”“How's my favorite young man?”“I'm good! What's this about you wanting both of us to come to see you?”“We miss you both, so we want you t... visit. To get our place ready, we have to ask both of you something.”Rose's nails were starting to hurt my arm where she had grabbed me.“We're still furnishing the house, so I need to know if you would need one bedroom or two.”We stared at each other, slack-jawed.“k**s,” Barbara said, “it's time you knew some things. Paul and I always hated hiding stuff. This was a fight about them, about her. And she was ripping mad at him. It was their first fight as a couple and she didn’t like it, not one bit. She didn’t care if she saw that man again, never would be too soon. She heard his car pull into the driveway and got even madder. How dare he come here, how dare he. ‘This is my house not his, mine!’ she was muttering to herself now. ‘The pain in the ass, now what does he want to fight about.’ She stood in the hallway and watched him come to the door,. “Dad, what is going on?”The fat alcoholic didn’t answer his Valarie. He didn’t have permission to talk.“Dad!” Valarie shouted again. She marched around me. “Why are you just sitting there, Daddy?” She tried to sound seductive, but that normal, sultry purr that she usually had was strangled by something else. I unnerved her. And Dad sitting there, not responding, had her more than frightened. He wasn’t passed out drunk like normal but awake, alert. “Daddy, what’s wrong? Why are you just sitting. ‘What got up your butt yesterday?’ Ayla asked Abby when she arrived back at the hospital. ‘You were so angry at dad and now that he’s sick, you’re back to trying to be miss goody-goody,’ Abby grumbled. ‘What the hell? Are you bipolar or something? You wanted me to patch things up with dad and now that I have, you’re pissed at me!’ Ayla exclaimed. ‘I just don’t want this reconciliation to be because he’s sick,’ Abby said with a sigh. ‘Abby, I love dad, I was just soo angry at him for what he.