“When?” I barked.
“We found out about four months ago,” she said, looking away from me.
Four months. Four goddamn months and they were telling me now.
“You didn’t think I deserved to know before?” My mother winced, and she had the audacity to look ashamed.
I speared Brad Coulter with a look. “Why now? Why tell me now?”
“Because…” he started, only to end up coughing. My mother jumped and helped lift his head from the pillow. He coughed and coughed, the dry sound rattling from his chest and echoing through my ears. At the sight of blood dribbling past his lips, my hands started to shake.
My fists clenched, and I had to look away. This man wasn’t my father.
After a moment, the coughing fit ceased, and I started to pace the hospital room. “Finish your sentence,” I demanded. Cold, yes. But I didn’t know how else to react, how else to speak to them.
“Because… I want… to fix… this… I want a… chance.”
“So you don’t die with the guilt that you were a shitty father?”
“Maddox!” My mother hissed. I swiveled around and matched her glare with one of my own.
“What? The truth is not something you want to hear?”
“I deserve that,” my father admitted tiredly.
Fuck. This. “I’m out of here.”
Before I reached the door, my mother’s voice stopped me. “I want to tell you a story.”
“I’m not here for some fairy-tale retelling, Mom,” I seethed.
“Nothing about this story is a fairy tale, Maddox.”
If you asked me why I didn’t leave, why I stayed by the door and listened to her, I wouldn’t have an answer to that question.
I simply didn’t know.
Maybe it was something in her voice. The pain, the sorrow, the guilt. Maybe because it all sounded so real to my ears. I felt things I shouldn’t have.
Turning around to face them, I leaned against the door and crossed my arms over my chest. “Speak.” One word. It was all she needed.
She gripped my father’s hand, her eyes glassy. “When I met your father, he didn’t have any food to eat.”
Wh – what the fuck?
She kept talking, before I could say anything, as if she was scared, she’d lose whatever courage she had to speak. “I remember that day very clearly. We were neighbors, and he came knocking at my door. He asked my parents if he could have a plate of food, or even a loaf of bread, to feed his younger brother.”
Younger brother? My father has a brother? I have an uncle? How the hell did I not know this? My mind spun, and I blinked several times.
“You see, we came from a shitty neighborhood. From the slums. You could easily describe it as a slum part of New York City. We barely even had electricity or warm water, because we couldn’t pay for it. We’d eat canned food that we could get from the community church or the food banks. That night, my family barely even had food to feed ourselves. My mother turned Brad away. After my parents went to sleep, I sneaked out of my room and went over to his house. I brought him two slices of bread. He broke down and cried. He was fourteen, I was eleven. He quickly fed his brother and only took two bites himself. I learned that they hadn’t had any food for two whole days.”
My mother paused, as I sunk to the floor, my legs suddenly feeling weak. I wanted to call her a liar, but I could hear the truth in her words, the rawness in her voice. This was real. My parents were poor… and I never knew. They never told me anything about their pasts or their childhoods. We never… talked.
I sat on my ass and stared at my parents, finally realizing that they were truly strangers to me.
My mother made a choking sound. “For four years, I’d sneak food to him. We were both poor, but I had parents who were still trying to get food on our table. Brad didn’t. His mother was a drug addict and alcoholic. The little money Brad saved up from working part-time at the church, his mother would steal for drugs. When he was eighteen, he left home with his little brother.”
“We were homeless,” my father broke in, with a whisper, his voice cracking. “For months, we lived on the streets, under a bridge with other homeless people. We were…starving. I was …desperate. I stole a man’s wallet… and I was…caught. Was thrown in jail for a night. It rained that night. My brother…was… alone under the bridge. He walked in the rain for hours, looking for me.”
He took a deep breath and paused with a cough. I was glad I was sitting down when my mother continued. “Your father’s brother… your uncle… he caught pneumonia.”
“He didn’t… make it,” I whispered, already knowing where this was going. If I had an uncle and my father never spoke of him, then it only meant one thing.