beauty of being two. You get older, you don't forget tears as easily.
You made me cry plenty of them."
"You don't get through parenthood without causing some tears."
"But some people can get through it without ever knowing the child they
raised. You never looked at me and saw what I was."
Pete wished he was standing. He wished he had shoes on his feet. A man
was at a distinct disadvantage when he was kicked back in a recliner
without his damn shoes on. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Or maybe you did--maybe I'm wrong about that. You looked, you saw, and
you put it aside because it didn't fit in with what you wanted. You
knew," she continued in a low voice that nonetheless snapped with fury.
"You knew I wanted to be a dancer. You knew I dreamed of it, and you let
me go right on. Oh, taking the lessons was fine with you. Maybe you
grumbled about the cost of them from time to time, but you paid for
them."
"And a pretty penny it came to over all those years."
"For what, Daddy?"
He blinked. No one had called him Daddy in nearly three years and it
pinched at his heart. "Because you were set on having them."
"What was the point if you were never going to believe in me, never
going to let go enough or stand by enough to let me try to take the next
step?"
"This is old business, Grace. You were too young to go to New York, and
it was just foolishness."
"I was young, but not too young. And if it was foolishness, it was my
foolishness. I'll never know if I was good enough. I'll never know if I
could have made that dream real, because when I asked you to help me
reach for it, you told me I was too old for nonsense. Too old for
nonsense," she repeated, "but too young to be trusted."
"I did trust you." He jerked his chair up. "And look what happened."
"Yes, look what happened. I got myself pregnant. Isn't that how you put
it at the time? Like it was something I managed all by myself just to
annoy you."
"Jack Casey was no damn good. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on
him."
"So you said, over and over again until he took on the gleam of
forbidden fruit and I couldn't resist sampling it."
Now Pete's eyes flashed and he rose out of the chair. "You're blaming me
for getting yourself in trouble?"
"No, I'm to blame if there has to be blame. And I won't make excuses.
But I'll tell you this--he wasn't nearly as bad as you made him out to
be."
"Left you high and dry, didn't he?"
"So did you, Daddy."
His hand shot up, shocking both of them. It didn't connect, and it
trembled as he lowered it. He'd never done more than paddle her bottom
when she was a toddler, and even then he'd suffered more than she had
because of it.
"If you'd hit me," she said, struggling to keep her voice low and even,
"it would be the first real feeling you've shown me since I came to you