Just now, after we had just eaten dinner, he comes back inside after throwing the trash and he calls me from my bedroom, and I already know it's bad. "Did you see that your car has hail damage?" he says, with that sniveling tone that he saw something that I didn't, and more importantly to him, that he saw something that he believes I should have seen that as soon as I laid eyes on my car.
Monday was wild. For 15 minutes in the evening, and for only 15 minutes, bad weather swept through town, and we had hail the size of, oh, ping-pong balls. During that crazy period I walked out to the hall to see My Fucking Father look outside. Man, that hail was nothing I saw before. But I didn't think about it the next day. I took a look, and it seemed fine. I chalked it up to the new technology of car exteriors, or something.
But just now he basically taunts me, "You can't see it?" So of course I have to go outside and show concern. And in the dappling early evening sun, yes, I see the pock marks of hail damage on the hood of my new car. But I don't want to be the only one, so I look even more intently at my old car as well as my parents' minivan, and they had as much damage as my new car.
"Well, if that's hail damage, then all the cars have hail damage," to which he turned around from martyring himself washing the rest of the dishes to say, wincing smile meant to cut me down, "I'll call the insurance company Monday." That wince was his way of saying that, once again, I disappointed him. Don't exactly know how. If I told him Tuesday that there was hail damage, well, the car is still damaged, so why the smartass tone, dick? And I don't know how car insurance claims work, so does it really matter if I call it in a week after it happened as opposed to a day?
Oh, I see -- you think I wasn't paying attention? OK, now I know what this means. He's going to come back into my bedroom and start nagging me about not throwing away all the papers I've accumulated, and he's going to start asking me every fucking day when I'm going back to school. I see what he did there -- find a way to see how superior he is to me, how I once again have failed him. And he's going to goddamn let me know it, for a long fucking time.
Can't let him win. So that settles it; I'm not going to clean up shit in my room. 'Cause fuck him. I might stay out for a long time, too.
By the way, this is why I didn't want a new car. New cars always get old.
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