I raised the paper cup of water the orderly had left me.
“Here’s to the glitter that brought us together,” I toasted. “All that glitters may not be gold, but sometimes glitter is much more fun than gold. And to Lily, for trying her best, even if it ended up injuring us considerably.”
“To Lily!” they called out.
Jack was readying another toast when my father came barreling into the room.
“There you are!” my father said in a tone that made it sound as if I’d been hiding from him.
“Exactly where I was supposed to be,” I replied.
From the way he was dressed (suit, tie, eau de Bombay Sapphire), I could tell I’d pulled him from a party. From his timing, I could tell that the pull hadn’t been an urgent one.
“Did I interrupt your festivities?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father replied. “In Philadelphia.”
I stood corrected. And for a moment, I pictured him riding frantically in a cab, desperate to get to his son in the hospital. It was a touching image.
“Come on,” my father said, impatient. “Leeza is waiting in the car. Get your stuff.”
Okay, I thought. That’s the way it is.
I started to gather my things, and my father started to leave the room.
“Not so fast,” Jack said, putting his drink down on a gurney.
“Who are you?” my father asked.
“Doesn’t matter. For the next minute, I am going to be your gosh darn conscience. And I am going to inform you that it’s standard operating procedure that when you’re picking your kid up in the hospital, the first, second, and third things you say to him are all versions of Are you okay?”
“That patch on his eye?” Chris chimed in. “Not a fashion statement.”
My father did not have the time or patience to be told what to do. As often happened with my mom, his defense was to go on the attack.
“Who do you think you are?” he gruffly challenged.
Kevin strode toward him and thrust out his drink so it sloshed a little in my father’s direction. “We’re librarians, sir. And we will not let you check out this future librarian unless you prove to us that you’ll take good care of him when he’s in your home.”
It was interesting to see my father face off against a librarian in a neck brace. But even more interesting was seeing how all the librarians in the room clearly thought my father was in the wrong here. I needed that reality check, because at this point in my life I was just too used to it.
“It’s okay,” I said to everyone in the room. “Dad, I’ll meet you in the waiting room. See if you can get some extra bandages from the doctor because I’ll have to change them in the morning, and we might as well get them for free here. Librarians, I will need all of your email addresses, since there’s a party I want to invite you to, if you’re still in town.”
Everyone did as I asked. As the librarians scribbled down their emails on a back page of my journal, a text came through from Lily.
How are you doing? she asked. (We’d already had a very long I’m-so-sorry-You-have-no-reason-to-be-sorry exchange.)
About to be discharged, I replied. Up for something tomorrow that doesn’t involve depth perception?
You name it, she replied.
I will, I promised.
But first I’d have to survive a night with my father.
—
Leeza’s first words to me when I got into the car were, “Oh no, you poor baby!”
Good sentiment, unfortunate word choice.
The whole ride home, she fussed and fretted about my eye, and by the time we got to the apartment, I felt my father was more annoyed at her than he was at me. Which was quite an achievement.
In many ways, Leeza was not what I’d been expecting for a stepmother. For one, I was expecting someone closer to my own age. But Leeza was actually a year older than my mother—something that annoyed my mom to no end, because it was one thing to be left for a newer model and quite another to be left for someone with as much mileage as you had. (My mother shouldn’t have told me this, but on a particularly dark pre-stepfather night when I was ten, she had.)
Along similar lines, I was relieved that Leeza and my dad hadn’t wanted to have another kid—my father broadcast this fact at many dinner parties that I was at in my formative years. This meant my status was secure. But at the same time, it also confirmed that maybe I hadn’t been entirely wanted in the first place. Because if my dad had experienced such a good time with me, wouldn’t he have wanted to experience it again? (I knew it was more complicated than this, but emotionally, this was how it sometimes felt.)
My room in my father’s apartment was maybe one-quarter bedroom and three-quarters storage for yoga equipment and odds and ends. Usually Leeza cleaned it out to make the ratio at least fifty-fifty before I arrived, but this time she hadn’t had a chance.