I reach the front door and punch in the key code, which is my mother’s birthday: 4-26-1964. She is, after all, the head of the house, at least these last few years. I turn the heavy steel knob, enter the foyer, snag my phone from my purse, and leave the latter on the entryway table. I wonder if she remembers he is only one hot patent, one big sale, from being famously wealthy. I wonder if my father remembers as well.
I find my father in the garage, in the center at a spread of elaborate tables, working on his newest inventions. He glances up and rips off his hat, his thick salt-and-pepper hair in expected finger-plucked disarray. His face lights with a welcoming smile, and I notice the crinkles at the corners of his eyes—deeper, it seems, each time I visit him. He calls them “wisdom lines,” but I call them a wicked promise that one day he will be gone, and I will be lost. He’s seven years younger than my mother, but as of late I do believe the opposite reads as true. I remember thinking my mother’s recent obsession with Botox and microneedling was her desire to retain my father’s interest.
Now I fear it wasn’t my father’s interest she had in mind at all.
“There’s my beautiful girl,” he murmurs, the tender greeting a reminder that I am the apple of his eye. But I do not miss the fact that twice now I’ve claimed that no one calls me beautiful, and twice now I’ve been proven wrong, though I dismiss the realization as irrelevant. My father wasn’t responsible for that note left for me at Caroline’s. Nowadays he barely leaves the house.
I round the table, noting his work uniform of khakis and T-shirt fondly. Already he’s folding me into one of his famous bear hugs. My father is tall, a “hunk” as my mother used to call him, well over six feet, and while he was once quite fit, he’s thinner now—too thin, I think. He pulls a stool up for me, and we huddle into the small space to chat. “Tell me what’s going on in your life?” he orders.
He’s surveying me with such eagerness, as if hearing about my happy life is the essence of his own happiness. I selfishly crave his comfort over today’s events, but how can I dash his joy by sharing his daughter’s ridiculous failure?
Thankfully the doorbell rings, ending my dilemma, at least for now. “That’s the pizza,” I announce. “I’ll grab it. I’m starving.”
“I am, too,” he says. “I haven’t had a good pizza since the last time we had one of our father-daughter nights. I’ll grab the Cokes.” He is already on his way to the fridge, and I’m dashing for the door, wondering what happened to the Friday-night pizza tradition he and my mother once shared. Traditions matter, even in friendships. Jack and I have once-a-month movie dates. We pick up coffee for each other a couple of times a week. Jess and I have lunch once a week and dinner out at least once a month. These things matter. They’re to be planned, eagerly awaited, remembered with fondness.
It’s a quick trip to the front door, where I snag the pizzas and accept the necessary and often underappreciated handful of pepper packets. Also underappreciated is the little box on top of the pizza filled with banana peppers ready to be squeezed on top of my cheesy slice. The driver tips his chin at me at the conclusion of our encounter. I linger to watch him walk down the dark sidewalk, not a star in the sky, a rumble of thunder and a gust of wind promising another storm.
Once I’m certain the delivery man has latched the wooden gate, easily damaged in the wind, I sway, intending to ease inside when my brows dip, and I hesitate. There, at the edge of the lawn, inside the sway of a weeping willow, is a shift in the shadows, an unnatural movement. My fingers flex on the box, warm heat almost hot on the tender flesh of my forearms, but I’m frozen as if ice in a bitter cold winter storm.
Unexplainably, the hair prickles on the back of my neck, and blood whooshes in my ears. My eyes dive into the darkness, seeking the source of my unexplainable, irrational unease, when another gust of wind sends the long dress of the willow flying left and right, shadows dancing a tango across the yard. I laugh, a choked sound, and chide myself for my ridiculous behavior, which my father would call my masterful imagination, which often went to work on the old house’s late-night croaks and creaks. I back into the house, shut the door, and punch the lock button on the keypad.
It’s time to put my “masterful imagination,” stimulated too often by edgy dark thrillers, to rest. No one is outside, lurking in my parents’ weeping willow.
Chapter Twenty
My father and I convene in the sitting area of his little man cave, and we huddle around the coffee table, where we’ve created a pizza buffet. For a bit, just a wonderful, sweet, blissful bit of time, we laugh and joke, floating down memory lane, sharing stories. The chaos of this day fades, and my father’s strong, square jaw relaxes, those lines beside his eyes somehow softer now than when I’d first seen him leaning over his worktable. It’s as if the sunshine has burst through the stormy night and splayed its gold and yellow joy right here in man cave central.
We dash between subjects, from decorating the house for the holidays to firefly hunting and the preparation of Rice Krispies treats with various creative add-ins. “Mom hated when we made those,” I say. “We had melted marshmallows everywhere.”
He points with a slice of pizza. “Yes, but she ate her fair share, now, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did.” I laugh. “She could put down the Krispie treats for sure.”
He stands up, mimicking Mom, pretending to wipe a counter with one hand and shoving pizza, a.k.a. a Krispie treat, into his mouth. “If you took your time, the mess would not exist.”
I’m a schoolgirl giggling now, in that way that only my father stirs in me. “That was so her.” I grab a slice of pizza. “She loved, or I should say, loves pizza night, too, even though she always bitches about the scale the next day.”
“No more pizza night,” he declares grumpily. “Apparently your mother’s cholesterol is high.”
Apparently.
He says that word in that sticky way that dominates a sentence and highlights his mood. As if he’s not sure he believes her. “Well, that’s no fun. I didn’t think it was bad enough to end pizza night.” I shift the direction of the conversation ever so slightly, but I’m still hunting for clues to their relationship health more so than my mother’s. “Why didn’t you go to her event with her?”
“You know I’m not big on getting out these days.”
I am instantly drowning in the quicksand of guilt for feeling I’ve done too little to lift him up since the mess on Lion’s Den. If the situation were reversed, he would have done more to support me than I have him. I sometimes resist admitting that while he’s my father, that day in New York City proves that he’s also human, and therefore vulnerable, insecure, and fallible as well. “But you do like to support those you love. She’s giving a presentation. She might be nervous.”
He cuts his stare and picks up his soda can. “I might make her nervous.” He slugs back a drink.
My fingers thrum on my knee, my thoughts jumbled up into mush in my mind, none of it forming coherent sentences. It’s at this point that I must face my fear of hurting him. He catches my fingers, where they continue to drum my knee. “What is it you want to say to me, honey?”
“You have to live life with Mom, Dad, and being in the same house is not living life with her. Ever since—”
He withdraws his hand. “I made a fool of myself?”
“Honestly, Dad, that asshole from Lion’s Den, Big Davis, is the fool. He came at you and made himself look like a jerk. It was all over the internet. You fall off the bike, you have to get back on.”
“Yes, well,” he says slowly, “about that.”
I perk up, my fingers calming, palms flattening on my thighs. “What does that mean?”
“I filed a patent last month that seems to be creating quite a lot of interest.”