Space by Emily Sue Harvey Read Free Book Online Page B

confused and disappointed. Also a bit defensive.
    What was to become of our family?
    And more critically, what was to become of Faith?

    Dan’s hands-off stance with Faith’s discipline continued. Oh, he showed her affection, but the old Daddy-Princess connection had slackened until the knot had slithered loose.
    To understand Dan would be to know his background. His childhood was riddled by alcoholism and abuse and abject poverty.
    â€œWe never knew if we’d have food,” he told me.

    From a family of seven kids, Dan knew what it was like to not have enough heat in the house during winter and to run out of food before being filled. He knew deprivation and what it was like to work odd jobs from the age of eleven and buying his own clothes.
    â€œNobody ever did anything for me from that time. I saved and bought my own cars. Dad even borrowed mine when he would wreck his during drunken rampages.”
    Dan’s was a heart-wrenching story of betrayal.
    â€œThe anger was the worst thing I had to deal with. Dad, when he was sober, was a fine man. But put alcohol into the mix and he was a nasty drunk. Mad at the world. Mama? She was his enabler.”
    Dan’s was a different perspective of life than mine.
    â€œI had a peaceful childhood in which I was validated every day of my life,” I told him one day during our porch rocking, intimate sharing time. “How lucky I was to know I was loved. I had a place where life itself was sacred. Revered. Peace reigned.”
    His next divulgence touched me profoundly.
    â€œIt was different in my family,” Dan said. “Kids ran wild everywhere I turned. I never had a space of my own,” he said. “So I found this little cubicle in the rafter of a new room being built on our house — one that remained unfinished for years — and I put all my little treasured things there so no one would bother them. It was mine, that space.”
    â€œWe just happened ,” Dan said. “Sex was for procreation. Period. Our walls were thin. When we heard the night noises, we knew. Soon another baby would arrive. And the food wouldn’t go as far. And the drunkenness would get worse. And the anger would be like a wildfire.”

    He looked at me then and smiled tenderly. “It took you to show me the difference between animal coupling and real love. Romance was just a word until I met you.”
    And that he had wanted a baby as much as I had still amazed me because I knew Dan’s early life deficits. He’d come so far during our marriage. That man of the past had disappeared behind our pitch perfect family harmony in the first years of our marriage.
    â€œI want to make life beautiful for Faith. To give her the happiness that I never had,” he declared over and over through her early years.
    More recently, however, after that disastrous Christmas day at Lexie’s, I saw the struggle as Faith pushed her father more and more to the limits. Dan bought her a white 280Z and she was ecstatic. She and Jensen were proud of their near identical cars.
    Dave and I felt that, despite her lapses, our daughter was equipped for a life of happiness and success.

    Success to Faith, we soon found out, did not include college.
    Though we’d hoped for her a degree and her choice of career, she’d long ago grown bored with book learning. With her fancy car for mobility, she’d secretly dropped out of school in her senior year, using her daily food and gas allowance to hang out with friends.
    By the time we discovered her truancy, she’d been expelled for her absences.
    Broken-hearted, we tried to look at the bright side of things. During those hooky days, Faith met twenty-fouryear-old Jack Kenyon, who, we discovered, was a nice man who loved her and wanted to marry her.

    Not exactly our dream for her but, at least, it offered a solution to her finding safe haven. Maybe our prayers were being answered after all.
    Now a beautiful