“No, Dad,” she said softly with a shake of her head as she stood to leave. “Not that. IN love. Because I spoke to Mom about this at length before she died. Maybe you didn’t know it, but she was IN LOVE with you long before you got together. And maybe I can’t compete with that.” I could see tears welling up in her eyes and the color in her cheeks was rising. Even as naked as she was under that apron, our mother’s apron, she was even more naked to my gaze then, her heart open and aching. Nothing hurts like a heart in search of love and she was that personified.
Without another word, she was the one to leave the kitchen, too overwhelmed to say anything more.
If there’s one thing you can’t do, it’s to compete with a ghost. It’s impossible. Because a ghost isn’t real and what you’re competing against is actually just an idea of a memory. But Amity wasn’t deterred. She didn’t give up. She knew what she wanted, even if I didn’t… yet. Oh, to be sure, the male in me wanted her the way a dog wants a bone, but the father in me was at odds with the MAN in me. It was beyond question that I loved Amity more than life itself, but she’d posed a serious question that I couldn’t answer: was I, COULD I be, in love with her?
I think she realized that that was the one hurdle I’d have to leap before I’d consent to taking her as my… my what? My lover? My mate? I think the relationships in my family kind of defied real definition in those terms. At any rate, I believe she realized that before I could make love to her, I’d have to be certain that I was in love WITH her- first. And I think she wanted it that way, too. A passionate, animalistic sexual exchange appealed to her youthful lusts, but she was no dummy. She knew that a healthy relationship between a man and a woman, regardless of their relations, would need to be built on a genuine love that was more than just what a parent felt for a child and vice-versa. Any love I felt for her outside of our family dynamic would need to have a life of its own.
So she dialed it back- WAY back!- but she didn’t give up. Or maybe she just developed new habits. It was hard for me to tell. For days after that painful conversation, whenever I saw her, she was nowhere near as bold, but she had just a hint of tease to her. Low-cut shirts, skin-tight shorts, barely-there skirts with thongs underneath… that kind of thing. But when I saw her in those outfits, she didn’t make an obvious show of it. She just moved and acted like normal. This was how she dressed now, skimpy, almost bordering on slutty, but not depraved. The male in me ate it up. And, I have to be honest here, the father in me felt proud. She was learning balance in the delicate art of seduction, learning how to wield the weapon that was her beauty like it was a well-honed knife rather than a sledge-hammer.
Amity was persistent, if not relentless. Nevertheless, our original father/daughter dynamic was slowly coming back into firm setting, despite a palpable tension that was felt by both of us. Never again did she broach the subject of whether or not I was or could ever be in love with her. Meanwhile, it was all I ever thought about… until I didn’t. I don’t know when, exactly, I stopped thinking about it, but I did. We fell back into our routines, I guess, and eventually it was a concern that I didn’t focus on anymore. I remember one night in bed alone, thinking about the situation, when I thought to myself, “For now, I love her. Every piece of her. And, for now, all I can do is hope that will be enough.”
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