Family Ties

 

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Even though he was not my father, biologically, nor in my esteem of him, he had a habit of continuing to show up in my life, especially when I least expected and desired that he would, such as for example when Mommy first brought him home to meet me, and he just stood there grinning stupidly; or the time when I had been drinking a little and he decided to kidnap me, steal me from my social life and force me into rehab, despite me being totally in control of the situation; or the time when he drove all the way up to my girl’s lake house and interrupted our weekend away to tell me that Mommy had gone to join Daddy (this name being reserved for my real father, who unlike this fool had loved me very much) and having the guts to stand there in the driveway and cry, imagine a grown man crying over a dead woman he hadn’t known half as long as me, her son, and to do it right in front of me; or most notably the time he’d pleaded with me after I pulled a gun on my ‘brother’ (his son with Mommy), without even intending to kill my ‘brother’, but just to scare him into respecting me a little bit, damn it, but feeling so worked up at that point (I can’t recall which meds exactly I was on at that time, but I doubt they were working) that I pulled the trigger anyway, of course not really thinking too straight, as if this were my fault, and the moron just had to jump in front of my ‘brother’, though the unfortunate thing was that we were all standing so close that after going through his head the bullet still had enough velocity to hit my brother square in the face too, along with bits of skull and nervous tissue, though I doubt my ‘brother’ felt the latter because the bullet killed him too (I say unfortunate, because it was unfortunate with respect to everyone except perhaps Mommy, who got to have her whole family together again, besides me of course, though that might be taken care of pretty soon), and now as I sit here waiting (and my state-assigned lawyers don’t seem too optimistic about my chances of escaping the death penalty, which this God-forsaken state still has) and write this I can’t help but get agitated as I think about him and remember that stupid, stupid smile he wore the first time I saw him, and I’m told that I need to forgive myself but if you ask me he’s the one who needs forgiveness, not that he ever asked me for it or would have, he was too proud for that, and honestly I’m glad he didn’t because if he would have I probably would have killed him on the spot. I like to think that would have been my way of forgiving him. 

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