Open-minded

"You're different" he says from across the center console. The inside of his Tacoma is ripe with the soapy scent of cardboard pine.

I look out through the windshield as a stranger, an outsider looking in, searching for familiarity but finding that something has changed. Everything has changed.

"I love you" he says. And I realize that everything is me.

He is shaking his head in that tortured way like my dad used to. Like this is hurting them more than it hurts you. Like they don't make the rules they just follow them, live and die by them.

And then I am suddenly seven years old, lying beneath my pink checkered sheets, waiting for Dad to come home. I am listening to Mom pace. I am listening to my sister dreaming. I am straining to hear the gentle push of the door opening, the clicks of his leather boots as they make their way up the stairs. But I hear nothing. I don't remember falling asleep but I do, and when I wake up he is on the couch, smiling like he never left. And Mom is smiling, too, but it's a fragile thing, cracked a little on the corners.

"I love you, too" I say. And I wonder if I'm smiling my mom's smile. I wonder if he notices the cracks.
I don't think he does. And I don't think that he notices that I'm giving him only half. If he does, he doesn't show it.
After all, it's only fair.