Chapter 15: The Long Sigh

Birdie's POV

Cal told me my father wanted me in the coal cellar, and then he went and stood in the kitchen with his back to the door.

I went down the narrow steps behind the pantry, where I had been going every night for a year.

The bare bulb was lit. Dad was sitting on an upturned bucket beside my heavy bag, with his windbreaker still on.

"Sit," he said.

There was a second bucket. I sat.

"You can stop the grunt," Dad said.

"What grunt?"

"The one you do at the bottles. It's a good grunt. I've heard it fifty times, and I've never once believed it."

I looked at the floor.

"Cal told you," I said.

"Cal told me this morning what I've known since last January."

"Since last January?"

He rubbed the back of his neck. "I stood on those stairs and watched you for an hour."

"I never saw you."

"No. Then I went up and didn't sleep."

I had never been so angry in my life.

It started in my stomach and went up to my ears. I sat very still and let it.

"You let me be the joke," I said.

"I did."

"For eight years. At every dinner. At the press table, with forty reporters, and the bottle, and a woman filming me for the internet."

"I know."

"You gave me the Short Sigh. You gave it to me every day, Dad. I have a whole file of them."

"I know you do." He didn't look away. "That's what I want to talk about."

"Then talk."

He took a long time, and I let him.

"When you were seventeen, you put your brother on the mat in front of eighty people," Dad said. "I said, Don't do that to your brother again."