with her father, the memories it had brought up, and dreaming up a better version of herself to be able to deal with it all better.