You're Still the One by Janet Dailey, Elizabeth Bass, Cathy Lamb, Mary Carter Page A

look like your damn mother! You got the same golden eyes, same brown hair. She kept secrets. What kind of secrets are you hiding from me? Sixteen years old and you think you know everything?” He towered over me, chest puffed out.
    I assured him, shaking, that I didn’t.
    “You think you’re better than me?” With one fell swoop he dumped my homework off the table.
    I assured him I didn’t, feeling nauseous.
    He threw a coffee mug and it shattered the window. I remember my stomach sinking. The window was right above the bench that I slept on. It was winter. I would freeze.
    “I thought you had a job, but maybe a man’s giving you money.”
    I told him there was no man. I didn’t tell him my clothes were bought used, for quarters, because my knees started to knock.
    “Don’t be smart with me, apple-core face.”
    He was huge, a thundering monster. He picked up apples that I’d taken from the orchard for dinner that night and smashed them together in his beefy hands. “Guess you lost dinner, Allie.” He pelted an apple through the shattered window, then the next apple. He pointed to the floor, then swayed. He reeked of alcohol. “Pick that mess up.”
    I grabbed paper towels and picked up the smashed apples off the floor, my hands trembling, my mind rebelling, hating him.
    “Wipe my boots.”
    I wiped off his boots. Black misery wrapped around me tight.
    He smashed two more apples when I was on my knees. The apple pieces got in my hair. I started to cry.
    “Clean those up, too, and quit crying, you baby. Your mom used to cry, too.”
    I waited for him to backhand me. That’s how he really showed me I was nothing.
    I cleaned everything up, my stomach growling. It was dark. I didn’t want to go back to the orchard that night, but I was starving.
    I threw out the paper towels and apple pieces, his mean stare glaring right through me. “Tell me about your mother’s boyfriends.”
    I sagged, completely defeated. I hated this topic. My mother didn’t have a boyfriend when she was married to my dad. I was with her all the time. I remembered no man. She didn’t even have a boyfriend in Montana. She had me. I had her. Like she said, I had a man and that was a nightmare. No more men for me .
    My dad bullied me, his face an inch from mine, his hand up in the air, ready to strike if I denied she had a boyfriend, ready to strike if I lied and said she did have a boyfriend. It was at that second that I finally brought my chin up, defeated but not dead, and said, my voice strong, “I hate you.”
    Those three words stopped him. His open palm froze in the air, his eyes widened, and the color drained from his flushed face, red with broken blood vessels.
    “I hate you, Ben.” I didn’t call him Dad. He wasn’t a dad. He was a monster.
    Something flashed in those narrowed eyes—hurt, anguish, I don’t know, but he lowered his hand, he bent his bull-sized head, and his heavy shoulders dipped.
    He swore softly, then said, his voice breaking, “Your mother hated me, too.”
    He turned and I saw him wipe his cheeks before he lumbered back to his bedroom and shut the door.
    That night I scrambled out to the orchard and picked six apples and ate them. I was scared by a raccoon and a distant gunshot. I thought I heard someone else running through the orchard, gasping, as if he was being chased. The night was black except for a moon that kept hiding behind the clouds. It started to rain and I was soaked, hungry, and freezing.
    I sat against a tree trunk, scared of the shadows and creepy noises, rain dripping off my face. But it was there, under the leaves of the apple tree, that I knew I was done. The unknowns in the apple orchard were less scary to me than the knowns of being in the trailer with my dad. I could not live like that anymore. I thought of my mother and her love and her hugs, how we made apple pies together, along with peach, blackberry, rhubarb, lemon meringue, and dark chocolate pies with whipped cream. She