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Show in my father's house/ 278 - with or without your permission!" I held my breath. My father, head bent, said nothing, only played his cards furiously. Jake snuffled, crouched over my father like a bear. Time was frozen. Unable to stand the tension, I went to my bedroom, threw myself on the bed and buried my head in my arms. Everything was so twisted, so confused. What had happened to the days of harmony and happiness - the white house days when we were one against the world, the Nevada days when we fished together and one person's catch was as good as another's? Where was our joy in one another? What had gone wrong? Later, when Jake had headed back to Nevada and my father had returned to his office, I learned from my mother that my father had given Jake his consent to marry Maria in the Presbyterian chapel in Nevada. My father's trouble worked silently as a bellows on my resentment. In defiance, I attended my former school, riding buses across the valley to preserve my precious anonymity. I spent hours phoning friends, tying up the line we shared with Aunt Helga until my father had a separate phone installed in her side of the duplex. This I took as a triumph of my will, that I had at last communicated to my father that I would not submit to an unfair yoking of my mother's family to Aunt Helga's whims and wishes. Danny finished high school and returned home to work the summer toward college tuition, but he didn't assuage the loneliness and anger that metastasized within me. Our worlds seemed far apart; we did not sit on his bed discussing life and family as we had the summer before. |