Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [21]
“I’ve been running a lot. Five miles yesterday.”
“Five miles. Wow. Good for you.” She looked at herself ruefully. “I bet I couldn’t run a mile. Not even if someone was chasing me.”
“You just start slow. Run for thirty seconds, walk for two minutes. Start with twenty minutes a day...”
She shook her head, smiling. She’d heard this before, my prescriptions for healthy living, advice about diet and exercise, and she’d listen with a smile, then ignore whatever I’d suggested. As far as I knew, she’d never been on a date since my father had left. “I’m just not interested,” she’d told me the one time I’d asked.
My father and his girlfriend lived in an apartment complex, a place called Oakwood Towers that boasted no oak trees and where the buildings topped out at three stories. The three-building complex, shaped like an H, was Section 8 housing, with a parking lot full of secondhand cars held together with Bondo and tape and baling wire, and apartments full of new immigrants and newly single men, families who’d cram eight or ten people into a one-bedroom unit, tired-eyed grandparents with babies and toddlers. My mother would drive into the parking lot, but no farther.
“See you at two?”
I nodded, leaving my backpack in the car, taking the plastic bag full of stuff I’d brought for my father. On the scraggly lawn in front of his building, two boys in corduroy pants and T-shirts kicked a soccer ball back and forth and chattered to each other in a language I didn’t recognize.
I pressed the buzzer, waited until the door opened, and then walked past the empty fountain in the lobby (sometimes there was a girl in a football helmet sitting on the lip of that fountain, rocking and drooling), down a disinfectant-scented, green-carpeted hallway to apartment 211.
Rita wasn’t there—she worked on weekends, a part-time job at a sporting-goods store. My dad was waiting for me at the door. He’d gained weight since his time in jail, and now his face was red, his fingers thick, his hands and cheeks swollen as he hugged me and said my name in his hoarse, raspy voice. He smelled like cigarette smoke, but nothing worse: sometimes when I’d hug him I could catch a whiff of whiskey or the strange, chemical odor I could only guess was drugs, but not today.
“Come in,” he said, leading me through the cluttered living room. Coffee mugs and sections of newspaper and DVD cases sat on every table; clothes were piled on the couch and the chairs. The windows were streaked with dirt; the pillows on the sofa were squashed; the knickknack shelf where Rita kept a few framed family photographs and some china plates and crystal glasses was dusty. My dad walked to the little kitchen, where there was a frying pan on the stove and three teacups beside it, one with cut-up onions, one with green peppers, and one with grated cheese. “I’m making a Denver omelet.”
“That sounds good.” I watched as he scooped a spoonful of margarine from a tub and put it in the pan to melt. His hands were shaking, but this could have meant almost anything: some of the drugs he’d been prescribed had tremors as a side effect, or he could have been going through withdrawal, or he could have been high, right at that moment, for all I knew. After all the years, I’d never gotten any good at telling.
I found forks and knives in a drawer, plates in a cabinet, and two juice glasses in the dishwasher. My father was concentrating hard on the pan. He’d dumped in the onions, which were cut in large, ragged chunks. He shook his head, then picked up a spatula, the end still crusted with melted cheese. I poured us small glasses of generic orange juice—as part of his disability payments, my father got food stamps, although they weren’t stamps anymore, just what looked like a regular debit card to use at the grocery store—and found paper napkins and a loaf of wheat bread for toast. I was starting to straighten up the living room when he called me in for breakfast. Feeling uncomfortable and out of place, the way I always did in his apartment,