Control

But then there had been the constant phone calls. Him paying our bill at the restaurant. I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that that was Robert’s way to check and see if I was actually there…

Maybe I was overreacting.

“Or maybe I’m not,” I whispered. It wasn’t the first time he had done something to subtly—or not so subtly—convince me to change my mind about something.

Like the time a year ago when my father had invited me to Texas for a visit. After my mother took me away when I was fourteen, I didn’t see my dad for four years. There were no cell phones back then, so no easy way for me to sneak a call to him without my mother finding out. But I’d called my father collect from a payphone on my first day at my new school. I’d been relieved to reach him, and quickly told him where I was so that he could come and get me. I’d been stunned to learn that he already knew where I was. My mother had called him days after we’d arrived in Philadelphia. I didn’t understand why he hadn’t come for me, but he explained that he’d wanted to do exactly that, that he’d contacted the authorities to try and find me. But my mother had convinced him that she was in a better position to take care of me. My father worked long hours as a janitor at two different office buildings and didn’t make a ton of money. Who would see me off to school in the morning, or make dinner for me when he worked late? He also explained that while his desire was to fight for custody of me, he knew that the courts favored the mothers the majority of the time. Besides, going to court would cost money—money he didn’t have. He promised we would stay in touch via phone calls and hopefully visits when the opportunity arose.

I’d had to accept what he’d told me—I didn’t have any other choice. But I secretly believed that he hadn’t pushed the issue of custody because he didn’t want to fall out of favor with my mother. That after everything she had done to hurt him, he still hoped she would come back to him one day.

Their relationship may have been dysfunctional, but he’d loved her.

True to his word, my father and I did stay in touch. We talked on the phone about once a week in the beginning, then tapered off to about once a month. When I was eighteen and legally an adult, I borrowed money from a friend to go see my dad. I thought maybe I could live with him. But a week into the visit, I knew it wasn’t going to work out.

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