Kit didn’t want a fight but she wasn’t holding back. There were a lot of things that her father needed to hear and maybe now was the time. He had once told her that until she lived a life of decency and respectability he would not entertain an audience with her. Well she could certainly claim that now.

Melvin sat back down and cleared his throat. Thinking back to the disastrous dinner when Bette and Tina told him that he was going to be a grand-father. “Look I know I wasn’t very supportive about the child but I just don’t believe that I should accept something so un-natural.”

Kit softened her tone as she too sat back down. “Daddy, all she wanted was your blessing. Why would you deny her that? For biology?” Kit found herself repeating almost verbatim everything she’d expressed to him that early morning in front of his hotel room door. “You turned her family away. You rejected her wife and child. I’ve never seen her so heart-broken. I think she even believed some of the poison you spewed to where she started doubting her ability to be a good parent. She feared she was going to be just like you. When Tina lost the baby to a miscarriage Bette lost a piece of her soul. She was too emotionally crippled to grieve her son and comfort her wife. Instead she took a page out of your book.”

“What are you saying?” Melvin realized that Bette had never told him that they lost the baby and it didn’t even occur to him to ask. He’d totally put the child’s existence out of his mind.

“You never allowed her to properly grieve her mother Daddy. You never wanted to talk about feelings and that has had a profound impact on her adult life and her ability to be vulnerable. Like it or not Tina Kennard is probably the only person in this world that can bring light into those dark places that Bette finds herself in sometimes. She told you that she failed Tina in perhaps the same way you failed her mother. What do you think she was talking about?”

Melvin couldn’t find the words to answer. He sat silently listening intently to everything Kit was saying.