Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [22]
“It’s really good,” I told him.
My father sighed. “Ah, I’m no cook. That was your mother.”
I didn’t answer, watching as he maneuvered a bite into his mouth. If he missed us, this was as close as he’d come to saying so. An onion fell off and got stuck in his beard. “Dad,” I said quietly, pointing, and waiting until he’d used his napkin to get it out.
If you saw my father on the street, walking or sitting on the bench outside the duck pond behind his building, you wouldn’t cross the street to avoid him. Maybe you’d think that he was just a regular guy enjoying the sunshine, a man with a job and a family and a house to come home to. If you looked a little closer you’d see the thumbprints smeared on his glasses, the way one of the earpieces was mended with duct tape, the way his skin was unnaturally red and his eyes filmy. If you noticed that, maybe you would pick up your pace and try to put the sight of him out of your mind. You wouldn’t want to think about how many people like him there were out in the world, unsupervised, untethered, unloved. At least you’d want to believe they were untethered and unloved, that they didn’t have wives, or sons, or daughters, because you certainly wouldn’t want to think about that.
I put my fork down on my plate. “Hey, Dad,” I said, “if I could pay for you to go to rehab, would you go?”
He didn’t answer right away. I looked at him, his swollen face, his greasy hair. He used to be handsome. He used to wear suits on the first day of school, no matter how hot it was. He used to kiss my mother in the kitchen when he came home from work, grabbing her around the waist and lifting her briefly into the air as she laughed. He used to live in a house with three bedrooms and an above-ground swimming pool . . . but I stopped those thoughts before they got too far.
He pulled off his glasses and turned them over slowly. “It’s not your job,” he finally said. “Not your job to take care of me.”
“I’m almost done with school,” I said, pulling out the pages that I’d printed and passing them across the table. Willow Crest: A Community of Care. I’d done enough research to show that the place was conveniently located and well-regarded, with a respectable success rate. The intake counselor I’d talked with the day before said that they’d have a bed available within the next three weeks. “I’ve got some money to spare. Would you go?”
He scratched his nose, forehead furrowed, then poked at the pages. After he had his accident, insurance paid for detox in a hospital, then twenty-eight days in rehab in a place up in New Hampshire. He was diagnosed with depression while he was in there, and he did okay for a while once he got out, even though he’d been suspended from his job and was on disability while the school board figured out exactly what to do. Then came the trial. “Area Teacher Sentenced for Drunk Driving Accident,” read the headline on page B-6 of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. My mother, who was normally a stickler about education, had let me and Greg stay home from school the day after the verdict. Greg had disappeared out the back door as soon as she’d left for work. I’d stayed in bed, not my bed but the one my parents used to share, watching game shows and talk shows and court shows, thinking it was quite possible that I would die of shame, that my mother would come home and find nothing but a girl-shaped puddle of embarrassment with, perhaps, some blond hair attached.
The school district hadn’t been able to fire him, but by the time he got out of jail, his job was gone. Downsized, they said, claiming that it had nothing to do with what had happened. I couldn’t blame them. Teachers could have a whiff of scandal in their histories—in my high school, there was a math teacher who’d left her husband for a shop instructor—but they couldn’t have hit a mother and child while driving drunk, and gone to jail for the crime.
With no job, he had no benefits. With no benefits, he couldn’t afford