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The real slap in the face was that, from that point on, my relationship with my father—if you could call it that—wasn’t all that terrible.

The tension was certainly there. We hardly spoke. But it was almost as though we now had an unspoken agreement that, after graduation, I would be leaving and he would tolerate my existence until the day he could forget I ever existed at all.

I had taken the bus down to the Military Entrance Processing Station the day after I told my father I would and expressed my interest in joining the Army.

The recruiter was thrilled with my enthusiasm, and because I was already eighteen, I was free to enlist. He told me that, in order to begin basic training, I’d need my high school diploma, and that was fine. It was only a few months away.

The only people who knew, apart from Dad and me, were Lucy and Grace. Nobody else. Not my mother, not Ricky, not Laura. I had kept it between those of us at the dinner table, not wanting to talk about something that wasn’t happening until after graduation anyway.

But one day, the signs for junior and senior proms started to pop up around the school hallways. I couldn’t say I cared much about it, but Ricky did.

And more importantly, Laura did.

I wasn’t sure I could call myself her boyfriend.

Months had gone by, and we hadn’t kissed again since that first time.

But sometimes, her fingers would reach out for mine in the hallways, and we always spent our lunch break together, reading more than talking.

It was a daily occurrence for me to spend time with her, and that felt like enough.

She wanted more though, and that was made obvious by the envious looks she gave Ricky and Molly as they kissed our lunch break away. Yet I never saw her show interest in any other guys. It was always just me, and for me, it was always just her. Whether we were making out or not.

But I was leaving, and she didn’t know.

“Do you … can you take me to prom?” she asked abruptly during lunch, looking up from the pages of The Hunchback of Notre Dame .

I stared into her hopeful eyes and hated that I had to hesitate.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. God, it felt so stupid. I was eighteen and had to wonder if I was allowed to take my prettiest friend to the school dance.

“Okay,” she replied softly, even as the hope in her eyes was snuffed out .

She didn’t bring it up again for the duration of our lunch break, and when we went our separate ways, I was filled with determination to put that spark back where it belonged.

That afternoon, I went home to find my mother in her robe, shuffling around the kitchen in a half-sleep stupor.

The older I got, the more I realized how abnormal her condition was.

I didn’t know what exactly was wrong, didn’t know if it was organic or a result of something— someone —else.

But it made me uncomfortable. It scared me to see her like that, day in and day out.

It scared me more than my father ever did.

What are they going to do when I’m gone?

My feelings on the thought flip-flopped daily. Some days, I was excited to go, to get out of this house and see, do, be something else. Other days, I was filled with terror … and today was one of those.

Mom’s lids were half-mast as she turned around from the stove, holding a pot of boiling water.

She didn’t notice me, and we collided. The pot sloshed in her hands, half of its contents spilling on my sneakers and her bare feet.

As she screamed, I grabbed the pot from her hands, placed it on the counter, quickly pulled the hose from the faucet, and sprayed her feet with the cold water.

“Look what you did,” she cried, gripping her tangled hair. “The floor is all wet. Your father will kill us both for this.”

“It was an accident, Mom,” I told her as I grabbed the dish rag. “Let me see your feet.”

She shuffled from my view, sloshing through the puddle. “No! You’ll make it worse! ”

“Mom, please .” I moved closer to her, knees in the water.

The kitchen light was dim, but I could see the splotched red skin on the tops of her feet.

She was scalded, but not burned. I sighed, stood, and dumped the hot water into the sink, then let the faucet run cold.

I filled the pot again, put it on the floor in front of a chair at the table, and told her to sit with her feet in the water.

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind, and I wondered how the hell this woman had managed to care for three babies.

“You need to cool it off, or it’ll get worse,” I explained, grabbing her by the shoulders and maneuvering her to the chair.

Without another word, she sat and put her feet in the water.

“Where are Lucy and Grace?” I asked, using the dish rag to mop up the floor.

“I don’t know.”

“Are they upstairs?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

I looked up at her, already exhausted from this interaction.

For a split second, I was glad she had spent so much of my life in her bedroom, and then I scolded myself for allowing that thought to enter my mind.

Whatever was wrong with my mom wasn’t her fault.

She was messed up and sick, and I didn’t know why, but I knew enough to know she hadn’t done anything to cause it.

“Did they come home?”

My mother looked like she was about to fall asleep right there in the chair. Her eyes fluttered, and her head nodded .

“Mom!”

Her head lifted. “Huh?”

“Lucy and Grace. Did they come home?”

“Oh, y-yeah,” she said, nodding as though her head weighed twenty pounds.

I finished drying the floor as best I could, then left my mother in the kitchen to call up the stairs to my sisters. They answered immediately, and relief washed over me as they ran from their rooms to hurry down the stairs.

“Hey, Max,” Lucy said, leaning against the banister.

“What’s up?” Grace asked.

“I need your help getting Mom upstairs,” I said. “She can’t cook. She’s too out of it.”

“Daddy will be mad if she doesn’t make dinner,” Lucy said with a grimace.

“I’ll deal with him. Let’s just get her to bed.”

Lucy and Grace led Mom through the living room and carefully up the stairs while I set out to cook the pasta Mom had attempted to make. Dad came home shortly before it was done, and when he saw me in the kitchen, he demanded to know what I was doing.

“Mom can barely keep her eyes open,” I said as I stirred the meat sauce I’d made into the pasta. “She’s in no shape to cook over an open flame. Unless, of course, you want her to set the house on fire.”

Dad only grunted.

My sisters came downstairs and quickly set the table as our father looked on, watching this dance we had practiced many times before. When I glanced at him, I thought I might’ve seen the faintest glint of satisfaction flicker in his cold eyes, but I could’ve been mistaken .

Then we sat down to eat.

It struck me as funny when I realized I couldn’t remember meals outside of our birthdays where my mother sat with us. And I found it even funnier that I had never noticed this until now, how the things you were used to just seemed so normal when they weren’t normal at all.

“Why doesn’t Mom ever eat with us?” I asked my father before shoveling a forkful of pasta into my mouth.

“Because she’s tired.”

“She’s been tired almost every day for eighteen years?”

“It hasn’t been eighteen years ,” he grumbled defensively. “You just don’t remember.”

He was right; I didn’t remember. But I could give him the benefit of the doubt and say it had been for at least most of my sisters’ lives.

“Why is she so tired?”

My father huffed an impatient sigh and lowered his utensils to the table as he regarded me with a look that matched his obnoxious sigh. “Your mother is a sick woman, Maxwell. If you haven’t noticed that, you’re more clueless than I pegged you for.”

“Sick with what?”

He rubbed at a spot on his temple, closing his eyes and sighing again. “Eat your dinner.”

Lucy and Grace looked up at me from across the table, their twin brows furrowed and pinched. I offered a slight shrug in response.

Crazy how you could live under the same roof as two people—your own parents—for years and feel like you hardly knew them at all .

Silence fell over us, as it usually did. We ate, we drank, and when we were finished, Dad stood from the table and started to turn away when I decided to take a chance.

“Dad,” I said, grabbing his attention.

He turned back to face me, but said nothing.

I sucked in a deep breath, an attempt to prepare myself for the inevitable verbal assault, then said, “Prom is coming, and I would like to go.”

He raised a single brow, a look of amusement on his face. “Prom?”

I swallowed at my humiliation. “Yes.”

“It’s that girl, isn’t it? The pretty one I saw.”

I strained to keep my fists from clenching. “Yes.”

He eyed me, taking his time as my heart thundered and my palms began to sweat. Then he surprised me with a shrug.

“Fine. Go. And you can borrow one of my suits. But you will go there and nowhere else. No hotels. No after-parties. No goofing around.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

It took every bit of strength not to fall away from the reality of who my father truly was.

This moment was an anomaly, and I was unlikely to ever experience something like it again.

But I couldn’t remember being happier, and I couldn’t believe it was because of him.

“Yes, sir,” I said with a nod, and as he left the room, I stopped trying to hide my smile.

** *

The next day, I asked Laura if she’d go to the prom with me.

It felt weird to say the words, oddly rehearsed after practicing it in my head all night and into the morning.

The dance still wasn’t something I cared about, and if it hadn’t been for her, I would’ve preferred not to go at all.

But the look of wide-eyed excitement that was slow to blanket her face made it seem worth it.