Falling From Grace by S. L. Naeole

 
    “Was that why you changed my clothes, Dad?   To inspect the goods?   To see if I had been spoiled by my need to feel better about having my best friend betray me, my father saying that it’s hard to like me and that it was a good thing that he had hurt me?”   I stood up, my hands shaking from the intensity of the betrayal.   “I got this shirt from a friend .   While you may feel that people can’t like me, there’s one person who has proven you wrong.   He likes me, Dad. Genuinely likes me, and he helped me today when I was feeling like absolute crap .”
    I stared angrily at my dad, shocked and hurt that he could think I’d have sex with some stranger just to get over Graham.   “I didn’t have sex with him.   Unlike someone else in this family, I don’t need to do that in order to feel better.”
    I headed back towards the stairs when he shouted my name.   “GRACE ANNE SHELLEY, YOU STOP RIGHT THERE!!”
    Tempted to keep on walking, but understanding the consequences if I did, I stilled my feet, my eyes drifting to the rough edges of carpeting that butted up against the stairs.
    Heavy breathing and mumbled counting were all I heard for a few minutes.   Finally, he spoke — his voice much calmer…
    “I didn’t change you.   Janice did that.   She told me to let you sleep, that I could talk about this with you in the morning.”   The melancholy tone with which he spoke kept my eyes glued to the floor — I wasn’t willing to look into his face and see the same in his eyes.  
    “I told her this morning that you weren’t happy about her coming to live here.   With us.   She said she doesn’t want to move in if you don’t want her to, that she doesn’t want to be a part of this…life, if you don’t want her to be.   She doesn’t want to come between us, Grace.”
    I looked at Dad and choked on the words that I had prepared in my rebuttal.   His eyes were pleading — his face full of grim lines and a wan smile.
    I remembered that look.   He’d had the same expression when he first saw me in the hospital and, seeing that I was fine, had held onto some desperate hope that they had been wrong about Mom.   Was it that desperate that he be with Janice?   Was he that deeply in love with her that losing her was like her dying?
    I turned and sat down on the bottom step.   This was confusing me.   I hadn’t known that Dad’s feelings for Janice were so strong, so serious.   But didn’t he say he cared for her a lot this morning?   Yes.   He did.   Sex?   Sure, I knew they were having sex.   He never brought her over here for that, but he never lied to me about spending nights over at her place either.   I just didn’t know that it went beyond that.
    So here it was. He had finally found someone to fill that void that had been in his heart since Mom died.   And I couldn’t stand her.   I looked over to Dad, looking so small in his inner pain.   He was losing a future with a new love and another child.   And all because I didn’t like Janice and had an unreasonable fear that she was trying to replace my mom in his life.
    How selfish was I being?   Graham’s face was suddenly in my mind.   He had never tried to work on a compromise with Erica about me.   He just chose her.   I wasn’t even part of the equation anymore, and that had hurt me.   Never mind the fact that I loved him.   That didn’t even factor into this problem because he hadn’t known that when he ‘d made his decision; but if he had, he still would have chosen her over me.   I knew that much.  
    But Dad had made the same decision this morning, hadn’t he?   He had underestimated Janice though; she was the kink in the gears.   She had decided not to come between the two of us.   She had sacrificed security and love and who knows what else so that I could be happy, even though I hadn’t thought twice about her happiness, too consumed with what my mom would have thought about all of this.