Read The Story Hour for Free Online

I’ll move her out. And I’ll tell the whole goddamn ‘hood you’re a dirty old man. I’ll expose you in church. I’ll tell your boss and his boss. And then I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
    Wallace had been defiant, then defensive, and finally, defeated. “A man gets lonely, Odell,” he’d said. “You too young to understand. Your ma bin sick for a long time. Besides, I ain’t done nothing evil to your sister. We just cuddle, is all. I dunno what lies this girl is spreading about me.”
    Odell’s hand curled into a fist. There was metal in his eyes. “You need a woman, you go to a whorehouse. But you leave my baby sister alone. You understand?”
    â€œI do,” Wallace muttered, but the look he flashed Maggie was pure hatred. Wallace had always worshipped Odell, his boy who was studying at Berkeley on a full scholarship. The weight of his son’s contempt was more than he could bear.
    â€œOdell helped me,” she now said to Sudhir. “He made him stop.”
    â€œThen I’m forever in his debt.”
    â€œBut Dad never forgave me,” Maggie continued. “When Odell moved to Paris directly after college, I think Dad blamed me for it. Not that he’d ever say it. He found other ways to punish me.”
    â€œHe beat you?” Sudhir’s voice sounded as if it had been brushed with glass.
    She shook her head. “No. He just—ignored me. He was formal with me. Exaggeratedly polite. And distant. Treated me like I was made of porcelain. And—he never touched me again. Never hugged me or consoled me or told me he was proud of me. Even when I got in to Wellesley. And first chance he got, he moved to Florida. Suddenly, I had no home.”
    The back of her throat hurt, as if a jagged piece of ice were lodged in there. “Even when Mom died. He . . . he just let me grieve. Alone.” How raw, how close, the pain felt. It surprised her. She had processed this with her therapist many times, until the memory had lost its sting. Or so she’d believed.
    â€œI wish you’d told me this earlier, Maggie. My God, you’re my best friend. I’ve told you every bloody thing that’s happened to me. To think that you would carry this all these years . . .”
    â€œI couldn’t. I tried. I wanted to. Sophie always urged me to. But I couldn’t.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    Why not? Because it was too confusing, too shameful. Objectively, she had known that she was the wronged party. But always there was the nagging thought that she had made a mountain out of a molehill, that she and Odell—she, in the dumb ignorance of childhood, he, with the angry self-righteousness of youth—had not been sufficiently sympathetic to what Wallace was suffering because his wife had been dying a slow, harrowing death. But then she would imagine if one of her clients confided that her husband was using a ten-year-old child in this way, carrying her to his bed, rubbing against her, and she knew how outraged her response would be. And so, round and round in circles her thoughts would go.
    There was also this: Before Wallace had withdrawn behind the wall of silence, of stiff formality, before he’d turned a cold, stony face to her, he had been the most affectionate of fathers. When she was a kid, he had laughed uproariously at her endless repertoire of knock-knock jokes, taught her to ride a bike, enthralled her with stories about his native Jamaica and how he’d come to America as a stowaway on a boatful of bananas, taught her card tricks, held her hand as the four of them walked to the Church of the Open Heart every Saturday evening. While the other men in the neighborhood spent their money on booze and drugs and alligator-skin shoes and stood on street corners tittering at the women who walked by, Wallace Seacole worked two jobs, paid for piano lessons for his daughter, shook his head at the