✨a haunting memory✨
They lived in a beautiful house.
Five bedrooms, three bathrooms, brown brick with cypress trim, in a neighborhood where daddies waved while mowing the lawn and mamas drove Suburbans to Bible study. There was a pool down the street,
and an HOA of sorts that collected swimming dues for privileges.
On the outside, everything looked right. Perfect, even.
But she already knew by eight years old that peace wasn’t something you could paint onto walls or pave into driveways.
Her bedroom was sweet and Southern lady, covered in soft floral wallpaper with tiny climbing roses. She had real furniture… solid wood, polished smooth… and everything matched.
Her mamaw liked it that way. Their daddy’s mama…
She came from country clubs and old money. And pride in every detail. She sewed their curtains herself… not out of scraps, but from bolts of expensive fabric she let the grand-girls help pick it out with purpose. The sheets.The pillowcases. Even their comforters…stitched by hand. Every ruffle and hem whispered of her care.
It should have felt safe there. Sacred, even. But safety doesn’t live in fabric. And sacred doesn’t survive in the echo of slammed doors.
That night, she was in her Strawberry Shortcake pajamas, lying in her twin day bed, closest to the door.
Her little sister… just five years old… was tucked into her twin day bed by the window, lost in sleep beneath a pile of stuffed animals.
The house was quiet, but not still. Something had shifted. She could feel it in the air, thick and sour, like lightning before the strike.
That’s when she heard it… the heavy roar of an angry woman. She knew that sound. And she knew that walk. The staggered rhythm of a man who’d had too much. It was her Daddy. The drinking kind. His shadow came before he did, long and slanted across the hallway wall. She pulled the covers up to her tiny chin like cotton could protect her.
When he stepped into the room, he leaned over her bed… so close she could smell the Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola rising off his breath like heat.
She was scared breathless. But, he wasn’t angry. Not in that moment. Not with her. His voice was soft, almost gentle, but soaked in something sad and unraveling.
“Hey…” he said, slurring just a little.
“Would you rather live with me… or mommy?”
She didn’t know why he was asking. She didn’t know where Mommy was. But she knew what came next if she said the wrong thing. He always left when things got hard. It always wrecked her. Wrecked them all. So she did what a scared little 8 year old girl does when the man she loves - her hero turns into a question she can’t answer.
She said, “I wanna live with you, Daddy.” And she meant it… in the only way a child that young can mean something that deep. With desperation. With fear. With a love that was too big for her little body. Tears welled in her eyes. But breath did not come. She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, hugged him like he could glue the night back together.
If he wanted to.
She begged him not to leave. He hugged her back. Just for a moment. A strong, trembling kind of hug, like maybe part of him was breaking, too. But then, he pried her little arms from around his neck and pushed her back down into the bed, tucked her under the quilt her grandmother made, and said,“Go back to sleep.”
He turned and walked out of the room. Boots heavy. Door half-closed. Like none of it had ever happened.
She laid there, the cotton still warm from where his body had been. Her arms empty, heart and mind racing. Eyes wide open in the dark … Just watching his shadow fade into the light.
Still holding the ghost of his neck in her hands.