“No, you don’t get to call what I do alternative, or who I do it with alternative. I am not alternative. I’m just myself. Who I am with and who I'm attracted to is one hundred percent my business. Your job as my father is to get to know the person that I’m interested in and provide support. That’s all I need, and to be honest, I don’t actually need that. I just would like it. But you notice I’m not the one that told you about this? Just an anonymous person that called you to give me shit.”

My father‘s eyes went wide. All these years, we’d shuffled around who I was as a person. It was about maintaining the distance we needed to ignore what was going on in our house and to ignore the problem that deep down my mother leaving gave him. He had confidence issues, and the way he insisted we kept our home was a way he could keep people away from our family. It kept us in and it kept others out. My leaving would make him uncomfortable.

I was outside the walls of his house now, but I wasn’t going to let him saddle me with his issues. And as I stood in the restaurant glowering at him, I realized I had to do this and stand up to him so that my sister wouldn’t have to have the same scene in a restaurant years from now.

Austin stood up next to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “What do you want to do? Do you want to go home?”

I sat back down and Austin did, too.

“Yeah, I just want to figure out what is going on in this world right now.” I addressed my father, “Did it even occur to you that someone called you out of the blue to talk crap about me? Do you have any concerns about that at all? Do we think about that? I know this seems like I’m being disrespectful, but I’m really not enjoying dealing with this whole smear campaign from someone who has a vendetta against me for no good reason.” I watched as understanding reached my father‘s eyes.

“Wow, I didn’t know that we had a whole campaign we were dealing with.” Concern made his forehead wrinkle.