Page 96 of On the Rocks

My heart ached, Noah’s face the only thing I could see as I shut my eyes and freed another set of tears.

“I will do this for you,” I whispered, breaking with the admission. “For our family. Because it would kill me to do anything that would ever hurt you, or Mom, or Mary Anne.” I sniffed, finally pulling my gaze up to meet my father’s.

When I saw the tears on his cheeks, his eyes red and glossy, I broke again.

“But, you will do something for me in return,” I choked out on a sob. “You have to get help, Daddy. You can’t keep doing this — not at this expense. You have to go to Gamblers Anonymous. You have to stop with the casinos, and the card nights, and the horse tracks. It may have been all fun and games at one point, a way to pass the time and wheel and deal with the good ol’ boys in this town, but now, it has affected not just your life, and not just my life, but our entire family’s.”

Dad rolled his lips together, two tears streaming parallel down his cheeks as he watched me. He was quiet for a long while, the air in his office stuffy and suffocating.

“I’m so sorry,” he finally whispered. “I know… I know I’m sick. I know I have a problem. I… I never thought it would get to this point, I never thought…”

He paused, face crumpling as a sob broke through. In all the years I’d been alive, I’d never seen my father cry.

Not once.

But that night in his office, he broke, reaching for a tissue on his desk and wiping the tears away, wiping his nose before his gaze sat miserably somewhere in the distance between us.

Now, it washimwho couldn’t look at me.

“I don’t know when it got this bad,” he said. “I used to have a hold on it. I’d walk into the casino with what I was okay to lose, and if I lost it, I left. But, when I started going to Pat’s club… I don’t know. Everything changed.”

Pat was my father’s affectionate pet name for Patrick Scooter.

The man he now owed so much money to that he couldn’t pay his own debt.

“When my money ran out, I’d just hang around, drink, smoke cigars with the other city council members. But, Patrick would entice me, tell me to get in on the next hand, that he had me, he’d lend me the bet. It was innocent at first, and I easily paid him back. Somewhere along the way, though…” Dad shook his head. “I don’t know. I got pulled into something I didn’t even realize. It was bigger than I could have ever known. And when I started losing more, I would ask for more — small, at first, but bigger and bigger as time went on. I just thoughtone more hand, and I’ll win it all back.” A shadow passed over his face, like he was trying to pinpoint the exact moment it all happened.

Like if he could, he could go back and change it all.

His mouth hung open for a long pause before he continued. “Before I knew it, I was in over my head in a debt I couldn’t even wrap my head around.”

I swallowed, trying my best to find sympathy somewhere in my heart for my father, for the man who raised me.

I came up empty handed.

“Your mom didn’t even know until it was too late,” he said, his voice low and cracking. “We were going to lose everything… and then… Anthony came to ask for your hand.”

Just the sound of his name made my stomach roll so violently I nearly vomited what little bit of dinner I could choke down. Tears flooded my eyes again, so fast I couldn’t even try to stop them before they rolled down my cheeks.

“That’s enough,” I whispered, voice shaking through the shallow breaths I managed to sip. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”

Dad opened his mouth, but after one look at me, he shut it again.

“I just needed you to know,” I said definitively. “I needed you to know that I’m aware of what you did, and I needed you to know that as much as it hurtsme, I will do what needs to be done for this family.” I shook my head. “Even if I wasn’t given the opportunity to make my own choice in the first place.”

Dad didn’t say anything else, which was wise, because I was in perhaps the most unstable state I’d ever been in in my entire life.

I nodded, the conversation over, and then I stood and walked to his office door, taking a moment to wipe my face before I opened the door. I glanced back at the big, broken man at that desk, and in that moment, I didn’t recognize him at all.

“For the record,” I said, standing tall. “Even if you do get help — and you will — I will never forgive you for this.”

And with the most painful decision of my life made, I turned my back on my father and shut the door on everything I ever thought my life would be.

Noah

I wasn’t going to go.

I swore on my father’s grave, on theBiblethat I was not going to go to the wedding.