#burnedbridge

“Bummer.” Damon heaved a sigh. I was not sure if this was in response to my situation or the fact that his character had failed this level of the game for the fifth time tonight. He tossed the controller onto the carpet before heading into the kitchen.

I turned to watch his slim figure walk to the fridge and rested my chin on the back of the couch. The fabric felt soft and cool against my skin and I closed my eyes for a moment, pretending that I could set down my troubles as easily as I had my head. I had been so sure that she would take my side, but I should have known that my grandmother would love her son more than she loved me.

“Maybe you should just make up with your dad.” His reply came from inside the refrigerator. I had no idea what he thought he could find in there; we hadn’t been grocery shopping in weeks.

“I can’t do that,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to be real, just real enough that you can still talk to her.”

No matter how many times I have explained the situation to him, Damon has never understood. For the first five years of my life, my father didn’t want anything to do with me. The first time I met him was the summer before I started kindergarten. The only reason he asked me to join him at the summer camp in the hills of Wyoming was because his current love interest wanted to meet me. I don’t even know how she knew about me when I didn’t know about him.

The next time I saw my father was three years later when he married my current stepmother, Drucilla. In the meantime, I spent two weeks out of each summer with his mother. She asked me to call her Bubbe. She said it was the Jewish way of saying grandmother, but I knew it was because she didn’t like the fact that “grandmother” made her sound old. I loved her and her husband, my Papa, almost instantly. When my Papa died two years later, I was inconsolable for months. After his death, my visits to Bubbe’s home became shorter in length and further apart in time. By the time I was fourteen, they had stopped altogether.