Chapter 3

Aunt Marilyn set a bag of medicine on the table and glanced out the window.

"Your father's downstairs."

I followed her eyes.

He was sitting on the edge of the planter, head down.

The last few nights Nora had woken screaming again and again, work was piling up on me, and the cut on my arm stung every time it touched water.

I didn't have the strength left to keep fighting him.

"Let him come up."

Aunt Marilyn had barely started to relax when I added,

"Ten minutes."

He came up, put the medicine down, and didn't move any farther into the room.

I'd just started to think he'd finally learned to hold himself back when the bedroom door opened.

Nora came out clutching the moon-patterned quilt.

That quilt had been washed pale, a crooked little moon stitched into the lower left corner.

My mother made it.

The night I turned four, my father went off to play cards and told me to sit and wait outside the corner store.

After the store closed, I curled up under the eaves with that quilt wrapped around my legs.

The next day, when Ruby Dickerson took me to the hospital, the corners were caked with mud and blood.

It got washed clean later.

I never could bring myself to throw it out.

The moment Nora saw my father, she buried her face in the quilt.

He'd been about to leave. Now his feet stopped again.

"Still scared of me?"

The wariness I'd just let go of snapped right back up.

"Dad, go."

He didn't move.

Nora took another step back.

His face went dark.

Everything he'd been swallowing these last days was right there on it.

The next second, he reached straight for the child.

I got in front of her.

"Don't touch her!"

Nora hugged the moon-patterned quilt with all her strength.

His hand had already closed on the corner of it.

My heart lurched.

"Let go!"

He gave it an irritated yank.

Riiip—

The quilt split open right beside that moon.

I froze.

My fingers started shaking first.

He saw my face and stalled for a second too.

But that flicker of guilt lasted only a few seconds.

"It's already this torn up. Just patch it, that's all."

I snatched the quilt back.

"My mother made this."

His face went hard at once.

"Your mother again."

The fire in my chest surged up.

But he kept talking.

Said my mother died young, never handled anything.

Said all these years I only ever remembered what he did wrong.

Then he looked at Nora and said the child had been raised by me to where she couldn't take the slightest hardship.

I gripped the corner of the quilt, my knuckles white.

Before I could get a word out, Nora was crying first.

"Don't talk about Mommy!"

She crouched down on the floor, frantic to fit the tear back together.

The two edges met, then her hands slipped and it split open again.

She was so upset the tears came down.

"Mommy."

"Grandma's moon won't go back together."

My nose stung all at once.

The anger from a moment ago was crushed flat under the ache.

I lifted her up and pulled the door open.

"Out."

He still wouldn't go.

"I raised you twenty-eight years, and I'm worth less than one ratty quilt?"

I looked straight at him.

"At least it didn't leave four-year-old me out there alone."

The anger on his face caught mid-motion.

A few seconds later, he said stiffly,

"Something from over twenty years ago. How much longer are you going to hold on to it?"

I stared at him, dazed.

Whenever that night came up before, he would always rush to explain.

Rush to say he'd had too much to drink.

Trip over himself to say he'd thought someone had taken me home.

But this time, he didn't offer a single explanation.

He looked away from me, turned, and walked out.

He didn't leave, though.

He sat straight down on the stairs.

Neighbors opened their doors one after another. Someone picked up a phone.

I told him to go.

He just sat there and didn't move.

The frustration in me pressed heavier and heavier, and in the end I stopped arguing and called the police.

It was nearly eleven by the time they got him to leave.

I closed the door.

Nora was still holding the split moon-patterned quilt, fitting it toward the middle again and again.

I watched her, but all I could see was the way my father had looked away.

That night, for the first time, I began to wonder:

The year I was four, had he really just forgotten?