Page 22 of Poetry of Flowers

The wrinkled letters are still on the floor. I picked them up and walked over to our dining table. Old wood, probably made manually in the Twentieth Century. It cost a fortune.

From oldest to newest, I laid them out, looking for a hidden message, an explanation I missed. I was searching for an explanation why my mother had done this to me.

My mother had always been strict with me about lying, but here I held the evidence of the biggest lie of all, with her signature on it.

Theo came to my side and gently patted my shoulder.

“Thank you.”

“No problem,” he tried to comfort me, even though he hated physical touch.

I really appreciated that he still did it to show he cared.

“I wanted to travel the world and play my music for anyone who wanted to listen. I thought I would get my trust fund at eighteen, just like Nash. But now I bet my trust fund will be exactly nothing? Mom said Dad set them up for us, but now I know there won’t be anything for me. My damn future is ruined.”

I cursed and shoved all the letters off the table.

It shouldn’t be my first priority to think about money right now, but this has been my dream since I first held a guitar in my hand.

I was going to take my money, my stuff and my best friend, we’d travel the world and make it ours. Playing music in bars on our journey, hoping to get recognized and make something out of me with Tillie by my side.

Ruined.

Everything is fucking ruined.

“Maybe you still have money in it, what if your mother-.”

I cut him off by shaking my head. “My mother has nothing to say in this house, nor is she the one making the money, she would barely get through the month if Da-, I mean Patrick, didn’t make millions each year with his company.”

Patrick owned a design company for fashion. Kidd’s was damn famous. They even made a documentary on how he started his business. I guessed that must’ve also been a reason why he stayed. Imagine the gossip if the founder of Kidd’s got cheated on and his son turned out to be another man’s kid. The media would have ripped him apart for not noticing it sooner.

My mother worked in the Seattle art museum, an hour from here.

The pay wasn’t great, but it was what she loved.

“What about your real father?”

“Don’t call him that, that’s weird.”

Theo shrugged his shoulders before he continued, “Sperm donor? Biological male parent part? The founder of Kayden Jude Kidd? Mother nature’s-”

“Theodore, stop! Just call him Clark.”

My friend nodded, “Alright, what about Clark? You know nothing about him. What if he found out and made a trust fund for you?”

God, I wasn’t even really after money, it was just the first thing that came into my mind because I wanted to get away from here as soon as possible.

“It’s not really about the money. It’s one of my worries, yes, but if I find out who this Clark is, I want to see if he could give me what I always wanted,” I answered and picked the letters back up, knowing that I would probably soon throw them on the ground again out of frustration.

“A father...?”

“Yes, it’s damn pathetic to want that because I’m almost an adult, but I always envied other children who were loved.” Swallowing, I turned around so that I looked at Theo. “When I was ten, I saw you helping your father with his car, never in my life had I ever been that jealous because my own had beat the shit out of me a day before that. I grieved the loss of Tillie’s father to alcohol because he was the only father figure I have ever known. I should have been there for her more, but I was grieving myself.”

Theo’s eyes softened. It was hard for me to talk about the abuse. Somehow, I felt like it was time to say it. At least with Theo, he knew about it, Tillie didn’t.

I didn’t want to become yet another worry on her list, she had enough on her plate, and it wasn’t like he got physical often, only when he got really frustrated, which I often provoked. In a weird way, I liked making him angrier than usual because then at least it made me feel like I deserved it.

“If I learned something from Tillie losing her mother, it’s that nothing is forever and if I get a new chance, a new start with a new father, I won’t wait another minute. I- I need this chance to-” Fuck, why was I stuttering? It’s not even that hard to say. “To give that little boy in me some rest.”

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