Good Again

Flash Fiction

Good Again

“Jen, where did the crackers go?” Dad yelling from the kitchen.

Dad had been living with us for three months. After Mom passed, he didn’t want to stay in the house alone. However, I was in my second year with a wonderful business, two hours away. I couldn’t drive four hours a day just to live in the house I grew up in. Plus, my husband was also in a comfortable job, and more importantly our kids had already started school.

My family had moved just when I’d started fifth grade. I found it very difficult trying to blend in with kids who had known each other for four or five years. I wouldn’t do that to my kids, even for that wonderful house. So, he came here.

Life was suddenly different; it was him living in my house not me living in his.

I yelled back, “The crackers are in the cabinet next to the refrigerator!”

“They’re not… did you eat them all?” he yelled.

I was getting a bit tired of being the child again. I was a grown woman, married, kids! Yet when he yelled like that, I suddenly became eight years old again.

I suddenly yelled, something I rarely do. “No Dad … did you eat them? I didn’t have anything to do with it!” I closed my eyes, waiting for the yell to come back.

Suddenly a hand fell on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, I was being a jerk,” my father said. Softly, as if I was one of his friends.

“Oh Dad,” I said, “You’re never a jerk!” But then I added, “Maybe a seven-year-old, but not really a jerk…”

He laughed! Actually, laughed for the first time since he’d moved in. And then he said, “There’s my girl!” And life was good again.