My mother is a nurse and my father is an asshole. He left us when I was six. For the first couple of years after the divorce, he lived in Savannah and came up on weekends to see me. He paid his child support. My dad was an accountant at the Gulfstream airplane factory. “Your father makes a pile of cash,” my mom would say whenever I asked her to get me something. “Ask him for it.” Or she’d say, “You can go see that movie with your father if you think you can shake ten bucks out of him.” Or, “If your father had half a heart, he’d get you some decent shoes.”
“Your mother has an active imagination,” is what he’d tell me when I asked him. “Rich, my ass,” he’d say. “Gulfstream doesn’t even have a union. At least not for accountants.”
The last time I ever saw my dad was the Saturday he took me out to Tybee Island. In the parking lot, he swiped me a ratty orange life vest off of someone’s boat trailer. He reached in and grabbed it and just kept walking toward the beach.
I was three weeks away from being eight years old. When Dad didn’t call on my birthday, my mom tried to reach him and found his phone had been disconnected. She called his boss out at Gulfstream, who said he’d stopped showing up for work three days ago and hadn’t left a forwarding address. He and my dad had been friends since high school, so my mom thought Mack—that was the boss’s name—was covering for him. She said she hoped his wife did the same thing to him one day and for him to go fuck himself. She wrapped the phone cord around her fingers so tight they turned yellow.
The next day, Mack called back. There was a problem with Dad’s accounts. The day after that, the police came to our house.
I asked what Dad had done to make everybody so mad at him. My mom said, “Your father’s an asshole. He did what comes natural to assholes. He shit all over everybody.”
The year I turned eight I learned how to do laundry, make Kraft macaroni and cheese out of a box, and smoke cigarettes.
I now divide my life into two parts—BDD and ADD—Before Dad Disappeared and After Dad Disappeared, and more and more I don’t remember a lot about BDD.
I do remember Tybee Island, though.
He must of known he was leaving by then.
I wonder if he’d planned to tell me.
Or maybe he didn’t know yet. And when he figured it out, it was too late to say anything.
His hair was curly and red and very thin on top. The sun turned his scalp the color of boiled shrimp. We treaded water out past the breakers, the gulls calling out threats to one another and the sunlight smashing into millions of pieces in the choppy water.