Abigail looks at her.

“Do you?”

Mom makes a little noise in her throat. I don’t think Abigail was trying to offend her. It’s true that Mom has never really talked about Dad’s absence much.

“Of course I do,” she says, a quiver in her voice. “Of course I miss him.”

We sit in silence for a moment, then Mom shifts in her seat and clears her throat.

“Your father was easy to love,” she says. “I’m not as easy. I know that. I always understood why he was your favorite.”

Abigail looks up, eyes wide. And I stare too. Favoritism, favorite: they’re ugly words, not the kind we say aloud in this family. We’ve only ever skirted around them. But what’s startling me is that Mom wasn’t just looking at Abigail when she said that. She was looking at both of us. She was speaking to me, too. And I feel an intense wave of guilt—because she’s not wrong.

“I resented it, you know, when you were younger,” Mom says. “How he was always the ‘good cop.’”

I see Abigail’s frown deepening. Mom glances between us, absorbing the looks on our faces. Her eyebrows knit together.

“You never saw it, I suppose? I loved him tremendously, you know, but I used to feel he let me down on that front. The way he courted you girls, both of you. I always had to be the bad guy.”

I mean…again, she’s not wrong. Dad was the soft touch in our home, Mom was the tough one. The one who set the rules, doled out punishments; the one who got angry. But I never thought of it as “good cop, bad cop.” I never thought of it as a parenting style at all. I thought it was just who they were.

I see the angry look on Abigail’s face as she opens her mouth then closes it again. I know what she’s feeling because I’m feeling it too. I have to struggle not to jump to Dad’s defense. It’s new to hear Mom say something critical about him, and I don’t like it. It’s new to blame Dad for any of these cracks in our family, but Mom’s right about the good cop bad cop thing: he loved us so much but I guess he didn’t really do the hard parts.

“Of course he never saw it that way,” Mom says. “He was just being himself. He adored you both—it came naturally. He would want to be here for you,” she says to Abigail. “He really would.”

Abigail nods, wipes her face.