by Wayne Grady
PRAISE FOR THE GOOD FATHER:
“Every parent, every daughter and son will want to read this book. Does this include all readers? I hope so. The Good Father is a wonder, heartbreaking and heart-mending at the same time, beautifully rendered in Wayne Grady’s inimitable, luminous style. Contemporary in its concerns but eternal in its laments and forgiveness, this is a novel to treasure. It affirms page after page with confidence and wisdom that our lives matter, that family matters, even though we wound those we love in ways that may not heal.” —Lorna Crozier, author of Through the Garden
“The Good Father is a powerful and unsentimental look at the relationship between a father and his daughter. Wayne Grady has expressed what is often inexpressible in this beautiful and moving novel.” —Helen Humphreys, author of Rabbit Foot Bill
“The Good Father chronicles the entwined heartbreak of father and daughter: the words unsaid, the hurts kept hidden, and love’s missed chances. A tale of redemption told with intelligence, compassion, and deep tenderness.” —Kerri Sakamoto, author of Floating City
“If only all of us, children and parents, could have this conversation. A tender novel that tackles addiction, betrayal, and the ups and downs of parenthood. Thought-provoking and wise.” —Susan Swan, author of The Dead Celebrities Club
“The Good Father is a book of real wisdom and profound heart. It is also gripping, narratively and emotionally, as we track a father and daughter’s stumbling progress through disappointment, setback, and near tragedy, to the book’s magical final moments of reconciliation and redemption. Grady’s latest work is a note-perfect evocation of that most challenging aspect of parenting, where our deepest sense of love and obligation is twinned with the feeling of being utterly lost. Parents and children have no idea how and where they will ultimately find each other. But in this elegant and heartfelt novel, Grady shows us that it does yet happen.” —Timothy Taylor, author of The Rule of Stephens
“The Good Father poses a terrifying question: What happens when a man’s escape hatch becomes the trapdoor in his daughter’s childhood? The answer is a thing of wonder—a riveting, stay-up-late read that doubles as a deeply moving treatise on familial love.” —Alissa York, author of The Naturalist
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF WAYNE GRADY:
“Harrowing…[and] meticulously researched.” —Margaret Atwood, on Up From Freedom
“Powerful…. At a time when racism and violence are still tearing at America—and Canada—[Up From Freedom] is a timely story that sheds light on how far we have and have not come.” —Toronto Star
“A stellar debut. This literary novel is set in the heart of the big-band era…. The music swings. So does the story.” —Winnipeg Free Press, on Emancipation Day
“Grady’s novel reads with the velvety tempo of the jazz music of its day. Like a deft conductor, he seamlessly brings in his main characters’ voices in alternating chapters throughout the novel.” —Chatelaine, on Emancipation Day
Selected Works by Wayne Grady
FICTION
Up From Freedom
Emancipation Day
NONFICTION
Breakfast at the Exit Café
Tree: A Life Story
Bringing Back the Dodo
The Bone Museum
The Great Lakes
The Dinosaur Project
Technology
Copyright © 2021 Wayne Grady
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The good father / Wayne Grady.
Names: Grady, Wayne, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200360515 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200360787 | ISBN 9780385694667 (softcover) | ISBN 9780385694674 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8613.R337 G66 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover and book design: Matthew Flute
Cover images: (landscape) James P. Blair; (burn mark) seamartini, both Getty Images
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Part 1
Daphne: March 2, 2010
Harry: November 19–20, 2009
Daphne: March 3, 2010
Harry: December 1999–May 2000
Daphne: March 3, 2010
Harry: November 24, 2009
Daphne: March 4, 2010
Harry: November 25–December 1, 2009
Daphne: March 4, 2010
Harry: December 1, 2009
Daphne: March 5, 2010
Harry: December 2–3, 2009
Part 2
Daphne: Summer 2018
Daphne and Harry: Spring 2019
Acknowledgments
About the Author
And its blood will seep into the water and you will drink it every day.
—MARGARET ATWOOD, “THE HURT CHILD”
Daphne
MARCH 2, 2010
So Sandra, you asked me to write down what I remember. This is what I remember.
I was ten years old. It was spring, sort of. Spring in Ontario. I was in the kitchen wearing my flannel pyjamas, there was still a sheet of ice on our driveway, hard snow on our porch, and if the car didn’t start again I’d have to walk to school. My dad was making breakfast. This was in White Falls, Ontario—you’ve never heard of it. It’s on the Madawaska River, between Ottawa and Peterborough. I went to Lester B. Pearson Elementary, and Dad taught at Madawaska College. Journalism. My mom worked for the mayor as his personal assistant.
Is this the kind of thing you want? You said just let it pour out, don’t censor myself, don’t go back and edit, just empty all this stuff out of my head. Use pen and paper, you said, not a laptop, which I don’t get because I think better on my laptop. Okay, yeah, maybe that’s the point. Don’t think, just dump. Got it.
So it was a cold morning. Dad was probably making porridge. I was still eating gluten and dairy then, and that was what we usually had. Dad talked about how the Scots made porridge by cooking it the night before, letting it cool overnight, then frying it in a skillet in the morning, but he always made it with quick oats in the microwave. He liked what he called “us doing things together,” even if it was only us clogging our arteries at the same time. While we ate I guess we talked a bit. I thought he was pretty smart, because a few months earlier, when everyone in town was panicking because they thought the world was going to end on the first of January—remember Y2K? all the computers were going to crash, people would get stuck in elevators and bank vaults, planes would fall out of the sky?—Dad had said none of that would happen, and he was right, of course, because nothing ever did h
appen in White Falls. He did seem preoccupied that day, but that wasn’t new. He always had a dozen important things buzzing around in his head. At the time I thought it was probably something at the college, some problem with his students. It was April, so maybe it was taxes. But he asked me weird questions, like had I seen many rabbits around lately, and were the kids in my school doing drugs. I was in grade five. I told him we didn’t start doing drugs until high school.
Mom was still in bed. Dad took her up some coffee, then came down and we did the dishes, then he kissed me, then he left. Okay, I may be imagining the kiss, I might have wanted him to kiss me, but I’m pretty sure he kissed me and held me a little longer than usual, looked at me and smiled a kind of tight, sad smile, as if he was experiencing sudden joint pain, like in those Robaxin commercials on TV. And then he told me to be careful and to look after Mom. I remember him saying that specifically: “Look after your mother for me, will you?” I only figured out later what he meant. How hard would it have been for him to say he was leaving? That he wasn’t coming back right away but would be back later? He could have promised. He could even have lied, he could have said he had to go away for a few days, something to do with work, a conference, a field trip with his students, I don’t know, and then not come back. He could have told me anything. He could have said goodbye.
Maybe he was going to tell me, but then Mom came down and started giving him a list of things she wanted him to do that day and the moment passed. She was always doing that, bursting into a room rattling off instructions as though picking up the dry cleaning was far more important than anything he might have been doing at the time, like saying he was leaving us. She always worked late and relied on him to do things, and was always putting him down for doing them wrong. “Are you listening, Harry? Why aren’t you writing this down? You know you’ll forget, you’ve got a memory like a colander. Daphne, get your father a pencil. You’re the big writer, Harry, so write this down. Laundry soap. Not the colour-fast kind you got last time, just regular laundry detergent, you got that?” I was like, “No phosphates, Dad.” And Mom said, “Don’t make it too complicated for him. And we need dental floss, the thin, flat kind. And margarine, not butter—Daphne doesn’t need any more fat, look at her.”
Am I ranting? Sorry, Sandra, I know you said not to rant. Ranting is reaction, and I’m not supposed to react. Take deep breaths. Anyway, it’s hard to rant with pen and paper. If they traced the history of the written rant, they’d probably find it began with the invention of the typewriter. A rant sounds so satisfying on a typewriter. I’ll have to ask Professor Curtis about that.
Dad was doing his usual out-of-body thing, letting himself drift off to another plane of existence. Maybe in his head he was already driving down Highway 401, the radio on to see what the traffic was like on the Parkway. I saw him write something down, but it might have been the name of a hotel, or a book he wanted to read, or just a reminder, “Note to self: leave wife and kid.” All I know for sure is that he didn’t come home that night. Or the next night. Or ever. That was ten years ago, the last time I saw him in our house.
I know Dad will say it didn’t happen like that, but that’s how I remember it, and that’s what you told me to write. And if I’ve been carrying this memory around with me since I was ten, if it’s now part of who I am, how I self-identify, then it doesn’t matter if it really happened that way or not, does it? I know a lot of memory is fiction, but Prof Curtis used to say we learn as much from fiction as we do from history. Maybe more. He also said it’s hard to know the difference between what happened and what we want to have happened, which is not true in my case because nothing that happened is what I want to have happened. That’s why I’m here, writing all this down. So I’m pretty sure I’m not making this shit up.
It was a sharp break. One minute he was my dad, the next he was living in Toronto and talking to me on the phone like he’d suddenly remembered he had a daughter. I hated those phony phone calls. Neither of us had anything much to say. Yeah, it’s cold here, too. Yeah, school sucks. Yeah, ballet sucks. Yeah, I miss you, too. Maybe he did write it all down, laundry detergent, margarine, dental floss, just to have a reminder of why he was leaving. I picture him coming out of the college, ice-cold wind blowing up under his coat, him pulling the list out of his pocket, and then saying, Oh fuck it, I’m out of here, and getting into his car and driving to Toronto.
Mom kept glancing at the kitchen clock, then at her watch, then out the window at the empty driveway. Looking more and more frightened, slamming things around, pushing her hair back behind her ears every ten seconds. She must have known, something must have told her, because she never said, Where is he? Or, When your father gets home. And she didn’t call his office or the hospitals. She called his cell a few times, her face grimmer each time, until finally, when it was after ten and neither of us had eaten, she broke down and started crying, and I remembered I was supposed to be looking after her so I went over and put my arms around her, and then she really started blubbering. We both did. You have to admit it was a shitty thing for him to have done. A cowardly, loveless thing. He didn’t take anything with him, unless he had a suitcase in the car. I don’t know if he ever came back to get his stuff—I don’t remember that part. Maybe I wasn’t there, maybe he came when I was in school. But it felt like he’d died. Hit by a train. Swept away by a tornado. Kidnapped by aliens. I guess it worked for him. He got away. Maybe not clean away, but away. But I didn’t. Even today, a large part of me is still in that kitchen, looking at the empty driveway with my arms around my mom and wondering what the hell just happened to my childhood.
* * *
—
She hears footsteps coming down the stairs and closes her notebook, waiting for him to knock. He has a key, but he doesn’t use it when he knows she’s in here. And she never locks the door. She learned that in rehab. Not even the bathroom door. Especially not the bathroom door. This knocking thing is a game they play: he gets to think he’s being kind and considerate, and she gets to think she has some control over who comes into her room.
“Daphne?”
Sometimes she ignores him and he goes away. When that happens, he usually creeps back upstairs with his tea getting cold, careful not to spill on the carpeted stairs. Maybe he assumes she’s sleeping, or taking a shower, or on the toilet. But sometimes, after standing there for ten seconds, he knocks again, a touch harder, with more authority, and calls her name a little louder, with an inquisitive lift at the end: “Daphne?” Is he imagining her lying unconscious on the floor with a needle sticking out of her arm? Or does he know she’s sitting there at the dining table, keeping very still and waiting for him to leave her alone? So this is another little game they play. Sometimes she gives in and calls back to him. She didn’t used to, but these days she almost always does.
“Hey, Dad.”
“You okay in there? Everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine, Dad.”
“Just checking. Don’t get up.”
“I’m not. I’m writing. Like Sandra said.”
“Good, good. Don’t stop on my account. I’ll come back later.”
“Okay.”
“Love you.”
“Yup.”
But her momentum is gone. She looks down at what she’s written and feels like going over to the sofa to lie down. She’s been writing from the heart, and there’s nothing left in there. Now she’s back in her head, where everything hurts. Writing about her father is harder than she thought it would be when Sandra first suggested it as part of her therapy. In fact, this whole rehab/therapy thing is fucking hard. Two months now. A month in the residential treatment facility on Bathurst Street, and now this therapy with Sandra while living with her father and Elinor and going to Narcotics Anonymous three times a week. Frigging exhausting. Humiliating, too. And for the rest of the year? In Toronto? After growing up in small-town Ontario and living in Vanco
uver for two years, surrounded by and connected to all that nature, moving to Toronto was like taking a space ship to a dead planet. When she thinks of a Toronto spring, she thinks of forced daffodils and propane heaters in sidewalk cafés. In Vancouver, the problem is getting things to stop growing. Soon, the California daylilies will have taken over the roadsides, and cherry blossoms will be strewn on the sidewalks in Shaughnessy. Here, in dull, grey, damp Toronto, everyone’s still wearing wool and worrying about leaving slush on the mudroom floor. She feels like a recidivist. She knew a homeless guy in White Falls who threw a brick through a convenience-store window and stole a bag of chips every October just so the police would lock him up for the winter. That’s her now. Smart but stupid. This letter she’s writing is her brick.
She gets up from the sofa and looks around for something else to do. Attention-deficit, goes with the territory. She’ll make tea. Her father will be back soon and he’ll want some.
Actually, she knows what her problem is, she looked it up online. Her pituitary gland has stopped producing beta-endorphin peptides, those little happy-hormones that block the pain receptors in the brain. She doesn’t have them, so she feels everything except happiness. Everything hurts. Light hurts her eyes. Sound hurts her ears. She jumps when her father knocks on the door. Hot and cold water hurt her skin. Bitterness hurts her tongue. Smells hurt her temples. Hunger hurts. Being full hurts. Desire hurts. Sex would hurt, if she were having any. Thinking gives her terrible headaches. Carrying a bag makes her shoulder blades ache. Shoes pinch her feet. Her fingers hurt when she holds a pen too tightly, or a teacup, or a pair of nail scissors. Pain is the cause and constant reminder of why she’s here. She’s here because she’s in pain. She’s in pain because her pituitary gland doesn’t produce beta-endorphin peptides anymore. Her pituitary gland doesn’t produce beta-endorphin peptides anymore because she has snorted too much cocaine. She snorted cocaine because her father left when she was ten. That’s why she’s here. That’s the way she understands it, anyway. It’s also the way her father understands it.
