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There’s always a pile of shoes he has to kick away from the front door each night when he comes in. He can barely remember anything else— a life before worrying about the kids every moment of the day, a life before his family was at the center of it. A bathroom without half a dozen toothbrushes in the cabinet above the sink.
There’s a safety, a familiarity in it— his routine— checking that each of the kids is tucked safely in their bed before he gets in his own, mentally filing away as much as he can of what the older girls let slip at the dinner table.
He spent every moment of his short-lived youth trying to figure out a way to run from everything he already knew. Away from his mother’s moods and out from his father’s ever-looming shadow. He realizes now that he has became pretty damn close to becoming that shadow.
His brothers got out, Randall as soon as he could drive and drove right out of their lives, Joey to a life splintered off onto a path entirely his own— apple far, far away from the tree.
Sometimes he drops Liv off at her apartment, and on the quiet drive home imagines what it must be like to live without the constant noise— the needy chatter, toys that sing, and teenagers that slam doors. Without a wife that tries to hide it, but that he catches looking at him like he’s out of place in his own home.
He’ll catch that expression and compare it with another one— one filled with compassion and fondness that belongs solely to him. And he gets a flash of that life. Of mornings where he only has to worry about getting himself out the door, of picking up dry cleaning for two instead of one. Of sharing one cup of coffee in the morning instead of leaving his mug half full.
He watches his children on the playground and his eye lingers an extra second on a brunette boy going down the slide after them, almost expecting him to run in his direction too.
He loves his children more than life itself. He’d do anything to keep them safe, to guard them from the evil he knows exists in the world. He wouldn’t be able to live if anything happened to a single one of them.
He’s loved Kathy since he was 17, when he’d decided her laugh was the most beautiful sound he would ever know.
It’s a full life. A good life, better than most. But a mind wanders. Of what another life might have looked like, if the chips had just fell in a slightly different order. A life where he woke up in a different bed, with different hair splayed across his face. A home with dark haired children, born with brown eyes instead of the blue he and Kathy shared.
Then he pushes those thoughts away, briefly sits with the guilt they bring about.
He never lets himself linger on it for any longer than a second. He just wonders sometimes.