The Breakup Doctor (28 page)

But my aim was off, and it sailed harmlessly past him, exploding like a bomb against the concrete wall of the bar beside the door.

Kendall flinched, but didn't turn around, just looked back over his shoulder, and even in profile I could see his disgusted expression.

“Jesus, Brook. You're fucking insane. Get some help.”

thirty

  

I sat in my car. My hands trembled—it took three tries to get the key into the ignition. Some part of me registered that I was in no shape to drive, but it was drowned out by the urge to get away, to put as much distance between myself and what had just happened, as soon as possible. I wished I could do the same thing with my life—just drive off, pull away, stare back in the rearview mirror at the pathetic creature I was leaving behind.

But she was still with me when I pulled into my driveway at the house. Still there when I let myself in past the ruined living room, the hateful kitchen, into the barren master bedroom, disinterestedly cleaned and bandaged my hand, and fell into my bed still wearing my clothes. She curled up with me under the covers, and even shutting my eyes I couldn't escape her.

I couldn't sleep for a long time. I lay there, eyes wide and dry and scratchy, straining fruitlessly to hear the ringing of my phone. But it didn't ring. I couldn't think who might call.

In the screaming silence I heard, over and over, the replay in my head of Kendall's words, accompanied by the slide show of my own behavior in the bar. But gradually it all blurred into a white noise of self-hatred, and I drifted off. When I woke up sometime later it was still dark, but I didn't bother looking at the clock beside the bed. I blinked at the ceiling, feeling the crust in my eyes, my lashes caked together with clumped mascara. I hadn't eaten since sometime in the afternoon, but filling my belly didn't seem a compelling enough reason to drag myself from the bed. I was hot, and that did motivate me—but only enough to unbutton my cardigan and pull it out from beneath the covers, then slip out of my skirt and discard it the same way.

I rolled back onto my side and shut my eyes, and waited for oblivion to claim me again.

  

When I woke the next time, it was light, and it was Gloria Gaynor who called me out of sleep—the “I Will Survive” melody Sasha had programmed in after Kendall's disappearance. I turned over and fumbled my phone out of my purse, not knowing who I was hoping for, just realizing that my heart leaped when I heard it ringing.

“Doll!” My dad always greeted me as if I were the world's best surprise. “You wanna finish up that bathroom today?”

I sank back, deflated. “What time is it?”

“Ah, a little late—almost nine—but a perfect time to get started. Whattaya think?”

“I don't think so, Daddy...”

“Come on, now, sweetheart. Soonest begun, soonest done.”

I rubbed my crusty eyes, my fingers coming away with black smears of makeup. “Maybe not today.”

“No time like the present. I'm on my way—you eat yet?”

I sat up reluctantly, pushing tangled hair away from my face. It wasn't at all like him to be this insistent. Had something happened? Had he heard something from my mom...something bad? Maybe he needed to talk. I didn't know if I had any rally left in me, but I couldn't let my father down.

“Yeah, Daddy. Okay. Give me a few minutes?” I needed to at least take a shower. It wouldn't do him any good to see me looking like scrambled death.

“I'm gonna treat us to something from Merritt's Bakery. By the time I get through that line on a Saturday morning it'll be at least a half hour, doll. Up and at 'em.” Besides having suddenly sprung a cliché leak, my dad had become uncharacteristically dogged and persistent.

We hung up and I sat shaking my head, wondering what on earth could have happened that turned my dad into my mother.

  

Dad showed up with a bulging bag full of the best baked goods in Fort Myers—chocolate croissants and puffy cream-filled pastries and mini cinnamon rolls so tender and fragrant you could eat half a dozen before you realized it. I tried hard to scarf them with my usual gusto, but just the thought of all that rich butter and sugar made my stomach turn. I pulled apart a cinnamon roll on my plate—it was still steaming inside—and hoped my father wouldn't notice how little made it into my mouth.

I don't know what I was expecting—for him to show up a wreck, dark circles under his eyes, a distant expression, face slack and pale. But he was just the same old Daddy, with that big, happy-to-see-you smile he'd always greeted me with.

Of course, we weren't a confessional kind of family. If he had something on his mind, maybe it would work its way to the surface.

As always, my father was efficient and focused. We screwed the Backerboard to the fresh new wall to ready it for the tile, and then created an efficient assembly line where I buttered the back of each tile with Mastik and he spaced-and-placed them against the wall.

ICAN had had boxes and boxes of leftover tiles, and I had chosen a six-inch earthy slate-look porcelain, along with bronze and gold glass accent tiles I could never have afforded anywhere else. As we laid tile after tile in place, for the first time my house actually started to resemble the elegant vision Sasha and I had invoked the day I'd bought it. I wished she could see it.

I thought he might start talking as we worked, within the safe remove of concentrating on a project, instead of having to face me. But Daddy stayed mum, our conversation limited to instructions and requests strictly about the job at hand. So after a while, with the only sounds the soft scrape of my trowel against porcelain, I filled in the silences, hoping that if I opened the conversational floodgates, whatever was on his mind would come pouring out. Hoping it would drown out the ocean of shame and regret I was floundering in.

I asked about his cabinets. I asked about fishing. I asked about other projects he was working on. I didn't realize until I was trying to draw my dad out, instead of spouting my usual stream of free association about my own life that I so easily slipped into with him, how little I actually knew of him.

The cabinets, he said, were coming along. Of course, they had been “coming along” for nearly a year now, so that could mean anything from total disarray to close to finished. He hadn't been fishing lately—he didn't hear much from Stu in the past couple of weeks.

Yeah. No wonder. Stu had had his hands full of Sasha, I thought with a sharp flash of hurt.

His next project would be countertops. He got the idea when we were at ICAN, looking at their slabs of beautiful granite. “Can't have such pretty new cabinets and put that awful old stuff back in for your mom,” Dad said.

I wanted to snap out my knee-jerk retort that my mom didn't deserve his effort, his consideration. I wanted to ask him why he was being such a patsy for her. I wanted to shake some spine into him, some self-worth, enough ego so that he stopped lying down and waiting patiently for her to grace him once again with her presence, and instead realize he deserved better, confront her, demand she get her act together or she would lose him.

Instead, I bit back all my venom and focused on what Dad needed. He loved my mom, and for whatever reason he was letting her steer the course of his life. If I attacked her again he'd only get defensive of her, as he did every time.

It was time to come clean with my father. If he thought he was helping me with a problem, in the process, my smart, wonderful, loving dad would have to see the parallels to his own life and come to his own realizations about how he was being treated.

“Dad...” I handed him a tile and reached for another as he laid it carefully into place. “I could use some advice.”

He glanced over, his fingertips pressed gently to the tile, holding it steady. “Of course, doll. What about?”

And, haltingly, through my own shame, I told him about what I had done last night—how I had confronted Kendall, how I'd thought for just a few minutes that everything was going to be all right, and how I'd humiliated myself when I realized that it wasn't. My dad didn't watch me while I spoke—and I was grateful. Just as I'd done when I was younger, I talked to his back and shoulders and the back of his head, his reassuringly capable, constant motions calming my soul and loosening my tongue.

When I finished my story I stopped talking, and we worked for a few minutes in a quiet that felt soothing rather than awkward. I'd told my dad about my behavior as a way to help him find some relief from
his
pain, but in the process I'd lightened something in my own chest.

“Ah, doll,” he said finally, carefully taping down a completed row of tiles to keep them from sliding out of place as the Mastik dried. “It's amazing the awful things you can do that you don't think you're capable of doing to someone you love.”

I didn't know if he meant me or Kendall. “Can you forgive them?” I asked my dad. And I wasn't sure if I was asking whether I could forgive Kendall, or whether Kendall could ever forgive me. Or whether it was even Kendall I was talking about at all.

I'd gotten sidetracked with my own problems, and I'd forgotten I was trying to guide my dad onto a path. I pushed my thoughts back to my mother. “When someone does something...awful like that...even though they love you...when they've crossed a certain line, can that be forgiven?” Dad didn't speak for a moment, and I hoped he was considering the question for himself. I buttered the back of another tile. “And should it be? It seems to me that if you love someone, it means
not
doing something on purpose to hurt them. It means thinking things through before you do or say things you can't take back. That's what love is.” I handed my dad the tile. “Isn't it?”

Dad fixed the tile to the top of the next row, square and perfect. He tapped it to remove air bubbles underneath, and he didn't look back at me. I waited.

Finally he spoke. “I'm gonna tell you something, Brook Lyn.” Dad never used my whole name. “And then we aren't ever going to discuss it again. This isn't something anyone else knows, except your mother, and if I share it with you, I'm asking you not to share it with anyone else—ever. Not your brother. Not Sasha. And not your mother. If she ever finds out I'm telling you this, I would have a hard time forgiving you for that. Can you agree to this?”

His tone had gone flat and dead serious, and all I could do was nod, the sudden dread burgeoning in my gut swallowing any words. But my father was looking directly at me now, not working, and one look at his expression told me he needed something more formal and binding than a nod. I swallowed hard and mustered, “Okay, Dad. I promise.”

He bobbed his head once, sharply, as if making a resolve. “All right. All right, then.” He carefully placed the small rubber mallet he was holding on the side of the tub and then stared down at it as if it held the secrets of life. His lips stayed closed, but they moved as if he were tasting something bitter, something unpleasant he was too polite to spit out.

And then his words came out short and sharp and clear and impossible to misunderstand: “I had an affair.”

Of all the things I had expected my father to tell me, that was nowhere on the list. Not my father, who loved my mother so much that sometimes, growing up, Stu and I had felt jealous, left out of their circle of two.

“N-no...” I stammered nonsensically. “No, you didn't.”

“Stop it, Brook Lyn. Some things are true whether you want them to be or not.” His tone shut me up, and he looked down at his hands, as if their idleness were a mystery to him.

“It was a long time ago. You were so young... Stu was just a baby. Your mother... Your mother was—she is—the best mother in the world, whether you see that or not. Everything she does, she does for you kids. And at the time...” He choked on a breath. “At the time I didn't understand that. I wanted back that part of her I had when we met... But that energy went into you kids, and I...”

My father lifted his head and wiped his face, though his cheeks were dry. “I don't need to go into that with you. Who it was and how it happened doesn't matter—it didn't matter then, either. It was stupid—the stupidest thing I ever did. I almost lost your mom over it. But I didn't. She forgave me—finally. It took a long time, but your mother tried to understand, and she forgave me, and she stayed with me. She didn't leave.”

He looked at me for the first time since he'd started his terrible story. “I don't know what's going on with your mother right now. I don't know...what she needs, I guess. But I'll be waiting for her to figure out what that is. I'm not going anywhere, and if she decides, after she figures things out, that I'm what she wants...I'll be right here. No matter what. Because I love her. Because I will always love her. You understand what I'm telling you?”

I felt inexplicably angry. Angry at my dad for being no better than any other man. Angry at my mom for leaving so long after she'd forgiven his transgression. Angry at Kendall, who bailed out not at the first sign of trouble, but without
any
sign of trouble. Angry at the world because nothing and no one was as it seemed, and you could never fully trust anyone, and in the end maybe love didn't mean much after all.

“It's not fair,” was what tumbled out of my mouth.

My father put his hand on mine, just for a moment, before leaning down to pick up another tile and handing it to me. “Whoever promised life was fair, doll?”

  

We worked the rest of the job without speaking any more of what my father had said. I wasn't sure of
his
reasons—whether he was sorry to have confessed, or didn't want to talk about it further, or that he'd simply said all he intended to say on the subject. I only knew my own—that I needed to process it, to figure out what it meant, whether it changed my family or my history or my relationship with my dad—or my mom.

By the time he left the bathroom tile was in place, and even without grout it looked polished and beautiful and elegant—but it didn't matter to me anymore. I saw my father out the door and stripped off my stained work clothes and showered, and then tumbled into bed before seven o'clock without even walking back into the bathroom to admire the results of all our hard work.