Free Something Like This (Secrets) by Eileen Cruz Coleman Page A

the possibility that everything could end with me in the fetal position, crying my little heart out, with Grace and Lisa trying their best to comfort me. Nonetheless, I was willing to risk a broken heart, because for the first time in a gazillion years, I was actually experiencing moments of happiness. I was sure my past would always haunt me, do its best to bring me down, to make me want to stop laughing, stop smiling, and stop living altogether. But I’d refuse to let it.
    Hell, I’m only twenty-three years old. I still have a chance. I can still live a normal life.
    I swallowed a sip of my wine and then glanced down at the bracelet on my wrist, a simple, thin, silver bracelet that had been with me since I was twelve years old. I rarely took it off, and when I did, I couldn’t have it off longer than a few minutes.
    When I looked at it, something I did often, I felt it could somehow transport me back in time, back to when my father was sitting across from me at a table at Popeyes, the only place he ever took me to eat when it was just him and me. He would tell me how much he loved me and how he would always protect me, and I would munch on my chicken and eat my dirty rice and keep my face down and barely say a word to him. Despite my lack of engagement when we were together, I always knew he was telling me truth.
    But on one Wednesday afternoon, my father lied to me. He sat across the table, handed me a bracelet, and lied to me.
    Grasping my hand, his eyes welling up with tears, my father had said, “Jadie, I love you very much. Never forget how much I love you. No matter what happens, I will always be there for you. You’re my kid and my job is to take care of you...to protect you, and love you.”
    Looking back, I should have known he was saying goodbye to me. I should have known that the bracelet was his going-away gift to me. I should have clung to him, begged him not to leave me. I should have started talking to him, being nice to him, and calling him “Papi.” But I was still mad at him for not living with us anymore. I said nothing that day.
    I was a twelve-year-old kid who believed her father when he told her he would always be there for her. That day, I sat in a booth at a fast-food restaurant, eating chicken and sipping soda, a silver bracelet on my wrist, and I was happy. I was happy because even though I still resented my father for breaking up with Mami, I knew it wasn’t entirely his fault. I knew he was trying to be a good father and I knew that the day would come when I would no longer resent him, as long as he continued to show up, I would go on loving him.
    My father sat across from me and never took his eyes off me. I remember watching a tear trickle down his face. I had asked him why he was crying and he had answered, “Because you’re the most beautiful child I have ever seen and I’m so grateful to have you in my life.”
    And I had smiled and told him he was a good father and then, I had gone back to eating my food. When we were done eating, we walked out of the restaurant hand in hand and he drove me home.
    As I opened the car door, he said, “Remember what I told you. No matter what happens, I will always be there for you.”
    If only I had known that my father was walking out of my life, that he was abandoning me, that he didn’t love me anymore, and that everything he had told me was a lie.
    My father was a good man, a good father despite what Mami would say about him. They split up when I was about eleven years old. I don’t know the cause of their separation, but I remember the day it happened. Mami had locked him out of our apartment and he had banged on the door for so long and so hard I thought our neighbors were going to grab him and kill him. People had been murdered in our building, and I was convinced my father was tempting anyone who was waiting for an excuse to take out his frustrations on another human being.
    “He’s gone crazy,” Mami had said to me as she pushed me