Cordell has never felt smaller than when his daddy stopped him outside the house by the sleeve of his shirt. A sharp tug, claws catching on fabric that took him right back to an old book of fairy tales that still lived somewhere in his childhood bedroom.
He hadn’t wanted to leave like that. If everything hadn’t gone wrong like it did, if he was able to look his children in the face without seeing flashes of a ghost, he wouldn’t have gone at all. But he was only good in a crisis so long as his head wasn’t below the surface, and by God he was drowning after Emily.
“So, you wanna talk about it?”
Cordell was unsettled even before he turned to face his father.
“Not yet,” he said carefully, hoping he wouldn’t need to turn onto his belly to keep from bruising his daddy’s ego.
“You ran on out when they needed you most,” his voice was like poison dripping into Cordell’s ear, “couldn’t put yourself second to look after them after they lost their mother.”
He stared his father in the face, held a steely cold eye contact that he could tell was winning him no favors. “I listened to her die. I had no idea what to do, I just needed to get out of Austin for a while.”
“I, I, I, you couldn’t even take a second to think about what it’d do to them, you running off like some flighty teen.”
His pulse thumped in his ears and he gripped at his sleeves.
“I called as often as I could,” he lied; a futile attempt to end this before they were in a screaming match right in front of the family.
He shook his head at Cordell, his own gaze turning cold as he rejected that answer. When their talks got like this, there wasn’t an answer in the world Cordell could give that’d satisfy his father.
“You could’ve meant to come up and see ‘em every day and it wouldn’t’ve changed the fact that you never did. Missed their birthdays, missed Stella’s games, practically missed an entire year of their lives all because you couldn’t get yourself together.” He hardened his features, and Cordell knew he was really in trouble. “What kind of father does that? Tell me.”
Cordell was standing in the middle of a bear trap, his feet on either side of the trigger. He shook his head once and took a rattling breath.
“A bad one. A bad father.”
His daddy was starting to mellow, convinced that he was getting through to his son; but he still had more to say.
“Remember when you were a kid? You must’ve thought I was the devil the way you’d scream and cry after an ass whooping. Only meant to be a good father—prepare you for the world. Guess in the end I didn’t.”
Cordell bit his tongue. His jaw tensed and he looked down at his feet. His words felt like a monotonous, hypocritical drumbeat, and soon he was tuning out the majority of them as he began to repeat himself: telling Cordell off for being a terrible father, for not knowing how to cope with his grief, for not sitting down and shutting up when he was supposed to. He still remembered the feeling of trying to sit still at school with welts on his ass and only getting irritated looks from his teachers that he wasn’t strong enough to endure in silence. Now, nearly 40, he’d had more than enough practice.
“You need to sort yourself out,” he emphasized those words like some kind of plea, though Cordell saw right through it. Didn’t mean that he wasn’t frozen in place, scared shitless just like he was as a kid.
“Seems to me like everyone wants you to help yourself but you can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps and do it. I didn’t raise you to be like that, Cordell, and it kills me watching you refuse to help yourself.”
He finally let go, moseying over to the pen and allowing Cordell to walk away.
He hadn’t anticipated that coming home would leave him feeling so empty, and he entered the house quietly so as not to alert anyone of his presence. Cordell needed a minute away from justified anger, a minute to process his daddy's words that were burning into him like a hot iron. One day home and he was already feeling like he’d worn out his welcome.