Dad, No One Will Laugh at You Anymore chapter 06
Those whispers drifted into Dad’s ears, but he did not snap back the way he always had before. He sat with his head down, both hands pressed over his face, his shoulders shaking.
The thing he feared most in his life was being laughed at and being talked about behind his back. He had become exactly that. He was the man everyone whispered about, the father whose obsession with appearances had cost him his son.
It was probably the cruelest punishment he could have received, being destroyed by the very thing he cared about
most.
Brady sat in a corner and gripped the hem of his shirt with both hands. Tears streamed down his face in silence. Uncle Ray sat beside him, sighed, and did not scold him. He patted the boy’s back gently.
I knew Uncle Ray understood. If Brady had not made that accusation, I might never have been pushed this far. But it was too late now. Blame would not change anything.
Dad stayed at Uncle Ray’s house for a long time, until the sky began to lighten. He rose slowly and walked toward the door. His steps were faint and unsteady, as though he might collapse at any moment.
I followed him home, back to the house where I had spent my entire life.
He walked to my room and pushed the door open. My backpack sat by the desk. My textbooks were stacked neatly. The blanket on my bed was folded into a perfect square.
Everything was exactly the way I had left it.
He sat on my bed, picked up my pillow, and held it against his chest. It still smelled like me.
He buried his face in it and cried harder than before.
“Kellen, will you please come back? Dad won’t pressure you anymore. I’ll never say ‘don’t embarrass me’ again. I’ll never say ‘laughed at’ again.”
“Whatever you want to do, Dad will let you. Just please come back.”
I floated in the room and watched him. An ache spread through me, but no tears came. Once you were gone, even crying was something you could no longer do.
I thought about when I was little, when Dad was still different. Back then, he carved small wooden toy guns for me with a smile on his face. He picked out the best pieces of pot roast and placed them in my bowl. When I fell, he scooped me up and blew on the scrape while he told me it was fine.
The house was warm back then. There were no accusations, no walking on eggshells, and no constant terror of being laughed at.
Everything changed after Mom died. Her parents blamed him, said he had brought bad luck and that it had killed her. The relatives whispered behind his back and waited for him to fail. The neighbors watched us with pity and suspicion.
He was a man raising a child alone and swallowed humiliation after humiliation. He learned firsthand how quickly people turned cold. He became hypersensitive, rigid, and consumed by the idea that appearances were everything. “Not being laughed at” became the only goal that mattered to him.
He believed that if he was harder on me and stricter with me, if he turned me into a well-behaved and obedient son, it would silence everyone. No one would have anything left to laugh about.
Yet it never occurred to him that his obsession had become a blade aimed at me. It cut into me again and again and sliced me apart piece by piece until I had nowhere left to go.
What he called “for my own good” had never been about me at all. It had always been about him and whatever was left of his dignity.
Over the next few days, Dad became a different person. He stopped grooming himself. His hair was tangled, and he wore the same clothes day after day. He sat in my room and stared at my things while he called my name again and again.
He did not eat. He did not drink. His body wasted away so quickly that his eyes sank into their sockets and the color drained from his skin. In a few days, he looked as though he had aged a decade.
The relatives came to check on him. They urged him to eat and told him he needed to grieve and move on, but none of it reached him. He kept repeating that I would come back and that I was only angry.
Uncle Ray sighed. “You need to face this. He is gone. If you keep going like this, you are going to destroy yourself”
Dad shook his head. His empty gaze stayed fixed on nothing. “He will come back. He would not leave me.”
I knew what was happening. He was trapped inside his own delusion and refused to wake up. It was not that he could not accept that I was gone.
