Such a Pretty Girl 
MTV Books
ISBN 1416521836


     The passenger door opens.
     One sneakered foot is planted on the driveway. The other joins it.
     The Nikes are blindingly new. Size twelve.
     My mother has been shopping for him.
     The jeans are also new. If I allow my gaze to travel higher -- which I won't -- I'll see the solid gold baseball charm on a chain that my mother gave him for his eighteenth birthday nestled in his coarse, whorled chest hair.
     My front teeth throb as the memory of the charm bangs against them.
     "Hello, Meredith."
     The voice is quiet, kind, hoarse with history...and it destroys me. A sick, writhing knot of old love and despair lays me open worse than the first time and the force of it almost takes me down. I lock my knees, trying not to sway. This was not supposed to happen. I spent years steeling myself, reliving every rotten moment over and over again to make myself immune, hiding from nothing so there would be nothing hidden left to cripple me, and I thought I'd made it but now, with one simple greeting, I've already lost.
     "No, Daddy, no. Don't."
     "Meredith," he says again, soft and almost pleading, a voice I know, a voice that sends the nausea churning in my stomach straight up into my throat.
     I swallow hard and lift my chin in reply. It's all I can manage and more than he deserves.
     "Well." My mother plants her hands on her hips, peevish. "Is that the best welcome you can come up with? Why don't you come over here and give your father a hug?"
     Hug him? Touch him? How can she even suggest it?
     "It's okay. Don't push her, Sharon." He slams the passenger door and stretches, glances around the ominously silent court. Blinds twitch and a shade goes down, but he doesn't seem to notice. "Nice place. Peaceful. We have the rest of our lives to get reacquainted. Right, Chirp?"
     My head jerks up, the curtain parts, and for one piercing moment the predator and the prey lock gazes.