Hah! Silly me, thinking Mom had nothing over me. She took away my ability to stay in my room, so now I'm forced to help Dad during the day.

Mom is one thing, she's a total b... witch, but she lost her edge when it comes to threatening me. Dad, though? Dad is always merry go happy through life, so he gets pretty scary when he's mad, and he's not happy about my current tantrums. That's why I'm spending my days cleaning the saddest corner of this village: Dad's Aloha Two. Yes, he's starting a pizza business in this hole of a town in the middle of nowhere, and he's dumb enough to call it after the best pizza place in the freaking world.

Seriously, Maple Heights is like a group of about a couple dozen blocks where people decided it was a good idea to live in. There's a local bakery, a local market, one pharmacy, and if you want any kind of entertainment, you need to drive two hours to the next town, Preston. And Dad pretends to succeed with a pizzería on a location with 20 houses and three dogs. Not even I am that stupid at marketing.

Also, the poor bastard. He wants it to look exactly like the original. He even changed the flooring to the same checkered red and white tiles from Aloha Aloha. However, no matter what he tries, or how many times he speaks to the construction team, he will never have his own Aloha. He will have a sad discount copy where he won't be able to joke twenty-four-seven with Uncle Owen. It has never been a matter of aesthetics, which, fair enough, are getting pretty close to the original. It's about the people in that place. It has always been, but Dad refuses to see that. Serves him right.

"Did you say something?" Dad asks, somehow angry.

I shake my head no, unsure if I was thinking out loud. I might have, I don't know. I tend to do that a lot lately to minimize the silence at home.

He points his fingers at a group of tables on a corner. "Get that mop over there and clean up those tables. And better be quick about it." Then he turns to the construction team, all smiles again, and explains them for the tenth time in the last hour how he wants the counter exactly like the one in his pictures.

"You should ask them to make you an Uncle Owen out of concrete, too."

"Funny, but those tables won't get cleaner by you being an ass."

"Come on, Dad." I take the mop and draw circles with it over a table. "You should be honest and admit already that you don't like it here any more than I do."

"Would that change the fact that we're already here? I don't think it would." He walks up to me and leans on the table I just cleaned. "Don't think we're stupid, we know you lost your friends and your sweetheart, and now you're here trapped with a Grandma who can't bear our existence."

Oh, yeah. Grandma hates Dad, too. With a burning passion. You should see the tantrums she throws when he arrives before Grandma is asleep. Also the reason why he leaves home early.

He continues with yet another rant I don't care about. "You love to think that I didn't have a say in it, that Aunt Sugar didn't try to stop you from coming here. Hell broke loose over that whole dilemma throughout the family. Your mom and Aunt Sugar are on bad terms now because of it." He takes a break from his monologue to pull out a cigarette from his shirt pocket and drags long and slow from it.

"First of all, I don't have any way to confirm if that is even true." Lies, I know their phone number by heart and there's a landline I can still use at home. I just don't want to have anything to do with anyone involving Celadon Bay. "And two, it doesn't even matter anymore because, as you just said, it won't change the fact that we're already trapped here."

"It does, because the only one who didn't try to stop your mother from bringing you here..." He stops, takes another drag of his cigarette and blows the smoke out of his nostrils. He closes his eyes and purses his lips for a second, and then says, "The only one who may have had a shot at changing her mind, John, was you."

"Of course I had to spell it out for her, right? Nice try at making it my fucking fault," I reply, now angry at my father for real. I can't believe he's suggesting I had the power to change Mom's choice of all things. Like my mother would have ever listened to whatever I tried to say.

"You love to think your mother is this ugly witch who eats puppies for dinner, but she'd do anything for you."

I roll my eyes. "Clearly. She'd go as far as to ruin my life to keep me by her side."

"Did you ever tell your mother that you didn't want to come, or asked her to please let you stay there?"

"Like that would have worked."

"Just answer my question, John. Have you ever done that?"

"No, okay? No, I didn't. I never thought that was something she'd allow me to get away with, and I didn't even know that was even an option. Is that what you wanted me to say? There, I said it."

And shut up, Sherezade. I'm not doing what you said.

Dad's voice softens. "I don't want to blame you for it, Champ. I never would." He takes a long drag of his cigarette and stomps the butt on the floor.

"It sure sounds like you are."

"I, for one, tried to talk to your mother to let you stay. I already told you that Aunt Sugar even got in a fight with her about the whole thing. Owen is a man of few words, but he definitely had something to say about it. Heck, even Alex had a talk with her in the basement one night before she came here."

"And then you somehow think I could have changed her mind."

"Yes, I honestly think that if you had spoken up your mind, even once, she'd have listened." He bends down a little to meet my eyes. "For you, she would have."

We have a few minutes of silence while Dad smokes another cigarette and I clean some more tables. Then a question bubbles up in my head.

"Why the hell are you even here, though?"

"What do you mean?"

"You could have opened another restaurant in Sunset Central and be more successful and make better money than opening whatever this is in the middle of a dead town."

Dad takes a drag of his cigarette and looks at the ceiling for a minute. "If Veronica was sent to the other side of the country and you had to provide for her, would you stay on the other side of the country because it's convenient to both of you, or would you rather try to stay with her through whatever she's facing daily?"

"Even if I didn't have to provide for her, I'd still try to stay with her no matter what," I say, realizing I actually didn't. Dad told me we had to come here and I accepted my fate and went with it.

So he's right, I didn't do anything to stop Mom from bringing me here.

But that doesn't mean I'm not angry with the outcome. Or my mother. So I spend the rest of the summer following Dad around in his endeavors. I guess a Sad Aloha is better than no Aloha at all.