Which was probably why the captain had asked me to take a leave.
Or the fact that you had survived four bullets and no one on the force wanted to be the bearer of bad news if things had gone south.
That, too.
I could still remember my conversation with the captain a week ago, when I was finally able to walk on my own two feet again and could trudge into the precinct. I had tried to assure him that I was fine enough to come back to work, maybe even take a desk job for a while. But I wasn’t very convincing, and I doubt the cane I was using to help me get around made it any better. He had literally kicked me out of the office, told me to take a break, stay with family, heal first, then talk about coming back to work.
“And for fuck’s sake, Alex, look after your goddamn daughter!”
It seemed like everyone was always chastising me to be a better dad, telling me what I was doing wrong and what I should be doing right. I appreciated their concern and tolerated their words. What they didn’t seem to understand was that no one chastised me more than myself. I started asking myself what would my dad do?
That’s when I started thinking about going home for a while.
Not home to the house Kelly and I shared on Beaker Street, but home to Connecticut, where I grew up. I had called my father a few days after I took leave and told him we were coming home to visit.
Kelly was great company, usually, but with the start of summer holidays and both of us in each other’s faces all day, the house was quickly turning into a warzone. I blamed it on puberty, she blamed it on the fact that I wasn’t taking enough meds. Or that I was just being an asshole intent on ruining her life.
It’s like I’m married all over again.
“We could’ve taken a plane, you know,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“You don’t say,” I replied. “Jeez, I should’ve thought of that.”
Kelly leaned in again. “You know, sometimes I wonder which one of us is the adult in this relationship.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll pretend to be the father whose credit card pays for all the stuff you have, and you pretend to be the daughter who is always grateful that her father loves her so much to spoil her in every possible way.”
She huffed at me. “Spoils me so much that he’s trapped us in a car for two days?”
“So much that he hasn’t stopped two states back and told the closest trucker to drive you back to Miami,” I replied. “Do you know what happens to little girls whose parents don’t keep their eyes on them all the time?” I looked at her in the rearview and frowned. “Do you know?”
“I’m twelve,” she replied. “I’m not living under a stone.”
“I’m going to have to rethink giving you your own phone,” I sai
d, shaking my head.
Kelly threw her hands up. “Sure, take it,” she said, slumping back. “Just what I need to make my life even more miserable.”
“Your life is not miserable,” I countered.
“I’m in a car for two days,” Kelly shot. “What’s your definition of miserable?”
This conversation for starters, I wanted to reply, but just smiled and shook my head.
We passed a road sign that read “Kent 30 Miles” and I let out a sigh of relief. Kelly had noticed it to, because she let out her own frustrated “finally” before shifting closer to the window to get a look at the world around us. I think it was the first time she had peeled her eyes away from that damn phone in two days.
Connecticut was beautiful in the fall, peaceful, the complete opposite of Miami with its year-round flow of tourists, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the scorching tropical heat. I had grown up in Kent, my parents’ house a constant reminder of the youth I had spent scraping my knees and bruising my elbows.
Moving to Miami had never been an easy decision, especially since leaving my dad alone was pretty much like giving a child a gun and asking him not to pull the trigger. Ever since my mother’s death back when I was in middle school, I had come close to losing a finger, breaking bones, and literally running a man over because my dad had thought it would be funny to let me drive his truck.
The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, eh buddy?
I looked at Kelly again in the rearview and wondered just how much of my dad was in me, how much of me was in her, how close I had come to ruining both of our lives, and shuddered. She definitely had a guardian angel watching over her, because more times than not, I wasn’t.
“Looking forward to seeing your grandfather again?” I asked.
The last time Kelly had been around my dad, the two had hit it off quite nicely. Well enough to the point where they had ganged up on me on numerous occasions. Sometimes I felt like he understood her a lot better than I did, and I usually wrote it off to the fact that he had been through the whole ‘single dad’ phase and had enough experience to handle situations I literally sucked at. Needless to say, he was thrilled when I told him we’d be spending a couple of months with him at home in Connecticut, a place I had not been back to in years.