This is a work of semi-autobiography and therefore should be considered fiction. Names and events have been altered. "Seven Years Bad Luck" is an ongoing series. This is part thirteen.

Previous | Beginning

To write about someone you know intimately, a family member or friend or sweetheart, and have someone else know them close to the way you know them is impossible. History and memory, the way you’ve understood and misunderstood someone over time can’t be replicated. It’s another failing of words.

I say this to make clear that the way I understand the fight with my dad might be different from the way others think of it. For one, my dad never swears. Not with his kids. I’ve overheard conversations my dad had with our uncles and was completely shocked by the copious profanity. In front of us, we barely hear a word of it. However, a certain degree of name-calling is common. So the ‘bitch,’ while being a step up from the usual, was memorable but didn’t have much of an impact.

Neither did the shouting. I always thought of my dad as having a bark much worse than his bite. His loud rants are common and we’ve all grown a little tone-deaf. I actually have the dubious honor of having been able to out-shout him on one or two occasions. I’m pretty sure Alabama and Georgia overheard those fights.

It was the getting more upset and then the, what looked to me like vicious, denial of my concerned distress that did it. When I left my dad’s place on Christmas Day, I went to my mother’s house and stayed moodily in my room. My mom came up to the second floor and knocked on my door later to tell me that my brother had taken our dad to the hospital.

“It sounds like he managed to convince him to go a little after you left,” my mother tells me kindly. “I’m glad someone did, that infection was pretty serious. Luckily it’s all taken care of.”

The news doesn’t make me feel better. Why had my brother been able to convince him, and it sounds like so easily? Matthew probably only asked a couple times with that nervous uneasiness in his tone that I could hear, and me working myself up to distress had done nothing. I feel like dad had shrugged me off because I was just his hysterical daughter. Never mind that I was the one to notice the problem.

I close the door and go back to my book.

My dad stayed the weekend in the hospital, but I didn’t know that. I had recognized the blood poisoning because I had recently read a novel that had mentioned the same symptoms -- red lines crawling up an arm -- and I could tell by the tone of the words that it was a serious condition. I didn’t know it required a hospital stay. After staying away from my dad’s house for a couple days because I was still kind of upset, my mother climbed the stairs again to talk to me.

“I heard that you didn’t visit your dad while he was in the hospital. Is it because you’re still mad at him?” I look down and mumble a kind of affirmative, because I am still angry. But that wasn’t why I didn’t visit. Just no one had thought to mention to me that he was staying there. Maybe they thought I already knew.

I went back over when dad came back. Matthew and Jacquie had left to go back to their schools. The twelve days after Christmas were over, so my dad took down and put away the decorations and packed up our plastic tree.

This was how the last Christmas I spent with him went, with the traditional Christmas Eve shopping and all.