“Sure, you can come in,” Royce said to his daughter. “It’s been too long since we’ve had a chance to sit down and talk.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said as he stepped back and she came through the door. “I’m sorry it’s been so long, but . . . I’m just sorry.”

Royce had been expecting her to show up here sooner or later, but this was sooner than he expected. There were things that Royce knew he wanted to say to her, but he knew he didn’t want to hit her with them right up front. “Can I get you something?” he asked as she came in as if she had never been there before. It really had been a long time since she’d been inside.

“Yeah, a drink, I guess. Not whiskey, I’ve had too much of it the last couple of days.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” he told her. “There’s no alcohol in the house. I’ve got juice, soft drinks, things like that.”

“You don’t drink?”

“No,” he shook his head sadly. “Not since, well, not since I found your mother in bed with Milt back when you were a little girl. I always figured that if I took the first drink to kill the pain it would be too easy to take the next one and the next one after that, and I wouldn’t be able to stop. So I never started.”

“God, she really hurt you, didn’t she?”

“More than you can ever realize,” he sighed. “Mostly because she took you away from me when she left. I’ve missed you, Petra.”

“Dad, I, uh, I guess I didn’t realize . . . you always seemed to be in such a good mood when I saw you.”

“I tried to be,” he shrugged. “I didn’t think it was fair for me to dump my loneliness on you. I wanted what little time we had together to be happy times. I didn’t want you to see how bad I was hurting inside the rest of the time.”

“I . . . I guess I didn’t realize that.” She paused for a moment, then went on, “Mom always said you didn’t really care for me, that you were just seeing me to get her mad or something. Even when you bought my car and paid for my college she said you were just trying to buy my affection.”

“Petra, look around this room and tell me how much I missed you,” he said softly as he settled down next to her on the other end of the couch.

Petra looked up and saw something she hadn’t noticed when she walked in: a large blown-up photo of her taken back when she had been about ten. Not a portrait, but a snapshot taken when they’d been at a beach on the ocean. It was taken mostly from the back; she was wearing a little girl’s pink bikini, and there was a hint of a ruffle on her bra. In the photo she was running joyfully into the surf, leaping high over a wave; one foot was just barely off the ground, and a spray of water and sand was flung off of it. Her wet hair was hanging behind her, and she seemed full of the pure joy of the experience. She remembered the day well, but had never seen the photo before.

To have that photo in such a prominent place in the living room told her how much he had really cared, how well he remembered those days and how much he missed them.

There were other photos, not as large. In one of them she was in her prom dress, on the arm of the guy who had taken her to the prom back when she had been in high school. She looked happy and proud. Another photo had been taken of her at her high school graduation in her cap and gown, holding her diploma. There were others, not many. There was even one taken at her college graduation a month ago!

“I never knew,” she shook her head. “I never saw any of those. Where did you get them?”

“I took the beach photo. It may be my favorite photo of you, since it was taken back when I thought we would have a future together. The mother of a classmate of yours took a couple of the others. She works at one of the stores, and gave them to me. Another friend had a daughter graduating with you, and he was thoughtful enough to pass it along to me. It’s only been up a few days. I couldn’t enjoy any of those experiences directly, but at least I can look at the pictures.”

“Please tell me you don’t have one of my so-called wedding,” she replied, with more than a bit of anger evident through her sadness.

“No, I don’t, and I wouldn’t put it up on the wall if I did. I don’t want to remember that, and I don’t think you do, either.”

“Dad, I never knew. I guess I listened to Mom too much.”

“Back a long time ago there was a man who said something to the effect of ‘when you tell a lie that’s big enough and you tell it often enough, it will be believed.’ I guess it happened to you.”

“Oh, Dad,” she said, starting to break out in tears. “I never wanted that to happen. I missed you so much. Mom always tried to tell me that Milt was my father now, and that I ought to treat him like it, but I never believed her.” All of a sudden she lunged toward him, and wound up with her head on his chest as he wrapped her in his arms. “I’m sorry, Dad. I really am.”

“I’m sorry too, Petra. I tried to do better by you, but I was never allowed to. You and I were supposed to have time together, but when I tried to set something up your mother tried to block it. You always had a ball game or a music lesson or were at camp or something. I kept trying, but it never worked. I even gave you the car at least partly so you would have the opportunity to sneak away from her to see me, but you never did it very much.”

“I know you came to some of my games back then and I was always happy to see you there. I wonder if that’s why Mom said I should quit sports.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her. She did everything she could to keep us apart, and she did it all too well.”

“I guess she did,” she sighed, and snuggled up closer to him. “I didn’t want to do it, Dad, I really didn’t, but I guess I just got sucked up in her line of bull. It’s like I wanted you to be at graduation last month. You deserved to be there after all the money you spent on college for me, but I could only get two tickets. Mom decided that she and Milt had to be there instead of you. She said that Milt had done so much for me that he deserved to be there, so I left you out in the cold. Again.”

“I figured it had to be something like that.”

“I could probably have gotten a ticket from one of the other kids, but I figured that if you and Mom were both there it would get nasty,” she went on. “I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me, and I’ve been thoughtless to you too much.”

“You were probably wise on that one,” he said. “Yes, if I had been there it probably would have turned into a fight that would have ruined an important day for you. I suppose I could have gotten a ticket if I had really wanted to, but I didn’t even know it was happening. You didn’t tell me, or I would have been there somehow.”

Petra was seriously crying now. “I wanted to have you walk me down the aisle at my wedding and give me away, but Mom wouldn’t have anything to do with the idea. She said that Milt was the one who deserved to do it and there was no shutting her up about it, so I guess I finally gave in. I had to do that too much, and I guess I learned to give in too easily. At least the goddamn wedding never happened.”

“I’m sorry you got stuck like that,” he said. He really was; he’d known it was going to hurt her, but at the time he’d decided that she really didn’t care about him. Now it was proving that he had been wrong, and he didn’t like the feeling it gave him. “That had to have been awful.”

“I can’t believe Barry would humiliate me like that,” she shook her head. “We had so many plans together. I really looked forward to being married. We were going to go way away from here so Mom couldn’t be on my ass all the time, but even that didn’t work out. At least I learned just what kind of a bastard he really is before it was too late, but everything I’d hoped for is gone, and I don’t know what to do, all because that gutless idiot decided he didn’t want to get married.”

As Petra lay sobbing in his arms, Royce thought hard. Should he tell her the truth? Right now it looked like she was really sorry, and there might be the chance to build at least a little bit of a relationship with her again. But if they did without the truth out in the open, at least between them, it would always be hiding in the shadows ready to ruin things.

On the other hand, he’d learned to live without her. It would be nice to be father and daughter again, but the chance to do it and have it mean much of anything was gone. She wasn’t his ten-year-old daughter playing in the surf anymore. She was twenty-one and would soon be twenty-two, and there had been an awful lot lost in the years between, things that could never be recovered.

There was the chance that a bit of what he had lost might be recaptured if things went well with Maria. At least if things went together there, he might be able to be a part of things like birthday parties and proms and graduations with Ramona, things that would be pleasant to remember, things that Maxine had taken away from him with Petra.

But there was no guarantee that things would work out with Maria and Ramona at all, and even if it did it wouldn’t be quite the same thing.

What had been lost was lost, and could never be truly recovered. Too much time had passed, too many things had happened, and Maxine had ruined too much.

No, the truth might be unpleasant for the both of them and might tear what little relationship they had apart forever, but it was a risk he had to take, he realized in only seconds. “Petra,” he said softly. “It was for the best.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I don’t think you realize just what kind of a bastard Barry really was.”

“Dad?”

“Petra, I need to show you something, and then I need to explain something, and to do that I’m going to have to get up.”

“All right, Dad,” she said softly. “It’s just now that I have you back I hate to let you go.”

Yes, he was right, he thought. The truth had to come out. She backed off from him enough to let him wiggle out of her arms. He got up, went to his briefcase, pulled out a DVD and pushed it into the player. Then he grabbed the remote and turned on the big wide-screen TV that was attached to the wall, then sat down next to her on the couch again as he pushed “Play.”

“I don’t think you’re going to like to see this,” he said. “But it’s something you ought to know.”

The DVD was still unedited, and there was still a long flat spot of a picture of an empty hotel room at the beginning. He fast-forwarded it to the point where Barry and the girl came into the room and started tearing each other’s clothes off.

“My God!” Petra literally shrieked. “That’s Barry! And that girl, I remember seeing her when we were on spring break! That had to have happened when we were down there! Dad, I can’t bear to look. Please don’t make me watch this.”

“Fine with me,” he said as he punched “Stop,” then turned the TV off entirely. “I can’t look at it myself. I’ve only seen about this much of it before, but I’m told it’s actually pretty good for a porn video.”

“Dad, where did you get that?”

“Let’s just say that I know a private investigator,” he said. “Petra, I know your mother said that I didn’t care about you, but she was wrong. I cared about you enough to have Barry checked out just on general principles since I didn’t know anything about him. Let’s just say that this wasn’t the only time he was with another woman since you’ve been engaged.”

“Not the only time?” she said in a small voice.

“There are no videos of them that I’m aware of, but he bragged about bagging at least six other girls since he put that ring on your finger, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there were more. He was a player, Petra. He was only going to stay faithful to you until he got the chance to get in bed with another woman behind your back. Petra, I went through that the hard way with your mother, and there was no way I could let it happen to you.”

“Dad, I had no idea he was like that. He . . .” she started, then what he had said struck her. “You weren’t going to let it happen to me?”

“I couldn’t let that happen to my little girl,” he said, crying himself a little now. There was a good chance he was going to lose her with his next words, but if it happened at least she would know the truth. “The reason Barry didn’t show up for your wedding is that I paid him to stay away.”

“You paid him?” she replied incredulously.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars in small bills,” he smiled. “Let’s just say he was very eager to take the money and run.”

“You paid him to wreck the wedding?”

“Well, I paid him to go away, and that sort of wrecked the wedding in the process,” he admitted. “I thought about showing you that video before you got married, but I was afraid you might rationalize your way out of it, or worse, that your mother would because she wanted you to have a big wedding no matter what. Besides, I’d convinced myself that you didn’t care about me, even though I still cared about you. I didn’t want you to go through a train wreck of a divorce with children involved like I had to do, so I knew I had to take action.”

“And you paid him twenty-five thousand dollars to do it?”

“If anything, that showed what kind of an idiot he really was. If he’d thought about it even a little bit he would have realized he was in a good negotiation position to get more out of me. I was prepared to go to a hundred thousand if I had to, but the rest of the money would have had to be in bank drafts. I had them in my pocket if I needed them. But no, he was so dazzled by the money that he was glad to get it.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Petra, if nothing else that showed just what you were worth to him, and that was that you were worth less than twenty-five thousand dollars. You are worth a good deal more than that to me. I’m sorry I had to cause you the pain and the humiliation, but I think it was worth it, and when you think about it, I think you will, too.”

“My God,” she shook her head. “Mom got Milt to pay over thirty thousand dollars for the wedding, and you paid twenty-five thousand to wreck it.”

“Actually, it cost me more than that,” he said with a little smile on his face. “I had to pay the private eye and some other costs, so I might be ahead of Milt. I think I got the better deal though.”

“Dad, how could you spend that much money? It’s really got Milt strapped.”

“The simple answer to that, Petra, is that I have it to spend if I want to spend it on something worthwhile, and keeping you from marrying that louse struck me as worthwhile. I would have been glad to spend the hundred grand if I’d had to, but at least Barry was even dumber than I thought he was.”

“Dad,” she shook her head sadly. “I really don’t know what to say. I had no idea that you loved me that much.”

“I really do, Petra. I always did. I never wanted to let you go, even though it seemed like you wanted to let me go.”

“It was all Mom’s doing,” she sighed. “Every bit of it. How could she do it to us?”

“I can’t answer that, other than to say that your mother wants what she wants and will go as far out of her way as she needs to get it. She did it with your wedding, and look at the pain it’s caused everyone. Petra, I think you know I’m not much of a Bible person, but there’s a verse in there that says something to the effect of ‘when you sow the wind you will reap the whirlwind.’ Your mother is just starting to reap what she’s sown.”

She sat up and looked him straight in the eye. “Dad, what do you mean by that?”

“Maybe it was childish and petty of me, but back at Thanksgiving when you told me that Milt was going to give you away at your wedding instead of me, I realized that I had to do something. The time had come for me to pay your mother back for all the pain she’s caused me over the years by taking you away from me. So I took action.”

“Dad, what did you do?”

“Well, the wedding blowing up in her face was part of that.”

“I haven’t seen her since then, but Milt told me that she’d pretty well gone off her rocker. She deserves it for cramming all that stuff down my throat. I never wanted a big wedding like that and I didn’t want to hurt you over it, but as usual I let her run right over whatever I wanted.”

“Actually, at that point I had no intent of messing with the wedding,” he admitted. “But right after Thanksgiving I started the process of setting up five sub stores and a hot dog store, all of them within a block of Milt’s places. They all opened yesterday, and Milt is going to find it hard to stay open, let alone catch up with all the wedding expenses.”

“Dad, how could you do that?”

“Because I owed Milt quite a bit of payback, too. After all, it was he and your mother who stabbed me in the back. I waited a long time to do it Petra. Over ten years, in fact. My original intention was to open the stores after the wedding so you wouldn’t get swept up in the collateral damage. Then I found out about Barry, and I knew what I had to do.”

“Oh, wow,” she shook her head. “You really did want to get them back, didn’t you?”

“More than you can ever believe. They hurt me, Petra. They hurt me a lot, and they hurt you just as bad. Now I have the chance to hurt them back, and I intend to do it. Petra, you mean a lot to me, more than you can imagine. But I’ve lived with the crap from them for so long that I feel like I have to do what I can to even things up. It’s over ten years of pain that’s been festering and boiling in me, so now maybe they’ll get a chance to feel what it’s like to hurt a little.”

She leaned back against him and put her head on his chest again, crying hard once again. “It’s been ten years of pain for me, too. I lost my daddy as a part of it. Oh, Milt tried to make things up, and we’re sort of friends, but he’s never been my daddy and you still are. It’s good to know that my daddy has tried to look out for me.”

They sat there silently for several minutes, and both of them were crying, now. Finally, she spoke up. “I can’t go back there,” she said. “I don’t want to spend another minute around there knowing how much Mom tried to hurt me. In fact, I don’t think I want to see her ever again. I don’t think Milt ever tried to very much but he always went along with Mom. I can’t put up with that shit any more. Daddy, I don’t know what to do. Is there any chance I could move in with you for a while? I guess I can’t be your little girl running in the surf any longer, but maybe I can still be your daughter and try to make up a little for what we missed.”

“I can’t think of anything I’d like better,” he smiled. “You can stay here as long as you like. I want to get to know my daughter again after she’s been away from me for so long. I agree that we can’t make up what was lost, but maybe we can be father and daughter again for real.”

“Thanks, Daddy. I think I’m going to call you that, now. I haven’t been able to call you that for a long time.”

“I’m just glad to hear it,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is your home now. I hate to say it but we probably ought to wash the sheets and bedding in what was supposed to be your room. They haven’t been washed since you stayed with me one night when you were about fourteen, and I haven’t had a guest in the house since.”

“I don’t care. I can live with it. At least I know I really have a home and a Daddy here to love me.” She shook her head and went on, “I’m not sure Mom ever really loved me. She just wanted to use me as a tool to hurt you.”

“I wouldn’t want to guess on that,” he shrugged. “Whatever her reasons were, I don’t think they were good enough to explain what she did. She must have thought they were, and now she’s going to have to learn what it’s like to be on the other end of the stick. I’ve got you with me now, Petra. That’s about all I could have ever asked for.”

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