Tina murmured, “Casey, Casey, come on. . . please.”
Casey stared at her father. “I’m not spoiled. Neither is she,” Casey said, pointing to Tina. “I’m sick of hearing how bad I am when I’m not. You won the sweepstakes with kids like us. Why aren’t we good enough? Why aren’t we ever fucking good enough? Just fuck this. Fuck you.” She said this last part quietly.
Joseph folded his arms over his stomach in shock, unable to accept what she was saying.
“And why am I not good enough right now? Without doing another damn thing?” Casey’s voice broke, and now she was sobbing herself, not because he had hit her, but because she understood that she had always felt shortchanged by her father. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t tried.
Joseph took a breath and swung his fist, hitting her face so hard that Casey fell. Her eyeglasses ricocheted off the table and skittered across the floor. Tina hurried to pick them up. A nose pad was broken, and one of the sides had nearly snapped off. Casey grabbed the table for support, and the Formica table with its cheap metal legs toppled, and she slipped, falling amid the crash of bowls and dishes. A bright red flush spread over Casey’s right eye, adding color to the handprints shadowing her left cheek.
“Get up,” he said.
With her fingers splayed across the green linoleum, Casey pulled herself off the remaining dry patch of floor. Somehow she was standing in front of him again. Blood trickled inside her cut lip, the metal taste icing her tongue.
“You going to hit me again?” she asked, her tongue sweeping across her teeth.
Joseph shook his head. “Get out. Get your things and leave my house. I don’t know you,” he said, his speech formal. His arms hung limply against his body. Fighting was useless now. He’d failed as a father, and she’d died as someone to watch over. He left the kitchen, stepping across the broken pieces of a white ceramic water pitcher. From the living room, he turned around but refused to look at Casey. “I sent you to school. I did what I could. I’m done now, and I want you gone by morning. It makes me sick to look at you.”
Leah and the girls watched as he walked into his bedroom and closed the door. Casey sat down in her father’s empty chair. She stared up at the ceiling tiles, unconsciously counting them as she used to do at meals. Tina smoothed her hair in an effort to comfort herself and tried to regulate her breath. Leah sat still, her hands clutching the skirt of her dress. He had left the room; he’d never done that before. She believed that it would have been better if Joseph had stayed in the room and slapped Casey again.
2 CREDIT
THE CHILDHOOD BEDROOM Tina and Casey had shared until Casey went away to school was far smaller than any of her dorm rooms in Mathey College or Cuyler Hall. The girls’ bunk beds were pushed up against the length of the room, blocking a dirty window that could not be cleaned from inside. Above the laminated headboard of the top bunk where Casey slept hung a faded poster of Lynda Carter dressed as Wonder Woman, her arms akimbo. Within the framed space of the bottom bunk, Tina had taped up a free Yankees poster from Burger King that she’d gotten when she was in primary school. Barely eighteen inches from the bed were two mismatched plywood desks and a pair of white gooseneck lamps from Ohrbach’s. Above the desks, the girls had papered the walls with unframed certificates of excellence from their school years: Among their many awards, Casey had received recognition for photography, music, and social studies; Tina, for geometry, religion, physics, and BC calculus.
Casey didn’t notice the awards anymore, their curled edges stuck down with yellowing Scotch tape. Nor did she notice the uncomfortable scale of the room or its lack of natural light. In the first years of visits back from school, she’d compared the glorious working fireplace in her suite in Mathey, the wood-paneled classrooms, and the stained-glass windows with the Dacron blue pile carpet in her Elmhurst bedroom and the bulletproof glass in her apartment building lobby, and she decided that she could not afford to look too critically at what was home, because it hurt.
Following the fight with her father, Casey went to her bedroom for the sole purpose of retrieving her Marlboros, and as soon as she got them and a book of matches, she walked out the front door.
She hiked three flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator because there was no other way to get to the tar-paved roof. From memory, she keyed in the security code—4-1-7-4, the birth date of Etelda, the building superintendent’s only daughter. For years, Casey had helped Etelda with her schoolwork, then later tutored her for the SATs. In consideration, her father, Sandro, gave Casey free rein of the roof. When Etelda got a full scholarship to attend Bates College, Sandro bought a metal café table and two matching chairs from a hardware store in Paramus with his own money and left the gift along with a glass ashtray on the roof for its sole visitor.