Terrible Daughter Danielle Wick
I’m sorry. I never got around to thanking you for teaching me how to make rice in our scratched aluminum pressure cooker, or that I need a little milk and cinnamon for really good french toast. I’m also sorry for not making a scene about those potato pancakes at Perkins, sitting across from each other in a booth for the first and the last time because you were finally skinny enough to fit. Now, remembering the sharp downward twitch of your beard and the dip of your brown eyes when you saw half-raw hash brown bits hanging out of Bisquick’s excuse for pancakes, I wish I had. I wish I had stood up in the booth, started yelling, “This man is two months from losing a year long battle with cancer and the best you can do is fucking hash brown bits? You should be ashamed of yourselves!” But, goddamn it, I would only have been yelling at myself – Ashamed for myself, for all the times I said I’d spend the weekend videotaping you telling those hundred stories you always told only to turn tail and run, eight hours in, catching any ride that wouldn’t ask questions back to my apartment the same night. Now, two years later,
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