by J. A. Wright
Hey Dad
You can search a million miles and never find me.
I can say a thousand words and we’ll never agree.
You can blink a hundred times and never see.
I can love you ten ways but you’ll still leave.
Robbie made me read what I’d come up with to him the night before the funeral. I didn’t want to because I knew he was going to laugh, but he insisted, so I did.
“What kind of poem is that? It’s crazy mumble-jumble and you sound like a deranged psycho when you read it!” he yelled.
“It’s nice. I like it,” Mom said.
“It doesn’t make any sense. It’s stupid, and if she reads it everyone’s gonna know she’s a mental case,” Robbie said.
“Listen, Robbie, he was her father too and she can read it,” Mom replied.
That was enough to set Robbie off. He freaked out, yelling at me about being a loser before announcing he was going out to get fucked up, because that’s what Mom and I were, and storming out of the house.
He was still drunk when he got home the next morning, and even though Mom made him drink three cups of coffee and eat some dry toast, it didn’t help. He was still slurring and stumbling around when the limo from the funeral home arrived. The driver had to come in to help Robbie.
“Would you happen to have any beer and tomato juice in the house?” the driver asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Would you mind pouring some beer into a glass and topping it up with tomato juice? I think it might help,” he said.
I did exactly what the driver asked and watched Robbie sit on the front porch steps, sipping and gagging, until Mom said, “We’d better go. We can’t be late for the funeral.”
On the drive to the funeral home, Robbie threw up into a bag the driver had given him, and when I started to laugh he looked at me and said, “You’re the reason Dad’s dead. No, wait . . . Dad probably died the day Mom found out she was pregnant with you. I remember being in the kitchen when Mom told him she was expecting and Dad yelled, ‘Worst news I’ve had in my life!’”
Mom looked over at me and said, “I’m sure he didn’t say anything like that, honey. Robbie’s drunk. Don’t pay attention to him.”
I told her it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care, and I spent the rest of the drive picking at the cuticles on my thumbs.
I did care, though, and I believed what Robbie had told me. Even on the drive to Dad’s funeral I felt unwanted, like I wasn’t welcome. So when we arrived, I found a chair in the back row with a nice cushion on it and sat down until Mom motioned for me to take a seat in the front row with Robbie, Aunt Flo, and Olive.
When the time came to start the service there were only about twenty people in the room, mostly friends of Mom’s from the bank, a few guys from the car club, and my sister, Tammy, who was standing by the door. Mom asked the funeral director if he could wait fifteen more minutes because she was expecting a few of his sisters. He agreed, but they didn’t show up.
Then, just about the same time the funeral director started to speak, I heard a commotion coming from the back of the room. Mom heard it too, and she whispered to me to see who it was. Sure enough, it was Genie, wearing a big black hat with a veil over her face. Uncle Bill was walking right behind her with his head down. I told Mom I couldn’t tell who it was because I didn’t want her to get upset. She figured out I’d lied just as soon as Genie started sobbing. It was so loud that Robbie got up and went to the back of the room. Everyone heard him tell Uncle Bill to take her outside, and I started to turn around so I could see what was going on, but Aunt Flo took hold of my arm and told me “never mind.” A few seconds later, I heard the sound of high heels walking on a tile floor, a door closing, and then no more crying.
With Genie out of the room, I focused my sights on Dad’s casket. From my seat in the front row I could see Dad’s entire face and most of his body. It was spooky. He looked like a creepy ghost, and I kept thinking he was going to sit up and start yelling at me. Aunt Flo and Mom thought he looked distinguished and said they were glad they’d decided on an open casket. I thought it was weird and excused myself to go to the bathroom, but instead I found a seat a few rows back and sat next to Mom’s friends Ken and Ron.
I didn’t pay too much attention to Robbie’s speech about Dad being a dedicated father and husband, as well as a loyal and brave Marine who was willing to give his life for his country, or to the car club guy who spoke about Dad’s great contribution to the club and his remarkable talent for restoring cars. But I did listen to Aunt Flo talk about how Dad struggled as a boy to please their father, an impossible task in her opinion. “Don’t get me wrong, my brother had his faults and they were too often the most obvious things about him, but in spite of them he still managed to give life to a few of the loveliest people in the world,” she said.
I knew I was one of the people she was talking about, and I felt good for the first time in a long time. I went up front when Aunt Flo finished and said my poem from memory without coughing or having to stop and start again. When I finished, I looked over at Mike and he started the music. Suddenly, the entire room was filled with Dad’s voice singing “Less of Me” and I couldn’t help but cry, and neither could Mom or anyone else, even Robbie.
CHAPTER 14
Only a few of Robbie’s friends showed up for lunch after the funeral. And they only stayed long enough to drink all the beer, eat all the food, and help Robbie take the wheels off of Dad’s Ford Falcon and put it up on blocks. The next day Robbie sold Dad’s truck and his partially restored Corvette to Dad’s used car dealer friend and split the money with Mom.
“Why’d you put the Falcon up on blocks?” I asked Robbie when he showed up in the kitchen just in time to eat a couple of the tacos I’d made for Mom and me.
“What do you care?” Robbie replied.
“I’m gonna be sixteen pretty soon and I’m getting my license. I want to drive it.”
“You’re not driving the Falcon . . . ever. We all know what you can do to a car, don’t we dumb-dumb?” he said before he shoved an entire taco into his mouth and walked out the back door.
Robbie went back to Sacramento a few days later, but not before he took everything he wanted, including Dad’s wallet and the US Flag someone from the Marines had delivered to the funeral home for Dad’s casket.
Mom didn’t care what Robbie took, and she seemed okay for the first week or two after he went home. It wasn’t until we cleaned out Dad’s dresser and closet that she got a little down in the dumps. It didn’t take us too long to sort through his clothes, because he didn’t have much: six suits, three coats, a few sweaters, and five pairs of boots. Mom let me keep the sixty-five dollars I found with Dad’s gloves in the right pocket of his overcoat and I didn’t say anything about the motel room key or the matchbook cover with a full mouth lipstick imprint on it that I found in the other pocket.
On Mother’s Day, Mom and I took most of Dad’s stuff to the Goodwill, except for his overcoat, gloves, and sunglasses; I kept those. After we put his stuff in the big donation bin behind the store we went inside and bought a teddy bear cookie jar and a patchwork cat bed someone had made.
“Your Dad would hit the roof if he saw us buying this crap,” Mom said, laughing.
When we got home I put the cookie jar in the middle of the kitchen table and the cat bed next to the TV for Rascal, and Mom and I ate ice cream and watched TV until after midnight. It was the first time I’d ever felt peaceful at home; I spent more time hanging out with Mom in the living room and watching TV in the first month after Dad died than I had in my whole life.
As the weeks went by, I tried to be good and helped out around the house with chores and cooking. I didn’t drink, skip school, or do anything I wasn’t supposed to for the rest of the school year. I felt pretty good about myself when I placed second in a poetry competition my English teacher helped me enter and got an A on my report card because of it.
On my
sixteenth birthday, Mom took me to Ken’s beauty parlor and let him give me a shag haircut. Then we went to Kmart and she bought me almost every color of Maybelline eye shadow, eyeliner, and mascara we could find. “I think all females look better with eyeliner and blush. I never really cared if you wore makeup or not, but your dad hated the idea,” Mom said as she was showing me how to put on black liquid eyeliner.
Later, after I’d drawn a perfect thick black line just above my lashes and put on as much mascara as possible, we went to the Sizzler for dinner. I noticed a couple of guys looking over at me when we were waiting to be seated, and I thought I saw one of them wink. It was exciting, and so distracting that I could hardly read the menu once we were seated.
“I know it’s only been a couple of months since your dad passed but I’m feeling alright, not too sad or depressed like I thought I would,” Mom said as she picked the croutons off her salad and put them on my plate. “Actually, I can’t believe how good I feel. How ’bout you, are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m okay. I get little nervous when I hear a truck driving up our street, like it’s Dad about to pull into the driveway, but other than that everything is okay.” I didn’t have the nerve to tell her that Dad’s dying was just about the best thing that had ever happened to me, so I shifted around in my seat and looked down at the floor, hoping she couldn’t see the big smile on my face.
I finished out tenth grade with a 3.5 GPA.
“I always knew you were smart,” Mom said when I showed her my report card.
I’d planned to get a job at Mickey’s Burger Barn that summer, but I didn’t get my application in on time and they gave the job to someone else. I was a bit pissed off about it because I thought Mom might be mad. But she wasn’t. “You’ve still got that little job at Ken’s salon, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but it’s only four hours a week, and he only pays me four dollars an hour.”
“That’s probably enough huh?” She smiled as she reached over to move my bangs out of my eyes.
A few days later, when I told her I’d run into my old softball coach at Ken’s salon and he wanted me to join his team even though the season was almost over, she said, “If you do, I’ll promise to park my butt on the bench and cheer you on.”
I felt a nice glow of happiness crawl from my chest all the way to my forehead. “That would be great, Mom—really, it would!”
I kept myself busy with softball practice on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and joined a summer reading club after the team’s catcher gave me her copy of Silence of the Lambs and promised to lend me more books if I joined the club.
Mom was in a good mood most of the time, and that made me feel good too. She was happy to be back in touch with her family. The family Dad wouldn’t let her talk to because he thought they were idiots. After Mom’s sister called to say she was sorry to hear about my dad, they called each other almost every day and sometimes talked for hours. I’d never heard Mom laugh so much in all my life.
I went with Mom a few times to visit her parents in San Diego in June and July. Her mom, my grandma, was small just like my mom, and she called me “pretty girl” instead of Randall. My grandpa was real quiet and had a hard time talking because of a stroke.
“My dad wasn’t always so frail and quiet. He used to be a fireman and a big guy with a big voice. It’s hard for me to see him like this,” Mom said on the way home from my first visit.
Sometimes Mom cried on the drive home as she talked about her family and how she’d pushed them out of her life. “I changed our phone number and sent them a letter telling them I didn’t want to see them again. It was a horrible thing and I still can’t believe I did it,” she said.
“Why did you?” I asked.
“Your dad hated my parents, and my parents didn’t like him, but they tolerated each other for a few years, until your grandfather refused to lend us money to buy a new Cadillac that your dad wanted. There was a big fight and afterward your dad told me I had to choose between him and Robbie and my family. It broke my heart to tell my parents to leave me alone, but I had no choice. I was pregnant with you, I didn’t have any money, and there was no way your dad would have let me take Robbie away from him. My parents tried to make contact with me lots of times. They sent cards and letters and they even came to the hospital after you were born. When your dad walked in and found them in the hospital room, he grabbed you right from my mother’s arms and told them to get out. I should have stood up for myself but I was such a weakling. I let him control everything, God dammit.”
Mom’s story filled in a lot of questions I’d always had about my grandparents. I was sad to hear what my mom had to do to her parents because of my crazy dad, but glad to hear that my grandparents came to the hospital to see me when I was born.
I started my junior year with a whole new wardrobe, thanks to Dad’s insurance policy and to Mom. Everything was going really well until two weeks before Thanksgiving, when my grandparents moved to Utah to live with Mom’s sister. They needed someone to be with them full time and Mom couldn’t do it. Mom and her sister got into an argument on the phone about their parents moving and Mom was pretty upset about it. She started drinking like never before and sometimes I’d have to help her to bed because she was too drunk to walk.
“I don’t ever remember feeling this down,” Mom said to me on Thanksgiving Day. She started seeing a shrink the next week, but as far as I could tell he didn’t help her much. He gave her some strong sleeping pills and a new type of tranquilizer and she always took more than she was supposed to.
By Christmastime, Mom was in such bad shape that her boss sent her home from work and told her not to come back until she was feeling better. I was more worried than ever when I found Mom’s purse, shoes, and car keys in the fridge one day after school. I called Robbie to tell him what was going on.
“I’m sure you’re exaggerating,” he said. “Put Mom on the phone.”
“She’s asleep,” I replied.
“It’s only 4 p.m., how could she be asleep?”
“Well that’s the way it is around here lately!” I screamed as I slammed the phone down.
A few days later Robbie arrived home to spend Christmas with us, and he made Mom get up and get dressed so he could take her out to a nice restaurant for dinner on Christmas Eve. “Someone’s got to cheer her up. Maybe if she had a decent meal she’d feel better,” Robbie said, giving me a look that said he was disgusted by my mac and cheese and hotdog dinner.
They were back at the house within an hour, and Mom collapsed on the couch and rolled into a ball without even taking her coat or shoes off.
“She didn’t want to get out of the car,” Robbie explained. “I had to drag her into the restaurant. After one glass of wine she started crying and babbling about how much she misses her parents. Not a fucking word about missing Dad!”
After Robbie left to meet a friend for a drink, I put Mom to bed and gave her two of her new pills because she made me. I took one for myself, broke it in half, and took the first piece before I went to bed that night. I slept really well, and I guess Mom did too because she was still asleep when I went to the kitchen at 11 a.m. to get something to eat.
Robbie stayed with us for more than a week. He had no more luck getting Mom out of bed than I did. On New Year’s Eve Robbie took me to the grocery store and he paid for everything. “You’ve got to get Mom to eat something. She’s too thin,” he said as he put two quarts of strawberry ice cream in our cart. “It’s her favorite, so make sure she eats it.”
Robbie drove back home to Sacramento later that day. Before he left he gave me twenty dollars and promised he’d call to get an appointment for Mom with a psychiatrist he’d heard about in Los Angeles.
I spent the next two days thinking about what I should do. I couldn’t leave Mom home alone, so I decided I wouldn’t go back to school when Christmas break ended. I’d stay home with her. But first I needed to hand in the four overdue library books I had in my bedroom and ge
t my stuff out of my locker. I went to school January 4 with a letter I wrote and signed from my mom saying we were moving to Texas. I left it on the counter in the principal’s office before I cleaned out my locker and headed to Ken’s beauty parlor to tell him about Mom and her depression.
“I had no idea, honey,” he said. “I’ll give Olive a call tonight and we’ll find a way to help. Don’t worry, she’ll get over it, I promise.”
Throughout January and February, Olive called or stopped by almost every day to check on us. Sometimes she’d just sit on mom’s bed and talk to her. “You are a good daughter and they know that. It wasn’t your fault they didn’t get to see you all those years. You’ve got to pull yourself together. There’s more to life than taking pills and sleeping,” I heard her tell mom one day when she stopped by after work with two pizzas and a bottle of wine.
Ken, Olive, and Mom all went to Utah to visit her parents the second week of March, and when they got back home Mom stopped taking her Seconal and Xanax and started eating several jars of banana baby food every day. She also went back to work the week after she got back from visiting her parents, so I started back at school again. I had to take Olive and Ken with me to explain to the principal why I’d been absent for so long. He wasn’t very happy with me but let me come back when I promised to make up the schoolwork.
It was crazy to have missed ten weeks of school. I was way behind with everything and had to meet with the school counselor before I could go to class. I told her that I was absent all those weeks because I had to stay home with Mom or she would’ve died. She was nice to me and wrote notes to all my teachers so they wouldn’t yell at me for being behind.
I felt glad to be back at school and to have something to do other than worry about Mom and watch soap operas all day.