A family argument.
That phrase has covered a lot of harm in a lot of families.
I turned to my daughters.
“Girls, get your things.”
Alana did not ask where we were going. She simply moved beside me.
Rey tried again.
“Kyle, come on.”
I looked at him for a long second.
Then I smiled.
It was not a friendly smile.
“Since you brought up what a father does,” I said, “you may want to pay close attention to the next few weeks.”
We left.
The drive back to Steiner Ranch was quiet in the way a family gets quiet after something lands too close to the bone. Alexa stared out the window. Kesha rested her head against her sister’s shoulder. Alana folded her hands in her lap and looked straight ahead.
I drove south on 183 with both hands on the wheel.
The Austin skyline flickered in the distance, purple and gold beneath the evening sky, indifferent to the fact that my cheek still stung and my daughter had asked me twice in the first ten minutes whether we were a real family.
We got home.
I made chicken fajitas.
That may sound strange, but children need dinner even when adults have failed them. Maybe especially then.
At the kitchen table, Kesha ate with the exhausted appetite of a child who had cried too much. Alexa picked at her food. Alana watched both girls with a stillness that told me she was storing pain somewhere she would have to open later.
After the girls went to bed, Alana found me in the kitchen.
She leaned against the counter.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Kyle.”
I looked at her.
“I’m fine.”
She crossed the room and touched my cheek, softly, with two fingers.
“I should have said more,” she whispered.
“You did plenty.”
“No,” she said. “I have spent seventeen years letting you absorb things from my family because I thought it kept the peace. And today, it reached our daughters.”
I took her hand.
“I let it happen too.”
She shook her head, but not in denial. In grief.
For a minute, we just stood there.
Then I went to my office.
My home office overlooks the side yard. There is a framed drawing above my desk that Kesha made when she was six. Four stick figures holding hands under a giant orange sun. Daddy. Mommy. Alexa. Me.
I sat under that drawing and opened my laptop.