The One That I Want (6 page)

“What?”
I say shrilly, my dream needling its way back into my consciousness, right alongside a dark swath of fear that I conjure up so quickly, too quickly, a mirror of my past. “He’s supposed to be in Mexico!”

“He was drunk, Till,” Tyler says softly, but I barely hear him. My stomach rises up and my tongue convulses, and I dry-heave over my coffee-spattered comforter. Then I move the phone to my ear to listen to Timmy Hernandez, the town sherriff, tell me everything I already somehow seem to know.

Three hours later, my father is snoring in our guest bedroom, as he has been since I brought him home from the station. His right eye
is the color of grape jelly, but otherwise, he looks mostly okay, though, of course, I know that he is anything but.

I’ve instructed Tyler to run to the grocery store and pick up all the pound cake and premade cupcakes he can find. We’re still due at Luanne’s this afternoon, and it’s too late to cancel. She and Darcy would know something is wrong, and then they’d press me, and then I’d have to either lie or tell them the truth, and neither of those options seems palatable. I would tell Luanne, but not today, not during her annual can’t-miss Fourth of July blowout. And Darcy—we aren’t speaking anyway, and this news would be like the match to her TNT: combustible. The last thing I need. My head hurts enough as it is. My father, well, I can manage him for a few more hours, probably a few more days, until I figure out a plan to tidy this up.

“This is what I do,” I said to Tyler earlier, while he listened to me skeptically. “I
take care
of things for people. I’ll handle this, just please, go to the store because I can’t be two places at once.” He popped his eyes at my chiding, at my bite, which was unfamiliar to both of us, but it had stuck with me through the night—this edge, this razor blade cutting through my psyche.
Jesus Christ, Tyler! Just go to the goddamn store and pick me up some freaking pound cake! How hard is that? Get your ass up from the couch and turn off ESPN while I manage the nitty-gritty. Is that too much to ask?
I handed him the keys, and he left without another word.

Now, I’m tucked on the velour armchair in the corner of the guest room, keeping my father company, my feet curled under me, a blanket draped over my legs. The open window blows in pleasant, soothing air, a balm after yesterday’s torrid onslaught.

While I wait for my dad to come to, to offer some sort of rational explanation, I try to focus on work. I reach for CJ’s grade
report—she’s amping up to apply to Wesleyan this fall; she’ll mail the application off to the university so far from here and send every last hope for her future along with it. As I tug out the file, the Polaroid of Susanna from the day before slips out of my purse.
Just yesterday?
I think. It feels like forever ago. Before my ungraceful run-in with Ashley Simmons. Before the explosion at the cemetery with Darcy. Before my father got up and drunk and became one with a tree. Before I intuited that he would do so in the first place. That last one, that’s the stickler.

I drop the photo back into the bag, abandoning hope of distraction while waiting for my dad to awaken. My dream from last night keeps pressing into the corners of my brain: how it seemed so tangibly real, how I blacked out without warning. My father gasps a deep inhale, and I glance up at him, waiting to hear his excuses, waiting for something more than Timmy Hernandez could offer under the fluorescent lights at the sleepy police station that never sees much more action than the occasional DUI or domestic violence call.

Timmy was generous enough not to press charges.

“Tyler and I go a long way back,” he said to me, touching my elbow and leaning in close enough that I could smell the stale coffee on his breath. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was trying to get a peek at my boobs. “You know, the team and all that. So this is a personal favor to him.” Peering at him now, you’d never recognize the once ace pitcher for the ’95 Wizards. Timmy’s paunch flopped over his fading leather belt and his hairline was beginning to resemble the Great Lakes, looping widely above his forehead.

“I appreciate that very, very much,” I said, searching over his doughy shoulder for my dad.

“The thing is, Tilly—” Timmy paused and rubbed the crux of
his neck. “From what I understand, this isn’t the first time it’s happened.”

“No, no, you’re right.” I waved my hand, pressing my fingers to the bridge of my nose. “After my mother died …” I trailed off.

“No, what I mean”—Timmy lowered his voice—“is that this isn’t the first time it’s happened
of late
. We spoke with Cindy Heller over at Mickey Mantle’s, and evidently, he’s been in nearly every night the past few weeks.”

At the mention of Cindy Heller, I felt the blood drain from my face, as if someone had stuck a vacuum up my nostrils and flipped it on high. A wave of my dream ran through me, an exorcism.

Now, the front door slams shut, and my father bristles in his sleep. Tyler peeks his head inside the door frame, holding up two grocery bags as evidence. I glide from the chair and go into the kitchen.

“We shouldn’t leave him,” he says, dropping the bags on the dining table. “What happens if he wakes up?”

“I threw out all of the alcohol in the house,” I say, like that’s the only thing I need to worry about if my off-the-wagon father wakes up in our guest bedroom while I’m at my sister’s Fourth of July party, sucking on ribs and flicking buttered corn on the cob out of my teeth. Ty glares at me, fleetingly, then it is gone, the idea of his beloved beer going down the drain.
Oh, grow up!
I think, then shake it off.
What is wrong with me?
I exhale, purging my negativity, attempting to inhale a fresh outlook.

“I’ll stay here with him,” he offers, like this is in any way a selfless act.

“I don’t want to go without you!” I crack open the plastic cupcake bins, and Ty hands me a serving plate.

“I think you should,” he says as we unload each cupcake
onto the plate in tandem. “To be honest, I’m beat from the fair. Talked out. And I think someone should be here when he wakes up.”

Yeah
, I
should
, I think, annoyed at his cop-out, abandoning my attempt at positivity.

“Fine,” I say with a sigh, because I don’t want to argue with him, because we stopped arguing years ago, each of us recognizing that it’s just easier to let the other one be. And besides, I don’t trust myself right now, this unfamiliar anger nipping my tongue, begging to be unleashed. “Luanne and Ben will be disappointed. And Charlie, he’ll ask for you.”

“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.

M
y 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.