I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
He has been unfair to her in allowing her to think he means anything at all, he knows.
He is undeserving of whatever she feels for him that could very well qualify as love.
She should not feel any inclination to look at him that way.
But he remembers the way she’d insisted she was capable of deciding for herself who she should miss, who she should care about. Why hadn’t he fought her harder on that? Why hadn’t he gone then? Because her stomach had been swollen with his child, perhaps. Because he felt something that could be called love, too? He doesn’t know but he cannot find it in himself to resent the way she’s looking at him now. A stark contrast to the way their daughter is looking at him, those bright green eyes brimming with a loathing only the two of them – Bethlehem and his daughter – know he deserves.
The child stares at him as fiercely as she can, willing him to go. This plain, ugly thing. She wants him to take those eyes – so steady and so patient – and take them back into the darkness from whence he came. She wants to be alone with her mother, just the two of them like it’s always been.
She hates the silk of his voice, wishes he was darker. Meaner. Like her. She hates the way he looks at her mother and says, “where else would I be?” And there is something in his smile that she does not understand. Something that makes her hiss and spit and shake her little head. He looks at her then and the smile shifts into something different. “You’re just like your mother, aren’t you?” he asks her and she hisses again.
“Such a lucky thing, you,” he says and she wants to lunge for him again. She wants to sink her teeth into the vulnerable underside of his throat. She wants to sate the vicious hunger. “Gospel,” he says and something shifts in her so that she has to turn and press her face into the heat behind her mother’s elbow, hating him and the cold and the hunger.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
