Annabelle / cofffee table

   From what I could recall, Chuck hadn't been a bad father. He might've been clumsy about doing the things that kids like to do, but he’d attempted them. I could credit him for that. And once Annabelle had come into the picture we had a moment of really pretending to be a happy family. I was around twelve at the time, so although I didn’t want or expect her to be a surrogate mother, I welcomed having a buffer between my preteen awkwardness and Chuck. She took me after school once, we’d gotten fast food and talked about school. Then she took me into a fashion outlet to buy feminine necessities. When we came home late and Chuck had asked where we were, she said “I took her to get training bra’s” as if it were nothing. My face had been burning and Chuck had looked perturbed but it was over, and it had been easier, anyway, than ever expecting spending money or asking for them for myself. 

Annabelle wasn’t taking my mother’s place because I’d never had a mother, and she never acted like it either. She respected my distance, which I in turn respected, although I hadn’t much care for her taste in men. But it hadn’t been that bad until the agency fired Chuck for something. What it was he couldn’t say, but the shame of it ate at him. He began to drink more and she pressed him more, people were beginning to give them a wider berth and she wanted to understand why but he couldn’t handle it. 

At the time I remember thinking that perhaps, since he’d been fired, maybe he’d be relieved of his duty of pretending to be my father. I kept thinking some agency worker was going to come by and end the charade and I’d be thrown into some foster care service for the unwanted punk children of vanished employees. I kept Evelyn’s journal under my bed and read the parts where she went out of town, that splendid night with G, and hoping somehow someone would help me find my real father. Maybe the agency could help me if I made an emotional appeal and told them that I knew to keep my mouth shut. 

But the only thing that happened was that Chuck drank more. His depression in the couch deepened and it formed around his mottled, paunchy body. Annabelle had tried to step out in front of it. She tried, I will give her that. She’d argued with him about something, probably the drinking but also the misery that came with it. The barrage of insults that began to whirl out of his mouth somewhere between drinks three and four, the things that happened when his jaw set and his eyes narrowed in porcine anger. But one night he flung her down into the wooden coffee table (an antique carefully collected and polished, presumably by rose, and used a foot rest by Chuck) and she broke her orbital socket. I watched it happen. I watched her crawl in her night gown to the bedroom they shared and locked the door. 

He stared at her. Then he’d realized I’d seen, and he fled. He grabbed the car keys and shouted something about how he was done with us both. I chased him, I don’t know why, I wanted him to leave. He peeled off in his sedan. I tried pulling my ancient beach cruiser out from behind the recycle bins that Chuck couldn’t be bothered to use - the thing had been wedged tight against the wall - but I pulled it with all my twelve-year-old strength until the thing came rattling on out and clipped me in the shin. The gear went all the way down to the bone. It shone white and it wasn’t bleeding. I hopped onto the bike and pedaled after Chuck - looking back I don’t know *why* - until I realized how ridiculous it was to think I could catch him or that he would care once I did. 

I went home and put the bike back in the garage behind the bins where it belonged. Then I sat outside the door to Rose’s room, the room Chuck had usurped, and I kept begging Annabelle not to kill herself. I don’t know why that’s where my kid brain went - she’d never given me any reason to assume she was depressed or suicidal in anyway. But for some reason I thought the coffee table incident might’ve done it, and the shame of it all might inspire her to take her own life. In reality, she was probably sitting just beyond the doors with a splitting headache hoping that I’d shut my mouth for a moment. I’m not sure, because she never said anything at all. I just woke up the next morning and there she was cooking eggs in the kitchen. Chuck was snoring on the couch with some empty shooters of banana-flavored vodka beside him. Annabelle’s face was ravaged with a black bruise that extended from her eye past her temple. She refused to look at me and knew better than to say anything. From that point on, we shared a goal of never making Chuck angry. But from that point on, she began to resent me for being another uncontrollable variable in her doomed campaign to make an impossible man happy. What he wanted most was a reason. The more we took them from him, the angrier he got. But when she realized she could start tattling on me, when she realized she could take some of the heat off herself and give it to me, she did. 

I suppose I can’t really blame her. I would’ve done anything myself to avoid Chucks wrath. Our household dynamics shifted to appease the unappeasable. I hadn’t gotten my first period yet, even, but in that way I’d already taken my first steps toward womanhood. The center of my universe became a man and his moods and the sole goal in my life became making him happy.