She never ceases to amaze me, she just knows stuff even the things she’s not suppose to.

“Yeah, she is.” she just nods her head, drinking her beer slowly.

“Wow, okay then…what were you talking about earlier today?” she asks slowly, starting with simple things, just like way back when.

“She’s moving to San Francisco, she’s going to uh help manage the store.” She just keep’s nodding her head, my fingers creating a strange beat on my leg. “…Gabe came by today.”

“What! Well what did that stupid ass man whore want?” just hearing her say that makes it all easier, she could always make me laugh.

“he wanted to say sorry, to say that he’s there for me if I need it…to ask why I was in detox, and what happened.” just hearing it come from my lips, the word’s vibrating in my mouth as I say them. “Ha-ha he wanted to be my father…he wanted to say sorry.”

“Really? What did you say?” her face filled with shock, her eyes clouded with dislike and curiosity.

“I listened to him…I mean he is my father, I owe him that much. But…but it was bullshit, everything he said was bullshit.” the way he looked at his feet, his hand held out expecting me to run into his arms. “I wish I never met him.”

The last swig of beer, the bottle empty and I still see the disappointment in his eyes, the pain in hers. The bottle still in my hand, and I can feel her move around in her spot.

“Do you really think that if you never met him things would’ve been different?” the question left to suck all the oxygen from the room, to make my heart skip a beat and my lungs to stop working. “What would you have married Carmen? Would you have stayed in LA?”

She ask questions that only she can ask, and I can see in the way she glances around the room before she look’s at me that she doesn’t expect an answer. After a few minutes I can breathe, there is only one answer to her question, only one truth.

“I wasn’t going to run…I didn’t even think of it until I saw him in the bar. I just wanted to see her walk down in her white dress…to read those stupid fucking lame vows that we wrote half drunk the night before. I wanted to give her the fucking piece of paper for her to sign so we could get the house, so we could do all that shit…I was in it for the long haul.”