Jovie & Bash

Eight || Splendiferous

|CHAPTER EIGHT|

The heart is a metaphor—but, you must know this already.

The literal heart is a muscle that harbors no emotion. It plugs along, pushing blood in an endless circuit around your body. It quits only when there is blockage, only when the brain cannot continue to order it otherwise.

Somehow, I think the literal heart is better at explaining love than the one you dot your i’s with.

Henry dropped me off at my mother’s house at the end of the weekend just like always, but there was something about this encounter that separates it from the rest.

When we pulled up in front of my mother’s house, he did not walk me to the door. It’s something he always did just so he could get a glimpse of my mother, to hear her monotonous tone of voice snap at him, to smell the orange of her perfume. This time, he put his vehicle in park and left it running. His seatbelt remained fastened.

I turned to him in surprise. “Aren’t you coming?”

His eyes were hard on the glass panels of the front door. A breath left his lungs heavily. “You’re capable of letting yourself in, aren’t you?”

I blinked once. “...Yes, but...”

I didn’t understand.

“I love you and I’ll see you next weekend.” He smiled softly at me, but the light didn’t quite reach his eyes.

When I arrived at his house that weekend, he asked the same question he always asked me when the door was safely shut between my mother and him.

“How’s Meredith?”

I replied the same way every weekend. “Nothing’s changed.”

Nothing’s changed.

Nothing had changed and nothing ever would. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but when reflecting upon it in the moments before I went to my front door—when I was seated beside my father with Johnny Cash singing in the silence between us—I realized the phrase had finally struck him.

The brain had stopped demanding that the heart continue to beat for it.

The naïve yearning I had always thought foolish in my father vanished right in front of me, and when I recognized it’s absence, I was angered. Angered and hurt. Empty and cold. Aching for a thread of hope I hadn’t realized I put so much faith in—even if it was just for comfort, even if it acted as a simple fairytale.

I vacated his car with the ring of a slamming door following me down the walk.

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My eyes were following the words across the page but not quite comprehending them when a knock on my bedroom door pulled me from my thoughts. Luis’s ears perked up, but he didn’t stir from my lap when the door slowly squeaked open.

“Just checking in,” her voice informed me bluntly.

I glanced up at my mother. We had always been so similar, even in looks. Since the day my features became distinguishable I had been told we looked identical. I guess it was another reason to align my goals with hers. Sometimes we appeared to be the same person. However, I couldn’t rationally explain the frustration I felt with her since this morning when Henry dropped me off, but it was a relentless pull and I couldn’t bear to look at her.

My eyes dropped to the floor.

“Jovie?” Her voice rose.

The questions that had been pestering me since morning escaped before I could grind them back. I never pried, never once had a conversation of depth with my mother. I treated her the way I saw others treat her—as if she wasn’t quite human, wasn’t quite approachable. It occurred to me then that I didn’t know the person I was becoming.