Then the rules tightened.
No mentioning Mom at the table. No crying where he could see it. No asking when things would feel normal again.
“Your mother had dreams, too,” he said to me once when I was 12 and made the mistake of telling him I wanted to be a nurse someday. “Look where that got her.”
He said it the way you’d comment on the weather. Just a fact—like dying was something she’d done on purpose to inconvenience him.
I found out years later from my grandmother—in a sentence she started and then stopped, looking away—that my father had forbidden my mother from going back to school. Diane had wanted to finish her nursing degree. He said no. She stayed.
That was the first time I understood that silence in our family wasn’t peace. It was obedience.
My daily routine was simple, the way a cage is simple once you stop rattling the bars.
5:30 alarm. 5:45 downstairs, coffee started, eggs on the skillet for Gerald. I started calling him that in my head around 15, though never out loud. He liked his coffee black with exactly one sugar, and if I forgot the sugar he’d push the mug to the center of the table without a word and wait for me to fix it.
6:15 Tyler’s lunch packed, his backpack by the door. 6:30 Gerald’s lunch packed too, because apparently a 47-year-old man couldn’t manage a sandwich. 7:00 bus stop with Tyler. 7:40 school.
3:00 home. 3:15 dishes from the morning, laundry if it was Monday or Thursday, vacuuming if it was Wednesday. 5:30 start dinner. 6:00 serve. 6:45 clear the table, wash everything by hand because Gerald said the dishwasher was a waste of water.
8:00 homework. Finally, 9:30 or later, bed—if I was lucky.
He checked the fridge to make sure I’d shopped right. He checked my phone, a flip phone so old the hinge was held together with tape, to make sure I wasn’t wasting time. He didn’t allow extracurriculars—no clubs, no sports, no friends over.
“You’ve got responsibilities,” he’d say, like I was 40 with a mortgage instead of 17 with a geometry test.
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