Stranger in Dadland (10 page)

“Your mom? No way! Your mother’s a great gal. Really! A very hard act to follow. They don’t make many like her.”

I chewed on that awhile as we drove. I’d always thought it was Dad’s idea to leave us. But I didn’t actually remember anyone
telling
me that. Maybe Mom threw him out! Whenever I asked her anything about it, she always gave the same zero-information nonanswer: “Your father and I fell out of love with each other, but we’ll both always love you.”

My friend Theo’s mom told him everything, and I mean
everything
, about why she divorced Theo’s dad. And she still, to this day, tells him whenever his dad does anything cruddy, like when he’s late sending the child support checks. Theo says I should consider myself lucky that my mom-doesn’t dump on me. He says a few unknowns are well worth it. But I think it stinks that parents can decide what to tell and what not to, and that’s just that.

We got to the pier and rented Rollerblades, knee pads, elbow pads, and helmets, then sat on a bench to put it all on. Dad said he felt like a giant insect. He tried to stand up, but his
arms windmilled around, his ankles turned, and he plopped back down on the bench with an explosive laugh.

He grabbed me and hauled himself up, but his feet shot out from under him. I couldn’t tell whether he was really as bad at it as he seemed, or he was kidding.
I’d
fallen plenty of times in the beginning—but I was me and Dad was
Dad!

“This is a blast!” he said. “Why haven’t we done stuff like this before?”

I didn’t answer.

The other skaters and bikers whizzed past us, some smiling over their shoulders at the spectacle we made. Dad-didn’t mind. He had his arm around my neck and his butt poking way out in the back.

“Bend your knees!” I instructed, laughing. “Straighten up.”

He let go of me and
boom!
Back down on the bench.

We tried again. This time we got about three feet and were on our way, Dad clinging to my neck and giggling like a kid.

After a while he started getting the hang of it, although one of his feet would skid off on its own every now and then, making him clutch at me. By then, I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. I almost felt like the screaming meemies were on their way.

“
I love this!
” Dad hollered, sounding a little hysterical himself.

We got as far as a hot-dog stand, and Dad said he needed fuel. He bought us each a dog and a Coke. I scarfed mine down but Dad was having trouble. Every time he lifted his drink to his mouth, his feet would slip and he had to fling his
arm around to stop himself from falling. I didn’t even try not to laugh at him.

Then out of nowhere there was a bicycle, and suddenly the bicycle and my dad were in a heap on the ground, with the biker cursing and my dad saying, “Uh-oh.”

Was that ketchup or blood all over the place? I untangled the men and the bike, and helped Dad hobble over to a bench.
Phew!
It was only ketchup. The other guy threw a fit about his busted bike. Dad pulled out his business card and said, “Call me.”

The biker snatched Dad’s card and grumbled away.

“Too old for this,” Dad mumbled, wincing with pain. “Should’ve listened to the little voice inside my head.”

“Where’s it hurt?” I asked.

“Everywhere,” he said. “Knee.”

I helped him take off his knee pad and could practically see his knee getting bigger before my eyes. So what was the
point
of knee pads? I lugged the gear back to the rental place and retrieved our shoes while Dad sat there with Coke in his hair and ketchup all over his shirt. He tried to smile when I got back, but he wasn’t very convincing.

“We have to get you to the hospital,” I said.

“Can you drive a stick shift?” he asked.

“Me?” I said. “Dad, I’m twelve.”

He laughed. “I keep forgetting that! I keep thinking you’re just a really short adult.”

“Well, the
really short
part is right,” I said, trying to put his shoe on for him.

“Yeah? Are you short for your age?” he asked.

“Way short!” I said. “Everyone in my grade is at least a head taller than me. Including the girls!”

“No kidding!” Dad laughed again. “I was the same way! I didn’t grow until I was a junior in high school.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“Then I grew so fast all at once that my joints were in
agony!
Not like this, though,” he said, pointing to his ballooning knee.

It sounds bad that even though my dad was in pain, I was feeling happier than I’d ever been in my whole life. But it’s true.

We decided to take a taxi. I’d never flagged one by myself. I walked up to the street but couldn’t find any. Not a single cab. I was about to go back down and ask Dad what I should do, but then I saw a phone booth and figured I’d try calling one. I had change in my pocket.

I got the number of a cab company, then checked the name of the street and the address of the tattoo place next to the phone booth. I called and they said they’d be there in ten minutes. Nothing to it.

I went back to Dad, then ran up the street to wait. I was afraid the driver would see I was just a kid and take off, but he didn’t. He even helped me get Dad—driver on one side, me on the other, Dad kind of pale and rubbery between us.

The hospital wasn’t far, and an orderly met us at the emergency entrance with a wheelchair. There were a ton of insurance forms and whatnot that took forever. Then we had to wait with all the other sick and hurt people, including an enormously pregnant woman who was moaning. Her
nervous-looking husband kept telling her to breathe through the pain.

“
You
breathe through it!” she finally barked back at him. And half the people in the waiting room cracked up.

Dad leaned over and whispered to me, “Everyone pretends
both
parents are going to share the birth experience. But once the pain starts, it’s a different story.”

The pregnant woman was whisked away in a wheelchair with her husband scampering behind. “When your mother was in labor,” Dad said, “she wanted a hot pastrami sandwich and a kosher dill in the worst way. But the midwife said she could only have ice chips. Every time I left the room, your mom was sure I was sneaking off to eat. But I swear, I-didn’t have a single bite the whole time!”

He laughed. “Eventually I got her a KitKat from the vending machine and slipped it to her behind the midwife’s back. Your mom was beyond hunger by then, though. All she-could do was squeeze it to a pulp, wrapper and all. But I was forgiven.” Dad smiled at me. “I think that was the last time I was in a hospital, till now.”

I’d never heard that story, or anything like it, before. “Was that my birth or Liz’s?”

“Yours,” he said.

I’d never pictured Dad at my birth—not that I’d thought about my birth much. But if I had, I would have imagined him pacing in the waiting room on his cell phone. Or handing out cigars to his friends and clients—in California. I’d forgotten that he didn’t leave till I was three. I wished I remembered more from back then.

By the time Dad’s name was called, his knee was huge and the skin was so tight it looked like it would split. They took X-rays, then we waited around again. But I didn’t mind. Throughout the whole ordeal, it was just Dad and me, talking. I figured his talkativeness was the result of shock, but I liked it.

At one point he said, “Stuff like this makes you appreciate what you’ve got, Big Guy. I’m a lucky man, you know. I love my work. I love my car. I love going out for a run in the morning…I’ve got two legs. I’ve got you.”

When the doctor came in, she talked mostly to me. It reminded me
exactly
of how my doctor back home sometimes ignored me and talked to my mom as if I weren’t there. When Dr. Wong did that to
me
, I hated it, but Dad didn’t seem to mind.

“We’re going to give him a temporary cast, and you’ll need to keep him off that leg for two weeks,” this doctor told me. “And I mean
off!
Then come back and we’ll change this for a walking cast.” She turned to my father and talked louder. “Have you been on crutches before, Mr. Gordon?”

“Not for many, many years,” Dad said.

“Well, the orderly will be in to give you a refresher course.” She wrote out some prescriptions for anti-inflammatories and pain pills and explained to
me
how often Dad should take each one.

Next came the orderly. He wrapped my dad’s leg in a cast, then showed him how to use crutches. “You get up to go to the toilet only,” the guy said, shaking his finger at Dad. “Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Dad said, like a kid who’d gotten in trouble.

I pushed Dad in a wheelchair to the hospital pharmacy and filled his prescriptions. Then we took a cab home. This cabby, though, was a creep. When I asked him to help me get Dad up the stairs, he said, “Sorry, I’ve got a bad back,” and zoomed away.

I leaned my dad against the wall with his crutches and left him grumbling about the elevator that had been broken for months. I raced upstairs, hoping Beau was home. How would I haul Dad up all those stairs myself? What if I dropped him?

I hammered on Beau’s door, and thank goodness he was there. I told him about my dad’s accident, and I swear, his eyes pinked up and his face got blotchy, like when I told him about Ditz!

By the time we got Dad upstairs and into a chair, with his cast propped up on the coffee table, Dad looked beat. But he grabbed the phone, saying he had to get his car back, had to cancel appointments for tomorrow, had a million things to do.

Beau and I slipped out of the room. “Major drag,” Beau said.

“Actually, we had a great time for a while there,” I told him, hearing how stupid that sounded.

Beau asked if I wanted to go feed the hungry video games more quarters, but I said I had to keep an eye on my dad. And it’s a good thing I did, because soon he needed help getting to the bathroom. The crutches were clumsy down the narrow hall. They clunked against the wall and
Dad looked like he was going to tip right over. It was funny, and not.

I finally got him back in his chair, and then he said he was hungry.

“Well, we’ve got eggs and we’ve got eggs,” I said.

Dad smiled. “I think I’ll have eggs.”

Beau and I banged around in the kitchen, hunting for a bowl and a frying pan. Then Beau pretended he was the host in a cooking show.

“First vee must break zee egg,” he said. But when he tapped it against the counter, the egg crunched to a zillion bits, oozing egg slop up his arm.

He came after me with his slimed hand, so I had to sound the battle cry, “Kill Kitchen Creature!” and fire slices of bread at him. Someone knocked over the orange juice and the floor was instantly slippery—and great for sliding.

“Hey! I’m trying to make a call here!” Dad yelled from the living room. Beau and I tried to quiet down—but we-couldn’t.

Eventually, we brought Dad his food. “Ta-da!” I said. Dad looked at it and tried to hide his wince.

Beau and I flicked through the channels, making fun of the people on TV while Dad talked on the phone and ate-every sticky glop of egg and every burnt crumb of toast.

When he hung up, Dad said, “Stuff like this makes you realize how alone you are. What would I have done if you-hadn’t been here, Big Guy? You too, Beau.”

“This wouldn’t have
happened
if I hadn’t been here,” I said. But I knew what he meant.

After a while he fell asleep in his chair. Beau and I tiptoed out to the grocery store.

“Need more eggs,” Beau said.

Later, I had to help Dad get undressed and into bed. Now
that
was weird.

After he was settled, I called home. “Mom? I think I’ve got to stay longer. Dad wrecked his knee. Tore some ligaments.”

“What?” she said. “How?”

“I was teaching him to Rollerblade.”

“
Rollerblade
?” She laughed. “There’s no fool like an old fool. What’s that forty-eight-year-old geezer think he’s doing on Rollerblades?”

“Mom, he has to stay off his leg completely. I gotta stay.”

“Well, you still have a couple of days left,” Mom said. “Isn’t that enough?”

“He’s supposed to stay off it for two
weeks
, not two days.”

Mom sighed. “Isn’t there someone else who could help him?” she asked.

“No,” I said, and heard how lonely and sad that one word was.

Dad and I spent the fifth day of my visit playing cards and talking about stuff. He even told me a little about
his
dad, my grandfather I never met. “I hardly knew him,” Dad said. “He wasn’t mean, exactly, he just couldn’t be bothered with me. He was always tired when he came home from work—wanted to be left alone to smoke his pipe and read the paper.” Dad shuffled the cards, saying, “My father was old-fashioned. He thought talking to kids was women’s work.”

I cut the deck and thought, Women’s work? And suddenly I just knew that Dad thought that telling me Ditz had been killed was women’s work, best left to Mom and even Cora to handle. But somehow that realization made me feel worse for him than for myself.

Dad dealt the cards and said, “I couldn’t have friends over when my father was home. My mother was always telling me to be quiet and leave him in peace.” I tried to picture Dad
as a kid in that kind of gloomy house. “They were older parents,” he said. “And, you know, I didn’t have brothers or sisters or anything.”

I studied my cards, afraid that if I looked right at him, he’d clam up. “I guess I thought my father would become interested in me when I got older,” Dad said, taking my jack with his ace. “But that didn’t happen. He up and died right before my fifteenth birthday.”

Fifteen? I thought. That wasn’t all that much older than me.

Dad took a nap after the card game. He said the pain pills made him dopey. I tried to watch TV, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dad and
his
dad.

I was relieved when Beau came over with a tub of vegetarian lasagna from his mother. The three of us devoured it for lunch. I guess Mrs. Lubeck was that
helping
kind of woman who likes to take care of men. She
must
be, I thought, with a husband and four sons! Then I wondered if I was a helping kind of
guy.
The idea creeped me out. But I liked taking care of my dad.