I UNLOCK THE door to a dark, silent house. On the kitchen table are a bowl of pistachio shells and an ashtray of stubbed-out cigars: no note from my father about where he went, nothing. For a moment I wonder if he’s in more trouble than he’s letting on, and I have no idea what to do. Then he walks inside with the newspaper tucked under his arm.
“Where were you?” I say.
“I should ask you the same thing, cutting out of work today.” He flicks on the radio and sits down. “Any uninvited guests tonight?”
“I didn’t see them.”
“Not even across the street?”
I glance at my father to see if I should be nervous, but his eyes are on the paper. “Should I be worried or are you just talking?”
“Worry about those fools?” He taps the sofa. “Relax a minute.”
I take a seat, watching my father’s eyes dart across the page. The radio, for once, is comforting: loud enough to absorb our silence but too quiet for my father to make out actual words and yell back at the news, wagging a finger in the air. Then he sets down the paper and walks into the kitchen. I hear the icebox open and close, and when he reappears he just stands in the doorway, cradling his beer, turning it around in his hands like he’s forgotten what to do with it. Then he says softly, “You’ve been acting funny. This about Gladys?”
This is so unlike him that I know Gladys is on the sidelines, nudging him to ask, and I can’t help it: I wonder if a new woman could be good for us. How comforting to have things back in order like when my mother was sick and the Party women took charge: dinner foil-wrapped and ready to slide into the oven, the sounds of a bridge game and neighborhood gossip rising and falling in the background as I drifted to sleep.
“Do you love her?” I blurt.
“No,” he says. “But I like her.”
“But do you think you could? Someday, I mean.”
He stares at me, as if genuinely registering my presence for the first time. “You want to know the truth?”
I nod and he sits back down and says, “Sometimes we’ll be out together, eating a meal or something, and I’ll be watching her mouth move and hear nothing she’s saying and feel like the saddest man in the restaurant. Sometimes I wonder if I was wired to love only your mother. But then I keep thinking, okay. Now’s the time for me to be back in my life.”
I’ve never heard him talk this way to anyone — certainly not to me — and part of me knows to let everything fall silent before the mood turns dangerously dark. I can already tell I’m wandering into mapless territory, where I can so easily step over some invisible border and start a whole new war, just like that. But I have too many questions. “Was Mom your first?” I say. “Love, I mean.”
He shakes his head. “But after her, the others seemed like rehearsals.”
“She was pretty, wasn’t she?”
He looks up, startled. “You don’t remember?”
I’ve spent my whole life trying to remember, I want to say.
Instead I say: “I was five.”
“You were five,” he says, as if it’s only now occurring to him. “No,” he says, slowly. “She wasn’t very pretty. Sometimes, at certain angles, she looked a little crazy. Like all her features, her long nose and pointy chin, had no business being together on one face. But then she’d look at you head-on and dazzle you.” He smiles, as if he can see something on the wall beyond me, some bright and endless reel of images, that will always — always — be invisible to me. “She had such a presence at the meetings. She knew how to be the most powerful person in the group by saying so little. You’d be talking to a room packed with people and she’d just stare at you, and all at once you’d feel drunk and oafish and full of hot air, even when you’d had nothing to drink.”
And then the question that’s been knocking around inside me for years comes tumbling out: “Do you ever think it isn’t worth it?”
“What?”
We’ve been talking so openly, but suddenly even saying the question feels too risky, as if someone might really be listening. “You know,” I say. “Have you ever thought, for just a second, of giving all this up and being — like everybody else?”
“We are like everybody else,” my father says quickly. “Everyone who matters.”
For a moment he doesn’t say anything. “You have to understand,” he says. “The Party was our life, your mother’s and mine. And after she died, the idea of getting out of bed and making coffee and going on with my day seemed. impossible. But everyone, they stepped in. The Party women caring for you, Lou and Alan coming by every single day, taking you to school, to the park on weekends. Everybody, all of them, they helped you with your homework, they taught you to read. I couldn’t do any of that myself.” He takes a slow sip of beer. “You can’t question the Party,” he says. “The moment you do — you fall apart.”
He’s sitting there, his feet tapping the floor to a sharp, even beat and his head squished against the cushions. I have this eerie and comforting feeling of seeing him at ten, twenty, thirty, shifting nervously on all the sofas in every apartment he’s lived in. All at once I feel his pain, his life, lean against my heart.
He clears his throat. “It’s probably past your bedtime.”
“Pop,” I say. “I don’t have a bedtime.”
But we both stand up and he puts his hands on my shoulders, steering me down the hall. “Let’s you and me pretend, just for tonight,” he says, “that I remembered to give you one. Okay?”
“Okay,” I whisper. And there’s a moment before I go into my room that his hands stay on my shoulders, just resting there: the heaviest, warmest coat.
I’M WIPING down tables the next morning when my father and Lou saunter through the restaurant doors. They seem all business, snagging their booth in the back without stopping to chat with the guys at the counter. “Hey,” I say.
My father doesn’t look up. So I walk over and say, “The usual?”
“Sure,” he says. “Whatever.”
And then he waves me away and turns back to Lou. They’re so focused on each other that it’s like I really am just a waitress to him, some flimsy, forgettable girl in a grease-stained apron with a too-hot pot of coffee. They just keep leaning in and whispering, and suddenly I’m so hurt I can taste it. I’m standing there, feeling like a bigger fool by the second for believing one real talk with my father means another will follow — and then I set the pot down right on their table, untie my apron and push through the glass doors.
“Running out again?” Alan’s behind me on the street, so close I can see a rim of sweat above his lip. In the sunlight he looks athletic, like the sweat came from a tennis match rather than working in a restaurant with a broken fan. But I’m already walking down the avenue too fast to answer, past the hardware store and the druggist and the bakery, my sandals loud on the pocked sidewalk. I know the last thing my father will do is tie on that apron, and yes, I know it’s wrong to make Alan take over my shift, but I keep walking. I turn up one block and the next, smelling everything at once: charcoal and hamburgers, eucalyptus trees, exhaust wafting out from the mechanic’s. I cross a boulevard, toward the larger houses set away from the road. Then down a side street, up another and past an intersection, until I’m standing in front of his door.
“Hey,” Hal says, opening it after my first knock. His face is pink, like he just scrubbed it. Behind him there’s a television flashing and a brown plaid recliner. I can’t make out the person in it, just a man’s arm, Hal’s father’s arm, reaching for a sandwich on the tray beside him. There’s a western on the screen, and beyond that, lemon-colored walls and thick carpet and the distant sound of a vacuum, humming away in a room I can’t see.