Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? Read Online Free PDF Page B

her father was.
    Summer, where’s your dad?
    He’s in California.
    When’s he coming back?
    Never.
    Why?
    He’s not i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-e-d.
    Eloise, where’s your dad?
    I don’t know.
    Why don’t you know?
    I never had an answer to that, so in elementary school I started making things up. He’s in Alaska, working on the pipeline. He’s climbing Mount Everest (that one was my favorite). He’s in China, Switzerland, France, California on business.
    The two things I never said was that he was dead or that he took off. I didn’t want either to be true.
    I picked up a fistful of sand and clenched it. “I haven’t seen my father since I was five and I haven’t spoken to my brother in over a year,” I blurted out.
    Three pairs of eyes were staring at me.
    “Oh, honey,” Amanda said, sitting down next to me on the rim of the sandbox. “I didn’t know about your father. You never talk about him.”
    “Now we understand why,” Jane said, squeezing my hand. “I’m so sorry, El.”
    I shrugged, not knowing what to say, how to respond. It wasn’t as though I could say, It’s okay. Something like that wasn’t okay and never would be. Not when it happened and not now.
    I haven’t seen my father since I was five, but it’s okay.
    Could you imagine a more ridiculous statement?
    “I just don’t understand it,” Natasha said, her eyes on Summer. “I’ll never understand it. How does someone leave his own child?”
    I shrugged again. “It’s too bad the two people who could explain it are MIA.”
    “I doubt Summer’s dad or yours could explain it either,” Jane said. “What answer is there for that question? It’s not about not loving the child.”
    How did she know? Maybe it was.
    “I love you, Elly-Belly,” my father had said often.
    So was he lying, or is there no answer for why fathers are able to leave their children and never see them again?
    “Your father loves you, Eloise,” my mother had said many times. “I’m sure he’ll always love you. But he’s not the sticking-around kind. It isn’t about you or your brother or even me. It’s about him. Something in him.”
    “Yeah, it’s called not loving me or Emmett.”
    “No, Eloise. Something might be lacking in him, but it isn’t loving you or your brother. I know it’s hard to understand now, but it’ll get easier when you’ve been through some stuff yourself.”
    Well, I’d been through some stuff myself. And understanding why my father left—left as though he’d never known us at all—hadn’t gotten easier.
    Natasha handed Summer her sippy cup of juice. “Eloise, I didn’t even know you had a brother.”
    “We’ve been on the outs for the past year,” I explained, and then burst into tears.
    “El, I’m so sorry,” Jane said.
    Amanda and Natasha nodded sympathetically.
    I hadn’t even told Jane, whom I usually told everything, about the last time I spoke to Emmett. A year ago, when my grandmother was in the hospital recovering from a stroke, Jane (who’d come every single day bearing fortifying treats for me, like bottles of Coca-Cola and M&Ms), had asked why Emmett hadn’t visited.
    “Because he’s a self-absorbed jerk asshole,” I’d screamed like a lunatic.
    And for the millionth time in our friendship, which was probably the only thing in the world besides my grandmother that I couldn’t live without, Jane had slung an arm around my slumped shoulders and off we’d gone to St. Monica’s Church to light candles for our losses, our monthly ritual despite the fact that neither of us was Catholic. Jane’s father died from a brain aneurysm when she was nine, and her mother died from ovarian cancer, as mine did, when she was nineteen. She understood.
    During some of those candle-lightings, when I’d been there more for Jane than myself, I would wonder which was worse: a dead father or a deadbeat father. A father who was taken from you by the fates of the universe, or a father who was taken from you by his own free