I worked at this place for years, a small, cozy restaurant that usually buzzed with local chatter and the clinking of glasses. My boss, a man of booming laughter and quick temper, was like a second father to me, or so I thought. One Tuesday, he was practically vibrating with excitement. “My old friend is coming to perform tonight!” he announced, his face split in a wide grin. “A real talent! We need to make this place perfect for him.” I spent the afternoon meticulously setting up a makeshift stage, polishing the mic stand until it gleamed, arranging chairs, trying to imagine this legendary friend. My boss talked him up constantly, a rockstar from their youth, now making a comeback.
Then he arrived. He wasn’t what I expected. He shuffled in, eyes glazed, a faint tremor in his hands. He looked… haunted. My boss greeted him with a bear hug, oblivious. The performer, however, barely acknowledged him. He just stared into space, then mumbled, a slurred whisper that sent a chill down my spine. “Steph… I’m on fire tonight. I’ll sing so well they’ll all cry.”
Steph. My mother’s name. My heart seized. I knew this man. I shouldn’t. I couldn’t.
I continued setting the stage, my hands shaking. I tried to stay invisible, to just do my job. But he turned, his eyes finally landing on me, narrowed, filled with a vacant hostility. “Who even are you?” he snapped, his voice raspy. “Why aren’t you saying hello?”
It was a punch to the gut. Say hello? How could I? To him? I froze, my throat tight. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t pretend. I couldn’t acknowledge the gaping wound he represented in my life.
A minute later, my boss found me in the back. “He says you have an attitude,” he grumbled, though his tone was softer than usual. “Go to the kitchen. Just help out there tonight.” Banished. Just like that. Because I couldn’t bring myself to greet the man who had shattered my world.
The concert was a slow-motion car crash. From the clatter of the kitchen, I could hear it all. Off-key notes. Forgotten lyrics. Awkward silences. The initial polite applause quickly turned to murmurs, then frustrated whispers, and finally, outright boos. I pictured the stage, him swaying, lost, a ghost of the talent my boss remembered. A pathetic spectacle.
When the last boo died down, the kitchen door swung open with a bang. My boss stood there, his face crimson, veins throbbing in his neck. “THIS IS YOUR FAULT!” he bellowed, his voice tearing through the kitchen. “YOU THREW HIM OFF! SINCE YOU’RE SO SMART — GO!”
Fired. Just like that. For a concert I didn’t even play, for an attitude I didn’t mean to project. But he was right. I did throw him off. Not by an attitude, but by my very presence. Because seeing him there, so broken, so lost, broke something in me too.
I walked out of that kitchen, out of that restaurant, without looking back. The shame, the anger, the bitter irony of it all. They thought I had an attitude. They thought I was disrespectful. They had no idea what it cost me not to speak.
He was my father. My father, who walked out when I was five. My father, who left my mother, Steph, for a life of chasing a music dream that never materialized. Every whispered story, every faded photograph, every tear my mother shed… it all came rushing back.
I’d recognized him the moment he mumbled her name. Steph. He always used to sing it, a lullaby before he vanished. And then he looked at me, his own daughter, and asked, “Who even are you?” His eyes, once so full of light, now held only confusion, hostility, and no flicker of recognition.
He didn’t know me. My own father, standing there, a husk of a man, and he didn’t even know his own child. The man my boss adored as a friend, the man they tried to “save” with a comeback concert, was just a ghost, lost in the fog of his own mind.
And my boss? He’d fired me for not greeting the man who had erased me from his life. The same man whose dreams had been my mother’s heartbreak, my own silent sorrow. He didn’t just throw him off. He threw me off, completely. And I just let it happen. I walked away, carrying the weight of a secret I’d kept for twenty years, a secret that had just stared right through me. It wasn’t an attitude. It was a scream locked inside my chest.
