by Piper Lennox
“Hey,” she calls, “come back, I’m sorry. I’ll keep trying.” I can tell from her tone she thinks I’m pouting, which I am, and that she doesn’t really want to keep trying. Who can blame her, anyway? She just devoted twenty minutes to the world’s most useless blowjob.
A few minutes later, she appears beside the couch, pulling the comforter with her. “What are you watching?”
“Can you not,” I say, my voice grating even to my own ears, “drag my comforter all over the house like that? It gets filthy and I hate when you do it.”
“Since when? I do it all the time.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
“For God’s sake,” she mutters, turning on her heel and putting it back in the bedroom. “There. A place for every damn thing and every damn thing in its place. Happy?”
I don’t respond, instead sipping from the brandy I abandoned when I decided to wake her up. It burns less now, my mouth anesthetized.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” she asks when she comes back. She picks up the bottle from the kitchen island and studies it. “We have work tomorrow, you know.”
“Yeah,” I spit. “Thanks, Mom.”
Mel slams the bottle down hard enough to chip the glass. “Hey,” she snaps, “I know you’re stressed about the baby and all that, but that doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole to me and drink yourself stupid.” She steps closer, in between me and the TV. “I found that vodka bottle under the bed.”
I lean around her until I can see the screen. “So?”
“And the one in your car.” Her voice softens, a shaky kind of whisper, and I already know it could break me if I’m not careful. “What’s going on?”
Only now do I look her in the eye. “Nothing.”
There are tears on her face. How didn’t I notice them? “Nothing,” she repeats, letting her hands fall to her sides. “So, what, now you’re lying to me?”
“Just worry about yourself, Mel, all right?”
“That’s not what a relationship is about. I’m allowed to worry about you. I’m supposed to.”
My heart starts racing, with that familiar, stabbing pain. It gets worse when I drink, but I stifle it with another gulp, just the same.
“Please,” she says, “talk to me. I want to help.”
I shake my head and turn back to the TV, so drunk by now that it’s just a box of flashing colors and noise. This must be what babies see when they watch television, I think, only instead of being funny, it just depresses me more.
Twenty
Mel
“Mom? Can I come in?”
I poke my head into Mom and Dad’s home office without waiting for her answer; I can hear she’s on the phone, which is almost always the case, discussing church business in between hours of gossip.
“Only if the bake sale runs late,” she’s saying. “Oh, I know! Last year, her brownies were so burnt on the bottom, bless her heart. You know what, I’m not sure she did....”
I take a seat on the broad, padded windowsill when she holds up a finger, telling me to wait. This was my favorite spot as a kid, the biggest, sunniest window in our house. It overlooks the garden and lets me spy on our neighbors. They have two chickens roaming their yard and a cat who, miraculously, leaves them alone.
“How long do chickens live?” I ask, when she hangs up. The Banks have had these hens at least fourteen years, to my memory, and they look as spry as ever.
“Well, Lisa said ten years, and Bill said up to twenty, so who knows,” she answers, punching something into a calculator. Her reading glasses are perched at the end of her nose, blurring the wrinkles under her eyes. “But those aren’t the same hens, you know.”
“They’re not?”
“Oh, no, the cat killed the old ones years ago. You don’t remember?”
“Apparently not,” I say softly. Guess that cat isn’t so miraculous, after all.
“So,” Mom says, finally giving me her full attention, “what brings you into my office, today?” She and Dad love this shtick, pretending this spare bedroom with books and twin desks is a little business Josh and I frequent on our trips through the house.
“When Grandpa Fred died,” I start, turning on the bench, “did Dad cry?”
“Oh, like a baby.” She gives a sad smile, remembering. “Never in front of anyone, of course. Sometimes I’d catch him, but he was determined to grieve in private.”
I don’t remember any of this. In fact, the only thing I remember from Grandpa Fred’s death was the powdery pink cookies someone brought to his wake, a big tray stacked high. Josh and I ate so many, our lips were caked in pink sugar. I feel bad, now, that it never occurred to me to ask my dad how he was doing.
“Did he do anything else?” I ask. “Lose sleep, yell...start drinking a lot?”
Mom takes her glasses off, studying me. “Why do I get the feeling you’re asking for a very specific reason?”
This is always the risk when seeking advice from my folks. They see through me like crystal.
“Blake’s been...acting different, lately.” I chew my cheek. “I mean, I know we didn’t start talking again until after his dad died, so how would I be able to tell, but—but I can. He’s changing. And not in a good way.”
Mom nods with the earpiece of her glasses in her mouth, thinking. “Everyone grieves differently,” she says. “Some people bottle it up, some don’t; some grieve and get on with life, and others let it take over forever. And I’ve seen a few do some combination of it all.”
“Yeah. I guess I just wish he wouldn’t bottle it up with me.” I pick at my cuticles as the sun burns through my shirt, sharp and soothing.
“Give him time, sweetheart,” she says. “He’ll open up when he’s ready.”
I remember last night, the weight of his words. “Just worry about yourself, Mel, all right?”
The Blake I know—even this new, take-charge, spoil-my-woman one—wouldn’t say that. Because it implies something else, too: that he only worries about himself. That he isn’t mine to worry about, and that I’m not his.
I look back outside. The cat is asleep in the sun, right in the middle of the yard. I don’t know what I find harder to believe: that this sweet, old cat could attack the creatures he’d managed to coexist with all those years, or that he’s been given the opportunity to do it again.
Blake
Mel probably wouldn’t believe me, but I think about my dad every day. The closer the due date gets, the harder it is not to.
When Mom died, he changed—but not in the ways people gossiped about. They figured he got depressed and, with the love of his life gone, could no longer care for me the way he was supposed to, the way he always had. It was this assumption that made Mel’s family like me so much: Dad and I were poor things, pitiable. Charity cases.
The truth is, yeah, Dad loved her. They weren’t this century’s greatest romance or anything, but I remember them being happy together. He treated her well: flowers, breakfast in bed on Sundays, the whole nine.
There really wasn’t much change, though, in how he treated me before or after her death. He’d play catch with me in our yard after dinner, but only because Mom guilted him into it. He came to every soccer practice, but only because she reminded him.
When she died, he stayed the same. He just didn’t have her there as a personal assistant, his own walking, talking How to Be a Dad manual.
Around age ten, I figured it out: he never wanted a kid. It was supposed to be him and my mom, just the two of them, enjoying life and disposable income and weeklong vacations out of the blue, forever and ever. ’Til death do them part.
Then I arrived, and Mom changed, readily making room in their lives for three instead of two. But Dad couldn’t let go of that idea—couldn’t make the addition of me, his son, seem real.
The cancer made her even kinder, if that were possible. It made him bitter. Here he’d wanted to spend his life childfree with the love of his life, and soon he’d be a single dad.
The day she died, I felt her hand go limp in mine through the railings of the hospital bed. The nurses didn’t think I should be there when it happened, but Dad insisted.
“I don’t care how hard it is to stay,” he told me on the way to her room, hands braced on my shoulders as the elevator lifted us like feathers, “you don’t let go of her hand. We aren’t leaving her side until she—” He paused, his voice catching. It was the closest I’d ever seen him come to crying. “Until she doesn’t need us there, anymore.”
Even when her chest stopped moving, and someone called the time, I didn’t let go. Dad held on, too, for what felt like hours. He used his other hand to touch her face, brushing back invisible hair she’d lost months ago.
Still, not one tear fell from his eyes. I fought mine, but failed.
When I sniffed, loud, he looked at me. It was like he’d forgotten I was there, or surprised I was staring at her just as intently as him.
The car ride home was cold. By the time the heater kicked in, we were already turning into our neighborhood. The house looked like an unblinking face in the darkness. I didn’t want to go in.
Dad didn’t want to, either, because he cut the engine and sat there for a while, feeling the wind rock the car.
“Just you and me now,” he said, letting his hand fall from the ignition. He turned, met my eyes, and nodded once. I nodded back.
As it turned out, “you and me” didn’t mean “us.” It meant we survived separately under the same roof. It meant I raised myself, accepting surrogate parents wherever I could find them, especially Mel’s.
Her mom liked that I was polite and ate her cooking like it was the best thing in the world. Her dad liked that I knew all about boating and marveled over the tiny ships-in-bottles on the shelves in his office.
After Mel and I stopped talking, I knew I’d be sad—but I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was to give up her family, too. Breaking ties with them, after all those years, was harder than breaking ties with my dad.
Actually, leaving his house was easy. I just woke up one morning, depressed out of my head, and looked around. What was keeping me here?
I had a job by then, selling t-shirts at the arena during concerts. The pay was awful, but I’d saved almost every bit of it for five months. I looked online and found some guys in need of a roommate, and that was that. I moved out that night, before Dad even got home from work.
My roommates were slobs, so I stayed in my room most of the time and cooked my meals with a hot plate, stuff from cans and frozen dinners, stored in the little dorm fridge the former tenant left behind. It was covered in stickers: band logos, local bike shops, the community college. That sticker was cobalt blue with bold, white letters. I stared at it while the microwave counted down or the hot plate warmed up, thinking.
By the start of the spring semester, I’d enrolled for my associate’s, focusing on business and design.
Dad never called. We never ran into each other around town, didn’t visit, never talked shit out, the way they do in movies. We just got on with our lives. We survived.
The first call from the hospital came the day after I got my degree. I had a stack of resumes in my hand, fresh from the print shop.
“Is this Blake Foster?” a woman asked, her voice distant and fuzzy in my cell.
“Yes.”
“Hi, Mr. Foster—this is Greta at St. Anthony’s Medical Center. We have you listed as the emergency contact for Patrick Foster.”
“That’s my dad.” My blood chilled instantly, a reaction that scared me just as much as this conversation. “Is he okay?”
“I think you’d better come down here as soon as you can,” she said. For some reason, her voice was crystal clear now, every word like a slug burrowing into my head. “Your father’s been admitted to the ICU.”
High cholesterol, weak heart, stressful job: he was a perfect storm for cardiac disease, according to the doctor.
“Will he....” I glanced at the honey-colored door to his room, shut tight. “Will he recover?”
The doctor inhaled slowly, like a sigh in reverse. “It’s unlikely. The damage to his heart is pretty bad.” He got quiet, putting his hand on my shoulder. It made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t move. “Most cases like his have about six months.”
“Six months before what?” I realized the answer before I could finish my question. It came out sputtery and loud, and my eyes burned.
I didn’t see him. I spent that night tearing through the streets, gunning my car up and down highways, squealing tires to make myself feel better. It didn’t work.
Why was I sad? Hadn’t I already put him out of my life for good? How was this any different?
I prowled through Mel’s neighborhood with my lights off. Her family was having dinner. It looked like Josh was arguing with Mr. Thatcher, both of them talking at once and waving their arms, but then they laughed and Mel laughed and Mrs. Thatcher, stirring something at the stove, smiled and shook her head at all of them.
I could have gone inside. I still had their house key in my wallet, in fact. While I wasn’t sure if Mel would be happy to see me or not, I was sure the rest of them would. Pull up a chair, they’d tell me. Stay a while.
Instead, I sped away, leaving a cloud of burnt rubber in the air over their curb. I let my anger and spite make the decision for me, something I was doing a lot by then. Something I still do, I guess.
The day he got out of the hospital, he called me. “Hey—it’s me,” his voicemail stammered. He coughed. “The hospital told me you came to see me and, uh...sign off on the treatments and stuff. Just wanted to say thanks.” There was such a long pause, I thought he’d hung up. “Stop by, some time,” he added suddenly. “If you want.”
Beep.
The next hospital call was two months later. You have four months left with him, I thought, as I signed all the forms they needed without going into his room.
He didn’t call me that time.
Four months snuck up. I drove by his house every day after work, my job at the agency still fresh. His lights were on, car in the driveway. He was still alive.
I thought about stopping by, every time. As a kid, all I wanted was for him to spend more time with me. Now he was home almost 24/7, and I was the one avoiding him. What a twist.
Month Six came and went. I stopped in front of his house once, even went so far as turning the car off and undoing my seatbelt. But then I saw his shadow move in front of a window, and I changed my mind.
He outlived the predictions, but it didn’t seem like a blessing so much as a curse. In Month Nine, he was hospitalized permanently. By ten, he’d lost so much oxygen from the attacks, his memory was shot.
“I should warn you,” his new doctor told me, “he isn’t showing signs of…recognition.”
“What do you mean?”
He adjusted his glasses and met my eyes. “He probably won’t know who you are.”
It should have bothered me. Devastated me, in fact, based on how quietly the doctor broke this news. Instead, it made it so much easier to step into the room, pull up a chair, and stay a while.
In the end, I got six weeks with him. Six weeks of silence, of blank stares, of things I could have said, but didn’t. It was already too late.
Occasionally, I’d bring him photo albums of his younger days: Polaroids of Mom and him on mountainsides, in diner booths, driving their van all over the map.
He didn’t even recognize her anymore.
The night he died, I stayed up until dawn drinking Irish coffee at the hotel bar across the street. Caitlin-Anne sent me angry texts about where the hell was I, what bitch was I cheating on her with, and when would I realize what a good thing I had with her—when she was already gone?
I turned off my phone before I could text back something nasty. It wasn’t her fault; she didn’t know yet. She still thought—exactly as I’d wanted her to—I never had a dad.
Well, I thought, slinging back the last of my drink
and ordering another, she’s not wrong.
Still, it felt like I had lost something, someone, and I couldn’t figure out why. It had to be more than the genetic factor, right? Maybe it was all the things I’d never told him, and all the things he’d never told me. Yeah, it was clichéd, but I’d never heard him say he loved me. I’d never said it to him, or even about him, either.
Sometimes I imagine it, playing out the deathbed conversations we never had. Would he have said it then?
Would I?
So…yeah, I think about my dad. Especially now, with my own son just weeks from being born, when all I can do is stare dumbly at these sonograms and baby books like I’m studying for a new ad campaign, not my future as a father. Mel doesn’t get it, which is my fault. She tries.
“Talk to me,” she said last night. Even though I was wasted, I remember that part with painful clarity. “I want to help.”
And some part of me wants to let her, I swear.
I just don’t know how.
Twenty-One
Mel
“Staying here tonight?”
I look up from my plate. Josh looks like he really is just curious, but he knows Mom and Dad (mostly Mom) consider my relationship with Blake “living in sin,” since I spend more nights in his bed than my own. Mom clears her throat but, thank God, doesn’t say anything.
“Um...I don’t think so.” I stab another bite of pasta and kick him under the table, like old times.
After dinner, while Mom makes brownies for some church function, I carry the empty batter bowls into the living room, scooping what she left behind with my finger and licking it off.
“What are you watching?” I sit on the armrest of Dad’s chair. He has his glasses on, but still squints at the screen.
“Documentary on the Cold War. Care to join me?”
“That sounds riveting.”
He laughs and swipes some of the batter from the bowl just before I get to it. “Fine, don’t watch it with me.”
