I was sixteen when my mom told me I was moving into the sunroom.
Her fiancé, Rick, had moved in that spring. His daughter, Brianna, was nineteen and seven months pregnant, and her boyfriend had just left. My mom said she needed “a real room” with a door, for the baby. My room.
The sunroom is the back porch with windows. It has no door, no closet and no heat after October. My mom bought me a folding screen from a garage sale and called it “basically a wall.” Everyone who walked to the kitchen walked past my bed.
I didn’t argue. I’d learned not to. My mom always said I was “difficult,” just like my father. She’d been saying it since I was six, when he left.
At least, that’s what she’d always told me. That he left. That he moved two states away and started a new life and didn’t want to be bothered with me. Every birthday, there was a card from him, with a check, and nothing else. I’d stopped opening them when I was twelve.
In November, I got the flu. I was lying in the sunroom under three blankets, shaking, at two in the morning, and Rick walked past my bed to get a beer and didn’t even look at me. I picked up my phone and, for the first time in my life, I looked up my dad’s number. It was on the back of the last birthday card.
I texted him. “This is Abby. I’m sick and I sleep in a room with no door and I don’t know who else to ask.”
He called me back in thirty seconds. He was crying before I said hello.
He drove nine hours that night. He was in our driveway by noon. My mom opened the door and went white. She told him he had no right to show up unannounced. He said, very calmly, “I’ve been asking to show up for ten years, Karen.”
Then he sat down with me at a diner, ordered me soup and slid his phone across the table.
It was a text thread between him and my mom. It went back ten years. He scrolled to the beginning and let me read.
“Can I take Abby for the summer?” “She doesn’t want to go.”
“I’d like to call her on her birthday.” “She asked me to tell you not to.”
“I’ll fly in for her school play.” “She says it’ll make her nervous. Please don’t.”
“Is she getting my letters?” “She throws them away.”
“Please, Karen. I just want to talk to my daughter.” “She told me she hates you. Stop making this about you.”
Hundreds of them. Every few weeks for ten years. He’d asked to see me every single summer. He’d asked to call on every birthday. He’d paid child support every month, and more than he owed. Every time, she’d told him I said no.
And every time, she’d told me he didn’t want me.
I read the whole thing. It took me an hour. My soup went cold. My dad didn’t say anything the entire time. When I looked up, he said, “I should have just shown up. I’m so sorry. I believed her because I thought if I pushed, I’d lose you completely.”
“You didn’t lose me,” I said. “She just hid me.”
My dad hired a lawyer that week. With the texts, it wasn’t complicated. The court asked me where I wanted to live. I said with my dad. I moved nine hours away in January, into a bedroom with a door, a window seat and a lock I’d never once needed to use.
The thing that surprised me most was Brianna. The night before I left, she knocked on the folding screen, holding her newborn son, and sat on the end of my bed. She said she’d had no idea. She said my mom had told her I’d “offered” my room. She cried and apologized. We still text. Her son just learned to walk.
My mom calls sometimes. I answer when I want to. She hasn’t apologized. My dad says she might never. I’ve decided that’s her room to live in, not mine.
Last month was my seventeenth birthday. For the first time in my life, my dad was there. He made pancakes that were burnt on one side and raw on the other. Then he handed me a box.
Inside were ten years of birthday letters. He’d written a second copy of every single one, just in case. I’m reading one a week. I’m on age nine. He wanted to teach me to fish.
We’re going in the spring.
