A woman abandons herself in the attempt to provide a father for her children.
I sobbed as the steaming water sprayed my naked body. I couldn’t wash away the image in my mind from the dream I’d woken from that morning. It wasn’t so much the kiss or the look in his eyes, or the smile I watched myself reflect back at him. It was how physically real it felt. The touch of his hand caressing my face, the warmth of his breath on my neck, the pulse of his heartbeat in my ears. As I turned off the shower, I took a deep breath, willing my tears to stop flowing. That deep ache in my chest was back; I had thought the lump sitting on top of my heart was finally gone, but there it came to rest again.
Wrapping myself in a robe, I left the bathroom, barely glancing at the Rhino in my bed. It flopped over, heaving a loud snore. The ache in my chest plunged deeper. I escaped to the hall, heading downstairs for coffee to soothe my constricted throat. But the picture on the wall stopped me. It was taken recently, of my son and the Rhino. It had been his 16th birthday and the Rhino had invited him to hunt zombies at a haunted house. He had originally bought tickets to take his own kids but they had refused, so he presented it to my son.
I remember my boy’s face lit up like his own dad had remembered his birthday. The stone in my chest had been like a balloon then, filled with helium. They came home with stories like war buddies, and the Rhino immediately framed the photo they took there together, posing with submachine guns and smug expressions on their faces. I had beamed at the buoyancy I saw in my boy’s gait, having missed the sunshine he once had before his dad died.
The snore rattled the picture on the wall and shook the ache in my soul. I wanted to smash the picture, punch the sour smelling mouth that drooled all over mine. It had been years since I had felt my skin tingle from the caress of a hand on my cheek or my body melt when joined with another. But some things are worth a trade.
The coffee pot was still mine. The Rhino had taken his own to the office. And I got to keep the reclining sofas I’d painstakingly saved and searched for, despite his reluctance to part with his newly acquired sectional. The sectional didn’t fit anyway. But my grandfather’s dining table was gone, sold for $200 on Craigslist, to make room for his grand banquet sized table that every guest gushed over. We had argued over whether or not to take apart my heirloom and store it in pieces in the garage and I had finally given in. It wasn’t until I was cleaning the milk that spilled that I realized it wasn’t even wood but had been a faux kit delivered from Amazon. Like most everything he insisted on blessing us with, the ornate furniture dwarfed my home and the classy décor looked silly next to my second hand homespun style. I meekly parted with my hand-me-downs until my home was not my own.
And then one day, the Rhino disappeared, along with the oversized furniture, the décor, and most of the belongings…and the picture in the hall. The ache was gone, and my heart felt home again.
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