The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  “So tell me again, Dad, why’d you quit?”

  There go his eyes again. Not shifty—it’s more like they’re losing battery power. She can see that there’s a lot going on somewhere deep in the hard drive, but he holds it back. She knows him. He quit because she had to.

  “I was having stomach problems,” he says.

  This is new. “Stomach problems? What kind of stomach problems?”

  He shrugs. “Nothing serious. Acid reflux, if I ate too much, or too late at night.”

  “Jesus, Dad, people die of acid reflux.”

  He nods. “Tommy Dorsey. Choked to death in his sleep.”

  She doesn’t know who Tommy Dorsey was. “And was he an alcoholic?”

  He nods again. “Point taken. But I quit in time.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Oh yes. Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’m taking care of myself. Just like you.”

  “So you’re a wine merchant who’s had to quit drinking wine. And they say the age of irony is dead.” Actually, she thinks it’s the age of subtlety that has died.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” her father says. “How’s the writing coming?”

  “Pretty good,” she says, cautiously. “It’s tough writing with a crayon, but Sandra says she might let me have a dull pencil next week.”

  “Ah, a real writer can write with a burnt match and a roll of toilet paper.”

  “I’m not a real writer,” she says, looking at her notebook. It’s not even a real writer’s notebook. It’s a scribbler. It says SCRIBBLER in big black letters across the top of it. The rest of the cover is pink. It’s a pink scribbler. At least it’s made from recycled, acid-free paper. Where it says “Subject” on the front, she’s written “Me.”

  Her father laughs. “Just like I’m not a real addict.”

  Her father is what people in program call a dry drunk. He’s stopped drinking but he hasn’t done the work. The triggers that made him drink are still there, they’re just triggering something else. Daphne begins making a mental list of some of the other things they can’t talk about. It seems to be growing. One: Why did he really leave White Falls? Okay, okay, she knows it wasn’t because of her. But was it because of her? Two: Elinor. She can sort of see what he sees in her. She’s at least a dozen years younger than him, she’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s cool. But what does she see in him? Three: why she really stopped coming here, or returning his calls, or wanting to talk to him. That’s what she’s supposed to be figuring out with the scribbler. Four: his drinking. And now five: What the fuck’s wrong with his stomach?

  She should write all those down before she forgets them. Her father isn’t the only one having trouble remembering things.

  * * *

  —

  Where was I, Sandra? Dad came down for a few minutes and we had tea and talked about our addictions. Well, he talked about my addictions. And how much I’ve changed. Dad seems to think I’m back to being the person I was before I became an addict, which I’m not sure is a good thing, because that was the person who became an addict. He also thinks addiction is an add-on, like icing on a cake, and when you lick it off you still have the cake. I think of it more like a cancer that gradually becomes the cake. There was a maple tree in our backyard in White Falls that had a wild grape vine growing up it. Every year the grape vine got bigger and bigger and shaded out the maple until eventually the maple tree died and there was nothing there but its skeleton covered in vines. It still looked like a tree, but it wasn’t a tree.

  What I meant earlier about Festus and exiles is that there’s always a before and an after. For Festus, it was before he left Botswana and after he left Botswana. For me, it was before my dad left and after my dad left. I saw myself as having been exiled from my childhood, like my childhood was going on without me somewhere else. Does that make sense? After Dad left, I was forced to skip that gentle slide into adolescence—you know, when most people gradually break from their parents and slowly put themselves together as separate human beings. I did that, like, overnight. Festus never adjusted to not being in Botswana, but he couldn’t go back. Same with me. Suddenly, I was looking after Mom, looking after myself, making my own lunches and Kraft Dinners, taking buses to Toronto by myself. Dad obviously thought I was ready for that. He likes to tell the story about teaching me to ride a bike when I was eight, how he ran beside me with his hand on the back of the seat, and I yelled, “Don’t let go, Dad,” and he said, “I won’t, don’t worry,” and then he let go.

  I couldn’t trust my dad. I guess I never got over not trusting him. It was like, he told me to look after Mom, but I felt I had to look after him, too.

  Before he left, my bedroom was upstairs, next to my parents’ bedroom. I could hear them talking at night, going to the bathroom, brushing their teeth. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I knew they were there. If I called out they would hear me. Kids need to know that shit. That’s what family was for me, boring but familiar. Safe, like you always know what’s behind the door. When I came to visit my dad and Elinor in Toronto, as a kid, they treated me like an asylum seeker. They gave me my own room, in fact they gave me this whole basement apartment, with my own entrance and everything. They thought I’d like the privacy. I’d lie awake in the dark and couldn’t see or hear a fucking thing. Well, that’s not true. I could hear my neck turning. Have you ever heard that grinding sound in your neck when you move your head back and forth? Loneliest sound in the world. It has to be dead still for you to hear that. It used to scare the shit out of me. And there was no one I could call out to. They were two floors up, pretending they didn’t have a twelve-year-old in the house.

  Now Dad says he knew I hated this basement apartment. Well, then, why did he stick me down here? Why am I down here now?

  When I was older, I brought Festus down here, usually in the daytime when Dad and Elinor weren’t home, though sometimes I’d sneak him in at night. Mainly for the company. Okay, mainly for the weed and the sex, but also for the company. In my mother’s house, when I had my boyfriend Kyle over, I didn’t sneak him in. It was like I only wanted to be immature when I was with my dad.

  Kyle and I were in high school together. He was a year ahead of me. He had his dad’s car. That’s another thing, Dad took the car when he left, and Mom didn’t drive, so I had to learn to drive in Kyle’s dad’s car. Okay, petty shit, but still. Kyle would pick me up when we went to parties, and on weekends we’d drive to the mall so we could bum cigarettes and watch all the unhappy women shuffle by, their heads down, parkas hanging open like they’d just been mugged, wearing running shoes in winter, going into Giant Tiger or Price Chopper on their husbands’ paydays, or Value Village the rest of the week.

  Kyle thought we were serious and I didn’t tell him we weren’t. He was just someone who was always there. I didn’t need to tell him I loved him to keep him around, I just had to not tell him to fuck off. We’re not talking Don Juan here. Byron said women only love their first lovers, that the passion goes downhill from there until it hits rock bottom after marriage. Such a romantic, that Byron. I didn’t love my first lover. I wouldn’t use the word “passion” to describe what Kyle and I were doing. I knew he was a loser from day one, the first time he asked me out and took me to a fucking monster-truck rally in Pembroke. His idea of a good time was going to Bad Boy to look at beds. I hung with him in school because I was fairly sure he wouldn’t jump me when I was stoned and get me pregnant, and his mere presence might stop someone else from jumping me. I gave him nooners under his coat at lunch, and sometimes I let him in with a condom. You can’t call that love.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t think love was important. It was that I thought love was so important that what Kyle and I were doing couldn’t be it. I know this sounds weird, but it’s true: all the time I was letting Kyle fuck me I was saving myself for someone else.

  The day K
yle finished high school he got a job at Staples and thought he was set for life. I wanted to scream. He said he could work his way up to manager in a couple of years. Have you ever gone into a Staples and wondered why the printer ink cartridges are never in any recognizable order? That’s because whoever organized them was someone like Kyle. Anyway, that was not going to be my life, pushing a shopping cart to the checkout with three screeching toddlers in tow. Wearing baggy sweats and a SpongeBob T-shirt over my last good bra. No, nope, no thank you, I wasn’t going to be the fish at the bottom of the capitalist pork barrel. But how could I break up with a guy I barely felt I was going out with? Christ, I had to get away. If I’d told him the truth, that I was going to university in Vancouver, he’d have wanted to come with me. So instead I just left. I learned from the best, after all.

  Why Vancouver? I don’t know. Well, I do: Vancouver was the farthest I could get from White Falls without a passport. I told Mom where I was going, of course, I couldn’t let that happen to her twice. And I asked Dad for tuition money, which he gave me. And so, just under three years ago, I arrived in Vancouver to major in English at the University of British Columbia, got my own place, sent Dad a photo of it so he could see what he was paying for, bought new clothes, got a life. It was all kind of last minute, but it was good. It felt part of a plan I hadn’t made yet.

  I did go back to White Falls. Once, last summer, middle of July. It seems odd, now that I think about it, that I hadn’t gone back in the whole two years I was in BC. Not even for Christmas. Dad came out on business a couple of times, and we got together briefly, a lunch, a walk in Stanley Park once. But I had a life in Vancouver. I was going to school, keeping up with classes, reading tons of books for Prof Curtis’s and Alyssa’s classes. I didn’t feel anything tugging me back. Mom had her job and Dad had Elinor. I felt wanted, I suppose, but I didn’t feel needed. But last summer, I stopped going to classes—I didn’t finish second year and wasn’t intending to go back in the fall. Maybe I felt a little at loose ends. I think I probably told myself that visiting my parents was a mature thing to do. Anyway, whatever the reason, it was a big mistake.

  By then I was taking so many drugs I thought I was queen of the world, I could do anything, change everything. I had met Paul, my wealthy new boyfriend. And I had a supplier, Wendell, who kept a can of cocaine and other goodies in the glovebox of his VW van. Between Paul and Wendell, I was pretty well provided for. The plan, such as it was, was to visit my mom in White Falls for a few days in July, then come down to Toronto to see Dad and Elinor before heading back to Vancouver to resume my so-called adult life.

  * * *

  —

  She closes her scribbler. She gets up from the dining table and looks out through one of the high-low windows at the driveway. Dandelions. Bladderwort. Chickweed. They seem so innocent, so incongruous, from down here in her sanctuary; yes, she knows, it’s nature trying to reassert itself. But why can’t it say roses? Why can’t anything ever come up roses?

  That trip to White Falls had been such a bad idea. She had intended to sneak in, stay a few days, and then sneak out again. But someone must have seen her at the bus station, because Kyle phoned the first night she was in town.

  “Daph. I knew you’d come back.”

  “I’m not back, Kyle,” she’d said. “I’m just visiting my mom for a few days.”

  “A few days, good, we can get together.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Kyle.”

  “Daphne, you just disappeared. I didn’t know where you went, I thought something bad must have happened to you.”

  She knew the feeling. “Nothing bad happened to me, Kyle.”

  “I thought we were solid. We were looking at houses.”

  “No, we weren’t. We were looking at mattresses.”

  “I really want to see you, Daph. Just somewhere for a coffee, like, just to see you. You owe me that much.”

  She didn’t owe him shit but you couldn’t argue with a post, so she agreed to meet him at the Tim Hortons, the one by the bridge at Madawaska and McKay.

  The place was packed with the aged and the infirm, wearing Harris tweed and Payless shoes and drinking decaf double-doubles. It was like a bus had just pulled in from the Land of Nod. Kyle was sitting at a corner table when she arrived, looking through the glass wall at the parking lot in front of East Side Mario’s, pretending he hadn’t seen her come in. He was still handsome, but he didn’t look good. He hadn’t shaved in a week, or even run his fingers through his hair. His green parka looked like he’d worn it while changing the oil in his car and then rolled around on the garage floor. And he had the shakes. He could barely raise his cup to his mouth.

  Had he always looked like that? Had they all? She couldn’t really remember, but maybe. That had been the look. Madawaska Grunge. Her mother used to go ape-shit every time Daphne went out with Kyle and the gang, like she was just doing it to disgrace her and the mayor. You’re not like those kids, she’d say, to which Daphne replied, Just because they aren’t smug, privileged, middle-class assholes waiting to graduate so they can take a course in real estate and run for city council doesn’t mean they’re bad people. But her mother had had a point. They’d stopped developing. When high school ended, so did their lives. She wasn’t about to let that happen to her. Her first year in Vancouver, she’d bought a set of bookshelves and started filling them, partly with texts for school but mostly with books from used bookstores and church rummage sales. She’d had a good eye. Her father, the non-addict, had shown her how one book led to another and then to another. She bought nice clothes with good labels. She didn’t want to look like what she was, someone who was not from Vancouver. As a result, she probably looked like someone from nowhere.

  When she reached Kyle’s table, he looked up, startled.

  “How are you, Kyle?”

  Close up, he looked worse. Scabby lips, puffy lids, teeth like jagged black rocks. His face was like the landscape around Sudbury. He didn’t seem able to locate her eyes. He kept looking through her, or down at her chest, or out to where a minivan was pulling into the drive-through. Tears ran down his cheeks. She felt sorry for him. She knew a junky when she saw one.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I drink too much coffee.”

  “You should switch to decaf,” she said.

  “Can I get you something?” Kyle asked.

  “No, I’m good. Are you working somewhere?”

  “I’m temporarily on EI.” He looked down at his cup. “Until I saw you just now, I thought, you know, there might still be a chance.”

  “A chance?”

  “For us.”

  She let that lie on the table for a few seconds until it stopped twitching.

  “I’m seeing someone, Kyle.”

  He nodded.

  “A lawyer. His name’s Paul.”

  Kyle nodded again and looked at her dress. “You two living together?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “I still have my own place.” A place her father was paying for and that she hadn’t slept in for months. Paul said it was a waste of money and she should give it up, but it was where she met with Wendell some afternoons.

  “Where are you living?” she asked Kyle.

  He made a vague gesture over his shoulder. She looked.

  “You live in the McKay Medical Centre?”

  He laughed, but maybe he did.

  “No, basement place on Front,” he said.

  “Still see the old crew?”

  He shook his head sadly. “They’re all gone,” he said, like he was describing an empty box of chocolates. Ottawa, the Yukon, Fort McMurray. No one kept in touch anymore. “We’re supposed to be into social media, right?” he said. “Everyone texting and on Facebook all the time, no matter where we live? That’s bullshit. They’re all like you, Daph. You see them one day, you ask them what’s up, they say not m
uch, this and that, ask you where they can score some weed, and the next thing you hear they’re tree planting up at Sioux Lookout.”

  “How come you’re still here?”

  This time he looked right at her. “Where would I go?”

  She shrugged and looked over at three girls about their age who were sitting at a corner table that was strewn with pastel plastic baby toys. One had a chokehold on a squirming baby in her lap and was shaking a bottle, while the other two stared out the window with expressions that said a nuclear bomb going off would be good right about now. A sign on the wall above their heads said: Tell Us How We’re Doing.

  She told Kyle she was sorry, she had to go. She told him her mother was making dinner, which might even have been true. Maybe someone else would have caved, told Kyle of course she still cared for him, she’d never intended to hurt him. Maybe she should have bought him a Fruit Explosion, or invited him over for dinner. But all she could think then, all she can think now, was, Holy shit, did I ever get out of there in time. She stood up and said goodbye, waited half a second for him to respond, and walked out. He didn’t watch her leave.

  She finds thinking about Kyle unexpectedly depressing. She needs to stretch her legs, practise a few simple motor skills. She has a coffeemaker down here, but upstairs her father and Elinor have an espresso machine, quite a fancy one, you practically need to be a civil engineer to operate it. Community colleges should offer courses in it, she thinks on her way up, Basic Barista or something. Maybe they do.

  Would the end result have been the same if she’d stayed in White Falls? No, no, of course not. If she’d stayed she wouldn’t have met Professor Curtis, or Alyssa. It may not show, but those people have had a profound effect on her. Does she really believe her whole life has been a waste? She can’t, or she wouldn’t be here in her father’s kitchen attempting to make the perfect soy latte. If she’d stayed in White Falls, she’d be stirring a spoonful of Nescafé into a cracked mug, or sitting in a laundromat hypnotized by twirling diapers. On the other hand, if she’d stayed in Vancouver, she’d be dead. There’s always another hand.