“It’s not like he’s dead.”
“Of course not.” He looked like he wanted to put his hand on my shoulder. Don’t ask me how I knew; I know what it looks like when a man wants to lay hands on me.
“He didn’t leave because of me, if that’s what you were thinking.”
“It wasn’t.”
“My mother made him think he was worthless. Tell someone that enough and they start to believe it.”
He drew on the cigarette, breathed out a puff of smoke.
“I hope you don’t believe it, Jimmy.”
“Excuse me?”
“You shouldn’t let her make you feel worthless.”
I was doing you a favor. He needed someone to remind him that he existed, that he wasn’t just a figment of your mother’s imagination. Let someone start believing they’re not real and, poof, one day they disappear. You wouldn’t want that, Dex.
We both know the last thing you want is to be like me.
“Mrs. Dexter has a lot on her plate these days,” he said. “And I’m not making things any easier.”
That was when I knew I’d said something wrong, “Mrs. Dexter.” Because usually he called her Julia, as in Julia hates it when I . . . or Julia would have a cow if she knew I. . .
“Maybe I should go,” I said.
“Maybe you should, Lacey.”
I didn’t mind that he said it. Only a screwup lets some strange girl insult his wife. I could be generous, because it didn’t change the truth: I was his secret, and he kept it. He lied to you, and he lied to your mother. I was his truth. I’m not saying that meant he loved me best. But it has to mean something.
MY FATHER IS NEVER COMING back. I know that. And my resulting daddy issues are not subtle. I didn’t need a therapist to tell me I was looking for paternal replacements, that the “inappropriate” encounter with my band teacher or the time I let that McDonald’s fry guy feel me up beside the Dumpster was all about filling a hole. Pun unintended, guttermind.
But I don’t need a father, Dex, so don’t think I was trying to steal yours. Just borrowing him for a bit, just chipping away a little for my own.
“I’ll probably get fired soon,” your dad told me once when I asked why he was around so much during the day. Not like the movie theater does such big business in the afternoon, and not like managing the place qualified as actual work, but still. “Though if you want to know a secret—”
“Always.”
He leaned in, and the whisper floated on a trail of smoke. “I’m thinking I might quit.”
He dreamed big: inventions he didn’t know how to build and franchises he didn’t have the cash to open, dreams of starting up his band again or winning the lottery or getting salad bar botulism and suing his way into a fortune. He’s the one who made you a dreamer, Dex, and maybe that’s why your mother never seemed to like you very much, either.
I told him he should go for it. That I would.
“Yeah, well, you don’t have a mortgage.” He sighed. “Or a wife.”
I was starting to think it wouldn’t be long before he didn’t have a wife, either.
“I shouldn’t have told you all that,” he said. “You can’t tell Dex. We good on that?”
It was insulting. Have I told you any of the other things you weren’t supposed to know? Like how he’d proposed to your mom because he thought she was pregnant, and when their bundle of despair turned out to be a stomach virus, he went through with it anyway. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he was trying his best. He’d gambled away your minuscule college fund on some stock scam before you were old enough to notice, and that was the last time your mom let him touch the checkbook. He liked the stillness of two A.M., when the house slept and he could imagine what it would be like if you were all gone. Sometimes he stayed awake till dawn, imagining himself into that emptier life, the songs he would write, the coke he would snort, the roar of his engine on the open road.
“They make me take these pills,” I told him, to prove myself: a secret for a secret.
“What?”
I didn’t tell him how it started, after my mother found me in the bathtub, the water pink. “You know how it is, you do one thing people don’t understand, and they freak out and drug you up like you’re some kind of crazy person having daily chats with Jesus and the man in the moon.”
“Were you?”
“I don’t fucking see things that aren’t fucking there,” I said.
“I meant, were you some kind of crazy person?”
Then I had to smile. “You’re not supposed to say crazy. It’s offensive.”
He held up his hands, like excuuuuuuuse me. “So sorry. Were you nuts?”
“Wouldn’t you go a little fucking nuts if everyone you knew was calling you crazy?”
It must have been lonely for him in that house, without anyone who knew how to make him laugh.
“So they put me on these pills,” I said. “One a day to keep the little dark uglies away.”
“Do they help?”