I still couldn’t deny the warmth between them, an energy so foreign to my father and his clients that it took me a moment to recognize what it was. When Riley called my mother “sweetheart,” the word sang, seamless and melodic. It was clear that they were trying to arrange themselves differently, to open the store of energy to include a third, but the apartment was still decidedly theirs. They had a shoeless policy, a series of abstract paintings in the hallway, a small cactus they called Speckles. And then there was my father: southbound, single, forsaken. I imagined that they were each privy to my movements in the new space: the way I didn’t fit for my mother and Riley; the way I shouldn’t fit for my father.
RUMPUS ORIGINAL FICTION: Summer Of Families by Scott Broker
Art by: Trisha Previte
