“I know,” he says, kissing my cheek and sliding toward the guest room to check in on my dad, and then he’ll likely go on into the den, where he’ll slip once again into the clatter of the baseball game, the background noise of his life. “Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I wasn’t feeling well.”
I reach for the tinfoil to cover the plate, wrapping it securely, glancing down for a moment, catching a glimpse of my reflection, tangled and angled and mashed up like a fun-house mirror, looking back at myself, resembling nothing like the me I’ve come to know.
Later that night, after the barbecue, I unlatch the door and shuffle into the dark foyer, the kitchen lights bouncing off the umbrella rack, the shadows heavy. My flip-flops drag under my sullen weight. I’m still not feeling right. Whether it was the burden of forcing a frozen smile while chitchatting with Luanne or avoiding Darcy, who refused to make eye contact, stuck on her side of the great divide of our fight, or the gravity of watching little Charlie and his toddler friends chase each other, whirling like spinning tops through the front yard sprinkler, or the loneliness I felt without my husband beside me, I’m bone-weary, tired to the core, fatigued in that way that you feel in every one of your cells.
“Tilly.” My father’s voice is a croak. He is waiting for me in the kitchen.
“Jesus!” I shriek, not expecting him, not expecting anyone. “You’re up! I almost had a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, his face haunted, then adds, “For scaring you.” Because we both realize that the breadth of his apology could extend for miles, for years.
“What happened?” I say, regretting it instantly because I just want to tumble under my covers and close my eyes for three days straight. A muscle twitches in my eyelid, a spontaneous, uncontrollable cry for rest.
“I hate to ask, but do you have anything to eat?” my dad says, like he isn’t perfectly capable of moving to the pantry and finding out himself. I open the refrigerator and prep a plate of meatloaf I made two nights ago.
I set the food in front of him and pull out a chair, hoping he’ll make this easy for both of us, though, if I were to really think about it, my father’s strong suit was never making it easy for anyone. He forks at the meatloaf, pushing it around the edges of his plate, occasionally spooning it in for a morose, thoughtful bite, his jaw working and working and working, as if he could chew forever because then, surely, we wouldn’t have to talk.
Finally, too exhausted to wait much longer, I say simply, “Dad, please, tell me what happened. You’ve been sober for so long.”
He runs a few fingers through his tufted graying hair and shoots out his breath. He’s hesitating, wondering if he can spin this into some tale in which he is the victim, in which the bartender held him down and poured those shots down the back of his throat, while he thrashed around and tried to refuse. Metaphorically at least. My dad, though a former football captain and two-time Westlake businessman of the year, is a portrait of contradictions, the epitome of the adage Don’t believe what you see, because what you see of him is often a bluff, a flimsy excuse for what is really happening at his core. Tonight, though, he surprises me.
“Adrianna left me,” he says, eyes casting down at the oak table.
“Timmy Hernandez told me that you told him she was in Mexico. Not that she left you,” I say, confused, disbelieving.
“She is. Now. But she left me three weeks ago. She went down there without me.” He sighs. “We already had the tickets and prepaid for the condo.” He looks so very, very old as he says this, like his joy for living has been vaporized, like he’s ready to call it a day. The creases sink lower around his mouth the circles around his eyes are black holes. I think of the picture from the bottom drawer in my bureau, the one in which our family seemed unbreakable, and even though I’m armed with the map of how he got here, it’s difficult to reconcile the snapshot of that man with the one sitting here now. My father listlessly nudges a chunk of meatloaf, and I rise to get him a glass of water.
“What happened?” I ask, holding the cup under the faucet for too long, distracted by my thoughts. The cold water spills onto my wrist, and I splash it off me, a damp dog after the rain.
He shakes his head. “She was diagnosed with melanoma.”
“What?” I say. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“No, no, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Stage one. Very early. They caught it, she’ll be fine.” Even as he says this, his face turns ashen, his mind casting about for a drink. I wipe the butt of the glass with a paper towel and set it down in front of him. He sips long and deeply, like he’s arid ground grateful for a storm.
“So if she’s going to be fine, what’s the problem?”
“I just …” He stumbles, looking for any sort of reasonable way to explain how far he’s fallen. His eyes burn red, his lashes batting furiously. “I just couldn’t accept it. That it was fixable. With your mother … it happened so quickly with her, and when Adie told me this … I couldn’t accept that she’d be okay.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I thought I could handle it. And Adie just wanted to deal with it and be done with it, move on like it wasn’t a big deal.” He waves his fork in the air, as if informing me that his girlfriend has cancer would have been a nuisance. “Anyway … I picked up a beer one night to relax, thinking it would be just one. And then it was more than one, and then it was the next night …” He drops his head. “And so on.”
“And Adie?”
“You know she has a zero-tolerance policy,” he says, his voice weighted in guilt. Adie’s first husband was a nasty drunk, and much as she loved my father—and she did, she did love my father—she’d told him from the start that she’d spent too long rebuilding her life to see another man tear it down all over again. I can’t blame her for jetting it to Puerto Vallarta. If I were a different person, I would too.
“So now what?” I ask, reaching over to clasp his free hand, because I’m not that different person, even if for a glimmer of a moment, I wish I were.
“Now I stop,” he says.
“Come on, Dad, it’s not that easy.”
“You’ll help me,” he says, locking our fingers together.
“Dad …”
“Please, Tilly, please. You always help me.” His voice cracks. “You’re the one who helps me the best.”
I start to protest, because I’ve done this with my father before, because the guidance counselor in me knows better, knows that a one-person army in the face of this particular enemy isn’t enough. But he looks at me with his runny eyes and his worn skin and yes, I see it there, his shame, and my heart cracks open for my father, the victim, whether or not he shares some, if not the bulk, of the blame for his burdens.
Of course I’ll help him. This is what I do best.
five
My father, Ty, and I work out a plan. Or, at least, I work one out and explain it over coffee on Sunday morning, before Tyler leaves for his annual fishing trip with his old crew from the UW. Because Sheriff Hernandez has revoked his license for a month and because I don’t trust my father enough to leave him un-watched, on his own, until he’s proven to me that he’s capable of going straight, my dad will remain in our guest room until his thirty days of probation are up. From there, we will reevaluate, examine his sobriety, explore what we all feel up to tackling next. I mention a treatment center, tentatively, with gentle feelers, but my dad balks, his ears red with angry contrition.
“I’m not going back to that place,” he snaps, referring to the rehab facility that I finally shipped him off to the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college. When everything came to a head and it became too obvious to ignore; when Darcy called me in a terrified, whispering frenzy, locked in her closet as the house was pillaged by a meth head in search of something worth selling, and my father was dead drunk on the downstairs couch, dead to the world around him, oblivious to his daughter, cowering and alone.
It is not the sturdiest
of plans, I realize on Monday night, as I navigate the SUV to Susanna’s to retrieve her and the twins for the Fourth of July fireworks show, but it is the compromise we can all live with for now. I still haven’t spoken to Darcy. Even though I know that she won’t wave her white flag and that eventually I’ll need to wave mine, I still can’t stomach it. I’ll call her tomorrow, I think, just like I told myself yesterday. I’ll call her and pretend that this didn’t happen, and we’ll all move on, and eventually, I’ll find a way to tell her about Dad. This is how it’s always worked, yet I’m annoyed at myself for the concession. Or maybe just at the concession itself. Who knows?
I beep the horn and the twins jet from the house. Susie lumbers after them, like she might rather be in bed, though I’m happy to see that her hair is washed, brushed shiny, a dollop of lipstick and blush spread across her face.
“We have to make a decision, you know,” I say to her, once the kids are safely buckled in and we’re speeding down Route 72 toward the lake.
“Shhh,” she says, casting a quick glance behind her. “I don’t want to talk about Austin in front of them.”
“No, not a decision about him, a decision about the musical. Which one. Anderson needs to know by Friday.”
“Oh,” she answers, like she’s contemplating a million reasons why she should back out. “Well, I don’t really care.” She pauses. “Whatever you think will be the most fun.”
I glance over at her before flicking my eyes back toward the road. My best friend. No, she hasn’t had a little fun with much in a while. The boys are yammering to each other behind us, and Susie just sighs, stares out the window, looking like she’d like to sink into the seat and whoosh, be invisible.
When she first discovered Austin’s indiscretion, I had to talk her down from maiming him. Now, as the reality has seeped in, as she’s discovered that she might not be made of enough grace to forgive him, and, with this discovery, realized this thing might shatter every last vision of her future, she’s shifted from angry to broken. Not vengeful, not grief-stricken. Just broken.
“Then I vote for Grease,” I say, hoping I can bolster her. “Remember how much fun it was senior year?”
She shrugs.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s time to anoint a new Sandra Dee. You can pass over the crown.” I pull off the highway, turning down the bumpy dirt road toward the lake. The same road I drove down a million times back in high school, our summers spent working the day shift at the grocery store, at the diner, at a local construction job, the nights spent building bonfires and sipping wine coolers and listening to Pearl Jam on the dock.
“I think I’d be passing over the spandex pants, actually,” she says, smiling. “Like I could ever fit into those again. God, yeah, okay, that was fun.” She pauses, awash in the memory of Grease and of everything that has come after, as we turn into the clearing that opens to the lake. “Okay, why not. I could use a distraction.”
“There are worse things you could do.” I grin, giddy, shutting down the engine.
“Enough,” she says at my Grease reference, tugging the twins from their car seats and stepping out into the night, though she laughs in spite of herself.
Though there are easily several hundred people gathered, I spot Luanne flagging us down almost immediately. Her hand flap-flap-flaps, her skinny arm waving us over. Charlie, her three-year-old, sits on her foot, munching on a cheese sandwich, and Ben, her husband, stands to kiss us hello.
“Hey,” she says breathlessly as Susie goes about spreading a blanket and unpacking a picnic dinner of peanut butter sandwiches and Oreos for the kids. “Come here.” She tugs my wrist, dragging me away from the fray.
Luanne and I look almost exactly the same. Smoky blue eyes that are set about two millimeters too far apart, small rounded noses that we inherited from my mother, milky skin that burns on the spot without sunscreen but, as I learned in high school, can be nurtured into just the right type of tan. Yet, despite our resemblance, she is subtly prettier than I am. Her features fold into each other more smoothly; the lines around her eyes have yet to seep in. Though the lines around my eyes have been earned over the years. She never had to do the heavy lifting.
“First of all, how’s Dad?” she says.
I’d called Luanne after the barbecue and broken the news, but only after she swore not to tell Darcy, not to honor the sister code of always sharing secrets. As the middle one, Luanne had a buffer on either end of her when Mom died and Dad spiraled into an alcoholic haze. She kept going to soccer practice or taking her extra biology lab because I was busy writing checks for the bills that my father would forget to pay or dashing to the store when we ran out of toilet paper or reading Nancy Drew with Darcy come bedtime, when my dad was “still at work,” though presumably, in retrospect, he was at a bar instead.
Luanne, as expected, absorbed the latest news with the even-keeledness of a middle child. “Let me know what I can do to help,” she said, as if he’d come down with a bad spell of allergies. “Maybe I can come over and talk with him,” she said, her professional nursing tone on full display. I could hear Charlie clamoring for her in the background and Ben shushing him until Mommy was off the phone, and I was certain that as soon as we hung up, Luanne would be just fine. Yet another disaster that she’d review from the outside in, while her older sister stuck herself smack in the middle of the chaos and buffed it clean.
“Sober,” I say with a shrug. Which he is. Home and sober and taking up residence on the den couch, watching the Mariners game, plopping right into the dent that Tyler left this morning. “We’ll see.”
I’ve already written off my dream, my freaky premonition-like dream, as nothing more than coincidence. I’ve heard about this before: that if you really home in on someone, on their energy, their body language, their patterns, you might somehow develop a sixth sense, intuit the future or what they might say next or what they’re thinking. Which is, I supposed when I thought about it last night while trying to fall asleep, exactly what must have happened with my father. And as far as this seed of anger? This breeding irritation with the world? Well, I mean, come on, who wouldn’t be a little put out, I think, a little damn pissed off at things, even if it’s entirely against her nature to be so?
“Okay, good,” Luanne says, an afterthought, like the bow has already been tied around my father’s recovery. An electric pulse of annoyance surges through me. “So listen, I have news. I’m pregnant.”
“Oh, Lulu, that is so, so wonderful!” I pull her toward me, clutching her tight, then pushing her back to take a look. “You’re not showing yet.”
“I’m only five weeks,” she says, her voice a whisper, right as the announcer, Steven Sommerfield, who runs the local radio station, steps up to the mike and declares the festivities nearly ready to begin, and I have to lean in closer to hear her. “So don’t say anything just yet. I just got the blood work back today.”
“Five weeks! Oh my gosh,” I say, louder now, above the din. “I might be pregnant too, actually!” Casually, though, like I haven’t been running to the bathroom and checking my underwear every other hour in the past two days. My period is due any day.
“Wait, what?” She squeals. “You’re pregnant too?!”
“No, no. I mean, I guess I could be.”
“That would be amazing,” she says, kissing my cheek, squeezing my hand. “Wouldn’t Mom just love that?”
I smile openly at her, because that is my middle sister—so seemingly simple and then out-of-nowhere deep. Before I can answer, a thundering boom explodes above our heads, crystal lights forming a layered flower soaring in the sky, then twinkling down, fading, fading, fading into nothing.
Darcy is planted on my front steps when I pull into my driveway after dropping Susanna and the twins back at home.
“What?” I bark, still angry, that bass note of disharmony beating in me, alive, present. I reach in the backseat to lug a grocery bag I’d earlier forgotten. “Is this your peace offering or somethin
g?”
“Fine,” she says flatly, standing and holding up her open palms. “Yes, I’m sorry. Get over it.” She hesitates. “Also, I have to crash here.”
“Of course,” I say. “Always with the catch.” I trudge up the porch, the bag full of canned beans and peas and corn, cramping my left bicep.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “Jesus.” We both know it’s not like me to hold the grudge, to make her work hard for her contrition. But the sticky anger isn’t letting go. I push past her. “Come on, please? I had to pack up from Dante’s, so I just need to stay here a few days before I head back to L.A. My ticket isn’t for another week, or trust me, I’d be out of here.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Darcy! Pull it together!” I drop the bag—too hard—by my feet, and the cans clang together, a cymbal punctuating my thoughts. “I mean, look at you! What are you doing with your life?”
Her eyes flare and she steps backward, as if the force from my unexpected ire has literally propelled her away, and bam! She trips over the suitcase that I’m just now noticing and is on her ass in a second.
“Shit!” Darcy yells.
I chew the inside of my lip, willing my pulse—a metronome in my neck—to slow. What is wrong with you, Tilly Farmer? I think, at the exact moment that Darcy shoots me a What bug crawled up your ass? look. Finally, when I’m certain that I won’t resort to physical harm, I exhale and sit down next to her.
“What happened?” I sigh.
She wipes her dirtied palms on her shorts. “Eh, I slept with him last night.” She looks up at me, all wide-eyed and innocent, like she didn’t know that Dante has been pining for this since she bolted to Berklee. “Turns out, I probably shouldn’t have. He told me he still loved me.” She shrugs.
“Oh, Darcy,” I say, exasperated, too tired for a you-should-have-known-better lecture, my rage finally poofing out of me. “Fine. Come on.”
The One That I Want Page 5