In the two years since I’d seen him, my father had aged five times as many. His once-thick hair was reduced to wisps, and liver spots stained his hands. And though he was still taller than me, he didn’t tower over me anymore.
“It’s good that you came,” he said, the timbre of his voice old, too.
Arriving in Houston a few days before, I got on one bus heading north, then another, trying to convince myself that I didn’t know where I was going. I waited until I was hours away to call Dad and tell him I’d be staying for a while.
He and June lived on a busy street, in a house with low ceilings and small windows, wall-to-wall carpet bleached by the sun in strange geometry. But there was a guest room for me to stay in, food I could eat. My first night, I slept for twelve hours. When I woke up late the next day, I found Dad in an easy chair with golf on, though I’d never known him to play or have any interest. His wheeze competed with the television.
“June’s worried about my surgery,” Dad said. “It’s good she’ll have you for company.”
“I got your email,” I said.
“I sent you a lot of emails.”
“You’re afraid?” I asked.
Dad kept his eyes on the golf course’s ripple of green hills.
“If it’s my time, it’s my time,” he said, and told me June had left food. I was hoping for a more confessional insight, but Dad only talked about a particular player’s swing, the many buses I had to take to get to him.
Dad’s surgery was two days later. June and I drove him to the hospital so early it was still dark out, most streets lifeless, some traffic lights blinking rather than toggling between red and green.
While he was in surgery, June and I laid claim to a waiting room. She shook her head with polite unease when I offered her one of my celebrity magazines, held her purse in her lap like some docile pet. An intercom paged a doctor.
June and I had only met a handful of times. She wore her gray hair short and a turtleneck dotted in flowers. I asked, after morning had come and gone, if she was bored. June answered that she was never bored, then took a notebook from her purse and began to write things down.
Members of their church showed up. Some brought sandwiches. Others came with coffee and desserts. Soon, food filled the table, and June handed it out to other waiting people.
Dad’s pastor, the man who several years earlier had told me to get up off the floor, kindly acted as if he had no memory of me. And then, with a wife in tow, a drooling baby strapped to his chest, came Brian.
June introduced us. Brian said we knew each other.
“You have a baby now,” I said.
Brian kept his eyes on the floor. One hand cradled his baby’s head. The intercom paged a different doctor’s name.
“I hear you’re a world traveler,” he said.
“I’ve been some places.”
I picked up a piece of the coffee cake his wife had made and bit into it. It was dry, overly sweet. As Brian watched me eat it, the pregnant attention he’d looked at me with years before resurfacing, I understood that I could still upend him.
A few hours later, after we heard from the doctor that the surgery had gone without incident, June cried and whispered heavenly thanks. She let me hug her, though it was awkward and uneasy, so I quickly let go. The doctor asked if we wanted to see Dad. June said yes. I declined, so she went without me, came back a half hour later in distress. “He just seems in such pain,” she said, then wrote down more in the notebook she carried.
“Sounds like you need a drink,” I said.
“We don’t drink,” June said, in a loud, startled voice.
In the guest room that night, rather than linger in my recent Pavel/Francisco fantasy (it had to do with being painted—there were drop cloths and brushes, admonishments to stay still), I imagined taking a slice of the coffee cake from earlier in the day, Brian eating it out of my hand.
After Dad returned home, I had to help him out of bed and get him to the bathroom. Soon we added short walks around the house to our repertoire. He told stories of my childhood until he got winded.
“That tree behind our place on Rolf Avenue,” he said one day, the two of us walking down the hall that led to the bedrooms. “You’d climb all the way to the top. You’d rest yourself between branches that seemed too tiny to hold anyone human, but it held you.” He stopped to take several breaths. Traffic whirred outside. The sun spread across the carpet in narrow bands. “And sometimes when you were in that tree, I’d take out a lawn chair and sit at its base. Climbing was a thing I could never do, Gordon. I’d sit there when you were in that tree for hours, and I’d say to you, do you remember? I’d say to you, ‘My boy still in a tree?’ Sometimes you’d answer.” I remembered that tree, him sitting underneath it, how I sometimes loved his company, other times wanted to throw twigs at him until he left me alone.
A late spring snowstorm knocked the power out. We walked around the house draped in blankets. I used their grill to make us toast and eggs for breakfast, chicken for dinner. I was reading a celebrity magazine by flashlight when the power returned. The overhead light blazed, the whole house humming with electrical activity. Walking into the hall, I found June and Dad there, blinking at the brightness.
“I guess we don’t need to wear blankets for clothes anymore,” I said.
“You didn’t tell me he was funny,” June said to Dad, and took the blanket he’d been wearing from his shoulders.
The next morning Dad got a call, asking if I’d be able to help shovel the church’s sidewalk. I agreed and walked there. It had turned warm. Icicles shattered and leaking snowmelt trickled from gutters. Slush slipped into my sneakers.
I found Brian and another man waiting at the church. Brian saw my feet and went inside to get me a pair of boots. They were too large, but dry. I relished each step in them.
It got warmer as we shoveled, so I took off my coat. Brian kept his on. His face grew slick, and sweat darkened his collar. I suggested he take his coat off, but he didn’t, and the thrill that came from torturing him returned. I recommended again that he take it off, that he’d be more comfortable. Brian didn’t even unzip it.
With my credit cards maxed out, my checking account balance the answer to a third-grade math problem, I got a job at a downtown Starbucks. I biked there using an old ten-speed Dad said was mine, though I had no memory of it. Some mornings I had to get up at four in the morning for work, and though tiredness ached across my eyes and shoulders, the busy immediacy of it brought me a comfort I hadn’t expected. I made cappuccinos and placated customers whose orders I’d messed up, also those whose orders I’d gotten right, though they claimed to have asked for something else. After each shift, I biked home. On cold days, my fingers and face burned. When it rained, the weight the water added to my clothes slowed me down. But spring was beginning to win out, biking home mostly lovely, the air just cool enough to count as refreshing. In front of houses, fists of daffodils and other early flowers started to appear.
Each day when I got home, Dad made the same joke: “Your smell is a latte.” June, usually in the kitchen, would poke her head out and answer, “The two of you are funny together.” Though Dad wasn’t funny and some part of me wanted to scoff at his pedestrian wordplay, it was nice to hear him say silly things, to notice sometimes, when I glanced up from whatever magazine I was flipping through, that Dad was watching me.
He hated the smell of cigarette smoke, so I limited smoking to my breaks at work. And with no booze in the house, I went sober for weeks. That, along with the biking each day and the steadying influence of proper sleep, left me feeling better. And though boredom resurfaced alongside it, it was nice to reacquaint myself with that feeling for a while, to see if I could outlast it or let it overtake me until it felt good, or at least comfortable.
One night I went out for drinks with coworkers. I biked home tipsy. Arriving home after nine, I waited for Dad to say something, but he just asked if I’d worked an extra shift then told me there was lasagna to heat up. As I watched television with Dad and June, an ad came on for the singing competition Meredith was working on. I threw most of my lasagna in the trash, and wished they had a computer besides the one in their bedroom, saying so out loud.
“Computers cost money,” Dad said.
“Don’t I know it,” I said. He turned the TV volume down.
“June and I have been talking,” Dad said.
The next ad was for chewing gum. Its actors had large white teeth. Dad leaned forward, elbows on knees. I waited for him to tell me I’d overstayed my welcome and wished I’d relished the easy boredom of my weeks there more. When he asked that I start paying rent instead, I was relieved.
“How much?” I asked.
“Seventy-five,” he said.
“A month?”
“A week, we were thinking,” he said, and turned the television volume up again.
After they’d gone to bed, I went to the backyard and smoked and decided that his asking for rent hadn’t been wrong, though neither was my annoyance.
The rent talk was a prelude to other conversations. They asked that I not stay out late, as June was a light sleeper. Said next that they’d rather I not bring home friends. “We can’t have wildness with your father’s heart,” June explained. With each talk there was a falling feeling, a settling as I reluctantly adjusted. I had a job, a place to stay. It was enough. Though when coworkers invited me to smoke weed in their cars during our breaks, I missed the lightness of that action, missed other things, too.
I got home from work and found Dad on the couch, breathing strangely. “I think you need to take me to the hospital,” he said.
June had taken their car to work, so he gave me a number to call. Brian answered.
“My father,” I said. “We need a ride to the emergency room.”
Brian was there in minutes. He and I sat in front, Dad lay in the back seat. “We’re almost there,” Brian repeated. I kept looking back to make sure Dad was still with us.
After Dad was admitted, Brian and I sat in a waiting room. Jerry Springer played on TV. People in tight clothes and thick makeup sat on the dais, arms folded.
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Just over a year,” he said.
Brian had on a tie and shiny shoes from his job as a guidance counselor.
“You met your wife at church?”
“I did.”
“Did she go there when I did?”
“You didn’t really go there,” he said.
A woman on TV stood, pointed to a man whose mouth pulled down at the corners like a bulldog’s.
“Can I ask you something? As a guidance counselor, I mean?”
Brian nodded. He had the pale, pleasant face of a missionary.
“What do you say to your students when they don’t know what to do?” I asked.
“About what?”
“Anything.”
Brian leaned forward. The tip of his tie dangled. I squelched the urge to pick it up, to pull.
“Sometimes I tell them to make a list. If they’re the praying sort, I offer that. Or we talk about what’s difficult for them. Break it down into obstacles and solutions.”
“Your students must find you comforting,” I said.
His expression suggested he thought I was poking fun, so I told him I meant it. “To know someone good is talking to them. I bet they leave your office and feel relieved.”
“Your father worries about you,” Brian said.
He went out of his way not to look at me. Years before, when he’d played piano at the church, I’d noticed his fingers delicately pressing on each key and understood the desire he felt and fought. Now he had a baby. When making that baby, he might have thought of men. I wanted to be one of those men, my greed growing as I looked at the thin band on his finger.
“Are you afraid for your father?” Brian asked.
I shook my head. My ten-speed and job, the small-windowed guest room, all of it felt like a joke I’d just realized was being played on me.
“Here’s what I don’t understand about you people,” I said, wincing at my use of that phrase. “Why, if you’re so jazzed about heaven. Why aren’t you all throwing yourselves into lakes or jumping off buildings together, hand in hand and all that?”
“We don’t hate being alive,” Brian said. “And we wouldn’t go to heaven if we killed ourselves.”
“So a technicality then,” I said, and began to well up.
“I can’t tell if you’re being ridiculous or not,” Brian said.
By then I was really crying, though that sort of thing was normal in an ER waiting room.
“I’m not trying to be ridiculous.”
He moved forward, to hug me perhaps, but resisted. I let out a small laugh.
“I’m not going to, like, attack you,” I said.
“I know.”
A patient came in with his hand wrapped in a towel, moved nonchalantly to the admissions desk to tell them he’d sliced one of his fingers. He unfolded the towel. I wanted to see, but couldn’t from where I was sitting.
“I’m not worried that you’ll throw yourself at me,” Brian said.
We drank hospital coffee, its heat snaking down my chest. Brian’s left heel tapped against the floor.
“I would hug you for telling me that,” I said. “But that’s just what you don’t want.”
Brian might have thought of me over the years, wound up each time with worry and lust and shame. I thought about him rarely, and then only as an anecdote.
“And the me from back then would have hugged you too hard,” I said.
I waited for him to talk about the path to damnation I’d forged and followed. But he smiled, and asked, “What about you now?”
“You’re probably safe now,” I said.
“Probably?” he asked.
The wounded man sat across from us, wrapped hand in his lap. With his free hand he picked up a copy of Good Housekeeping, which I found funny, though I find everything funny.
“Yes,” I said. “But you know, I can always change my mind.”
Esophageal spasms, the doctor told Brian and me. “Your father’s body has been through a lot with his surgery. But he isn’t in danger. Just discomfort.”
Brian drove us home. He helped Dad out of the car with a graciousness I found annoying. Inside, June had wound herself into hysterics. Brian said he’d leave us to it.
“Why didn’t you call?” she asked.
“I did.”
“There’s no message on the machine.”
“I called your job. Someone named Michele said you were out but that she’d tell you.”
“Michele hates me,” June said.
I wanted to ask why.
“It’s just his esophagus,” I said.
“What’s wrong with his esophagus?” she asked, pitch rising with worry.
“Just some basic discomfort,” I said, and added, mimicking the doctor, “Should pass sooner rather than later.”
June asked if he could still eat, given that his esophagus was an important part of that process. I handed her his discharge papers and said, “Some light reading.”
In my room I thought of Brian. But each time I went to undo his belt or stick my tongue down his throat, he looked like he was being injured. And when I told him he wouldn’t go to hell, wanting this dream version of Brian to say he didn’t care if he did, he told me instead, “You don’t know. We might end up there together.”
A week later, Dad wanted to go for a drive. It was one of his first times behind the wheel since his surgery. I sat in the passenger seat, listening to a story about a camping trip I had zero memory of.
“Lake Superior,” he said.
“I’ve never been there,” I insisted.
“There are pictures somewhere, maybe with your mother.”
“She doesn’t hold on to pictures.”
Dad gave me an exasperated smile, and I told him we should call her and ask, beginning an improvised version of that conversation in which Mom had the pictures and had quit smoking and admitted everything was her fault. Dad’s rattling laugh filled the car.
“You were right about everything, Bob,” I said, in imitation.
A cat darted into the road. Dad slammed on the brakes. They worked, and the cat made it to the street’s far side. But rather than continue, Dad’s hands squeezed the steering wheel. His stomach rose and fell. I put a hand on his forearm; he moved it away. As cars gathered behind us in a honking line, he said, “Gordon, you shouldn’t have distracted me.”
The accident years before happened when Dad sped through a stop sign he insisted wasn’t there. I’d seen it, though, from the passenger seat, and pulled in a startled breath when we blew through it and into an oncoming car.
As we waited for police and paramedics to arrive, Dad kept saying, “It wasn’t there.” Blood gushed from his already swollen nose.
“I know,” I said, the ache from what turned out to be my broken arm so strong I grew woozy. But I turned my head and saw the sign he claimed didn’t exist, looked back and saw that he’d seen what I’d seen. Dad started to cry, his hands squeezing the steering wheel until his knuckles whitened, purpled. For a long time I imagined that, had I not looked back at the sign, not made it so clear I was on to his bullshit, Dad might have stuck around for a time. Later, I tried to see my turning around as a public service, an animal’s labored breathing stopped with a clean shot from a steady hand.
A coworker named Duncan and I started to take smoke breaks together. I’d mistaken him for boring in my early shifts, was thrilled to learn that he had an amazing memory for minutiae, could mimic our manager’s affect so perfectly I kept asking him to say ridiculous things in his voice.
One evening, Duncan invited me out to drinks after work. “You can meet some of my friends,” he said. “I’ve told them about you.” When he mentioned the gay bar we were going to, I looked at him with surprise.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he whispered.
“We’re not in the army,” I said.
In a bar filled with loud music and interested men and eye contact, I grew shocked at what I’d forgotten.
Duncan’s friends were fine. One was a hairdresser who had things to say about the hair of most people in the bar. Another talked mostly about his nemesis at his office job, Sheila.
A man came over to me. The sharpness of being wanted filled my mouth. He was a dentist, he told me, pointing to his perfect teeth, as if I’d asked for evidence. An hour later, I went to find Duncan to tell him I was leaving, but he was occupied with a man who looked twice his age. The dentist and I left. When I told him I had my bike with me, he laughed sweetly, sweetness something I hadn’t realized I’d missed. We drove to his place with the bike perched in his trunk, its back wheel out and spinning.
The sex was nice, not otherworldly, though I liked how he looked at me. I like being looked at too much.
He asked me to stay the night. I told him I wasn’t looking for anything serious. He answered back that it was just a night and I agreed and conjured an excuse to tell Dad and June.
The next morning I put on my stinking uniform from the day before. And just as I was leaving, the dentist said, “It’s still not serious if you come over again tonight.”
He gave me his card. Told me to come to his office after work.
“You are kinky, doctor,” I said, imagining us in one of his exam chairs, drills and posters on flossing in the background.
At work, one of my colleagues told me I was being weirdly chipper and asked if I’d gotten laid.
“Bingo,” I said.
For the rest of the shift, we used that word. Bingo when the line got long or when one of us needed to use the bathroom. Bingo when the old man came in who always complained that the coffee wasn’t hot enough, as if we were keeping the hotter coffee from him.
“You told me you hadn’t had your teeth cleaned in years,” the dentist said, when I made it to his office. We stood in his waiting room, with its matching chairs and magazines fanned out on a table. I wondered if he needed a receptionist.
“Why are you being nice to me?” I asked.
“I’m trying to woo you.” His face fell as he added, “Though I imagine you’re not looking to be wooed.”
I was probably, not by him, though in the years since I wished I’d remembered his name.
“Come,” he said, and cleaned my teeth, moving close so I could hear the gentle whistle of his breathing.
I stayed the next night, then Sunday, which I had off. The dentist drove me to Dad’s when he and June would be at church so I could leave a note (Staying with a friend for the weekend) and get more clothes. Back at the dentist’s, we cooked together. I put together a salad I’d learned to make from Philip. The dentist ate it as if it were some great delicacy, and I stayed another night.
After my Monday shift, I biked back to Dad’s, rehearsing a story about a friend from work, the fun we’d had, whittling the last days down to an innocuous childhood sleepover. I can leave and come back, I thought, especially for a few days.
But walking inside, I found my packed bags just inside the door. Seeing them, I regretted the dentist, regretted the either/or my father demanded of me, regretted coming back at all.
Dad got up from the golf he wasn’t watching. I could see the sadness weighing him down, wishing I wasn’t so expert in translating what it meant when his blinking sped up and he knotted his mouth so that his lips turned close to invisible. I wanted to scoff at his hurt, to tell him I’d done nothing wrong, but he had taken me in when I’d needed it. Dad stopped in front of my duffel bag.
“We can’t have that kind of behavior in this house,” he said.
“It didn’t happen in this house,” I answered, a sincere statement, though he seemed to take it as sarcasm. I tried but failed to catch his eye.
Dad asked me for my keys.
“Thanks for packing my bags,” I said.
“What a thing to say,” Dad said.
I’d meant it. He’d been kind to me, even though I’m not sure he wanted to.
I stepped close, to hug him goodbye, but Dad shook his head, an action that allowed anger to creep in, though as he kept shaking his head so that his jowls trembled and with the edges of his eyes ringed in red, any anger lost its traction, especially when he tried and failed to pick up my bag.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I was about to explain that I wasn’t sorry for the dentist but for the mutual injuries he and I were expert at inflicting, but didn’t know if that distinction mattered.
I walked until I found a pay phone. When Duncan answered, he sounded surprised.
“Is it okay that I’m calling?” I asked.
In the background, TV or the radio. The reality that I had nowhere to live again crowded the booth I stood in.
“Sure,” Duncan said. “I just didn’t remember giving you my number.”
Duncan lived with his mother. They offered me the couch in their basement, a space with a carpet remnant and a rumbling hot water tank, boxes labeled with things like Sweaters and Holiday. Niceness permeated their house. They refused the rent I offered, told me I could get groceries from time to time. When I came back from work with a hundred dollars’ worth of food one night, his mom said, “This is too much,” and the three of us ate dinner from the overabundance.
Duncan and I went back to the bar where I’d met the dentist. He found another older man and I went back to his house without him, embarrassed when his mother, Lois, heard me and walked out of her room. She had on a bathrobe, her hair flattened on one side. I told her Duncan would be home soon. She smiled and answered that I was a good friend, though Duncan had been the good friend, me the beneficiary of his kindness. I asked Lois if I could use their computer to check my email.
There was a message from Janice, asking how Mexico City was going. Despite my promises of steady friendship, I’d let her drift into the distance. I began to write back, but the last, colorless months were too much to rehash, so I told myself I’d finish it later, hoping I would. I went to the basement and slept hard, was woken up the next morning by Duncan when he came down to do his laundry.
One night, Lois out and Duncan at work, I called my mom.
She talked about her job at the Y, then asked where I was.
“Milwaukee,” I said.
“With your father?” she asked.
“For a while, but that didn’t work out.”
“You thought it would?”
Her question was fair, even if magical thinking was a trait she and Dad had taught me.
“I’m staying at a friend’s now,” I said. “On a sofa in his basement.” I talked about the chatty hot water heater, the dryer so close I’d felt its heat.
“The way you sound,” she said. “Talking about it like it’s a good thing.”
“A place to live,” I said.
“Barely.”
I asked about her apartment. She told me it was a studio, warding off the possibility that I’d ask to stay. I talked next about Mexico City.
“Why did you go there?” she asked.
“I was invited.”
“What sort of invitation?”
“One that was offered and accepted.”
There was quiet for a while, a sucking sound. Maybe she was smoking again. Maybe it didn’t matter. Just as I was about to sign off, Mom said, “You can’t act like some scared child forever.”
I wanted to bang the phone against the wall, for her to hear each hard sound. But that feeling came and went, leaving behind a reminder that she could do nothing for me, that even as a child my sore throats or questions were puzzles she wasn’t up to solving.
“That’s true,” I said, “but I can be a scared adult.”
“Not everything is funny,” she said.
I was deciding whether to retreat or engage, whether to tell her she was right, that most things were only pretend funny, or funny if you didn’t think too much about them, when Mom told me she had to go, finishing with, “Let me know where you end up.”
I didn’t talk to her for months. Even then, I did so begrudgingly after several emails from her, each progressively more hysterical. The last one ended in all caps: I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.
I was making lattes for women with their work IDs on lanyards when my father appeared. He moved slowly. I steamed milk and called out orders. Dad waited in line. When his turn came, he dropped mail onto the counter.
“This is for you,” he said.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“You should tell people this isn’t your address anymore. I don’t want to keep you.”
He turned around and walked out the door.
I went into the back room, dropped the mail into my satchel, and returned to my post. But instead of taking the next order, I asked Duncan to cover for me. Dad was only a few steps out of the store. He walked carefully, as if navigating an icy sidewalk.
“You didn’t answer my question on how you’re feeling,” I said.
“How do you think I’m feeling?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“There are some bills in that mail,” he said.
On the street beyond us, his car sat double-parked. Wanting to end this on my terms, to fulfill the role he’d assigned me, perhaps, I said, “You know Brian at your church? He’s like me. Brian who you rely on, who you called when you needed to be taken to the hospital.”
“He’s not like you,” Dad said.
I outpaced him and turned to block his path. He kept his eyes on the ground.
“I spent those nights when I didn’t come home with a dentist,” I said. “He even cleaned my teeth, which was nice of him. Hot in a strange way.”
“Gordon,” he interrupted.
“After I slept with him the first night, he wanted me to stay. I probably could have turned into his wife or something. Wouldn’t that have been a thing, me and my dentist lover living just a few miles away from you? Maybe he’s your dentist. That would be an amazing coincidence, him checking your fillings and gums with the same hands he did things to me with.”
“Gordon,” Dad repeated.
“All sorts of things.”
“Why are you like this?”
I could have answered that his coming and going had shaped me, though there was a hardness in me I remembered even before he’d found the Lord, when he and I were, as Mom said, “quite a pair.” Could have told him that I also wondered why I jumped into uncertain waters only to flail once I reached them. How giving up felt good, the way it did when a man grabbed my throat or went at me with teeth, with force, and I didn’t have to try, just to let him. How it was sometimes only in those moments of abject pain or failure or with a pillow over my mouth that might not get lifted in time that I felt something close to better.
But instead I said, “I’d love it if he were your dentist. That would make me happy.”
Dad got into his car. He pulled onto the street without looking to see if anyone was coming.
When June called me eight months later to tell me Dad had died, she kept saying, “If only you’d seen him again.” I had seen him though. Living in their guest room, there’d been moments of loveliness, most in remembrance, what was left for us to share outside of nostalgia a shrinking patch of ground. The version of him I’d miss had left long ago, existing even more as what I’d hoped he might be. “The funeral’s Friday,” June said. I told her I’d book a flight, though I didn’t and on Thursday called and said that my flight had been canceled, that I didn’t have money for another one. I wanted her to offer to pay, or admit she wouldn’t, but she said she was sorry to hear that, and asked that I go to church the next day. “While his service is happening. So you can be with him.” I went out that night, felt lucky when someone reasonably attractive took me home. Early the next morning I stopped by a church—a Catholic one, with flickering candles, everything there plated in gold—and felt only the discomfort of the bench I sat on, a wish, too, to have felt more. I lit a candle, paid for it, and thought about the sex I’d had the night before, how it always took me by surprise when a stranger ended up being careful and attentive and looked at me with something like love, for a few minutes anyway.
Back in Duncan’s basement after Dad had come to the store, I went through the mail he’d brought me. There was a postcard from Janice, a credit card bill I couldn’t believe had found me. The last was written on thick card stock, a handwriting I recognized right away as Philip’s. I hoped he was writing with forgiveness, that his note explained how he’d kicked Nicola out and was hoping I’d return. I ripped the envelope open.
Philip’s note was brief. He mentioned the work it took to find me, that he wished me the best. Accompanying it was a check for five thousand dollars. In its memo Philip had written Arrears. I didn’t know that word then and had to look it up.
It wasn’t the forgiveness I wanted. And not getting what I wanted left me embarrassed at the way I clung to a vision of the world as I wished it to be. But the money was a lifeline. And as I lay there, the check written in Philip’s elegant hand resting on my stomach, I thought of Dad that afternoon when he’d pulled into traffic without looking, certain all he needed then was to get away from me.
I put the check in my wallet.
The next morning, I walked for an hour to get to my bank. The woman behind the counter accepted the check as if that much money were no big deal, so I pretended it was no big deal, too, and took a taxi back to work with its coffee smells and line of customers, and waited until the end of the shift to give notice to my manager.