Page 46 of Kiss Her Goodbye

I pick up the rodent-filled mug.Sigh heavily.

“You can do this,” Genni assures me.

I shudder, squeeze my eyes shut.I don’t want to do this, I really don’t.And yet…

Some people make healthy life decisions.Some pay attention to their inner wants, needs, desires.And some of us… we just do what we have to do.Even if it hurts us later…

I step around Petunia, march one, two, three, four steps down the carpeted corridor.

And I suffer a strange sense of déjà vu.

Myself as a kid, returning home after school following one of my parents’ blow-out fights, when my mother screamed she couldn’t take one more minute of my father’s drinking and he swore, begged, pleaded he would do better.Leading to a stilted breakfast where my father, who’d clearly spent the night sobering up with six pots of coffee, moved about the kitchen with relentless good intentions as he dished out overcooked eggs and prattled about the beautiful weather.

Except now it’s eight hours later, which he’s spent alone in a house that, no matter how hard my mother and I try, always has a hidden liter of Jack.

My footsteps slow as I approach the front door, my backpack growing heavier.My hand comes to rest on the door handle.

This is the moment.Twist the knob, push open the door, and…

Passed-out-drunk Dad is a given.Sober Dad…

Sober Dad is hope and heartache in equal measures, because it never lasts, and we all know it.

Which makes this moment right now, my small fingers curling around a smooth brass handle, a kind of limbo.Where I wish for the best, while assuring myself I can handle the worst.

Where I stand for endless minute rolling into minute because even when you promise yourself that you’re strong enough…

It doesn’t mean it won’t hurt all over again.

I have loved my father my entire life.And to this day, memories of him hurt me, which is particularly awful, because my father never wanted to be that man.There wasn’t a mean, violent, angry bone in his body.Just an illness that robbed his family of him all the same.

And soon enough, it became the curse he shared with his daughter.I’ve never been able to figure out which was worse during my own hard-drinking high school years: my mother’s deep disappointment in my behavior or my father’s self-conscious shame.

I wish they could see me now.I wish I could know them as the person I’ve become.

But life doesn’t work like that.Moments come, moments go, and even the truly horrific ones, such as what Sabera Ahmadi experienced, are seared into our souls while journeying on.We’re left in some kind of cosmic toaster oven, where the universe’s memory is long gone, while we still struggle with the burn marks left on our psyche.

I’m not a young girl anymore.

And behind this door isn’t the specter of my maybe drunk, maybe sober father.

The doubt, the dread, the terror, however, remain uniquely my own.

My phone chimes with additional texts from Bart.I don’t bother to look.It’s time to get this done.

Final deep breath, then I step into the darkened interior, my eyes requiring a moment to adjust to the gloom.On my right, the raised glass enclosure with its slithering mass of hungry baby snakes above, much smaller cricket cage below.Straight ahead,the even more impressively sized terrarium housing the coiled bulk of pale-yellow Marge, her head now rising into the air, forked tongue darting out to test the air.

Except Marge isn’t eight feet away in the comfort of her custom home.

She’s unspooling from a spot on the floor a mere three feet away.

I yelp.

I hurtle a half-thawed rat in her direction.Then, as she lunges for the dead rodent…

I get the hell out of there.

CHAPTER 17