Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [23]
I don’t make excuses. I know what he’s doing is illegal. I know that he’s a drain on taxpayers’ resources, that people who work hard at their jobs are the ones paying for his apartment and his food, for the cops who bust him and the counselors who hand him pamphlets about AA and methadone. I know that the radio talk-show shouters would hold him up as an example of everything wrong with America—how we’re entitled, how we’re weak, how instead of facing our troubles we lean on the crutches of chemicals. But he’s my father . . . and I don’t believe that it’s his fault. It’s not like he’s lazy, some privileged rich kid trying to escape from some imaginary heartache or chasing some feel-good high. He takes drugs so that he can feel something close to normal, and I believe that normal is all he’s after.
“You ready?” I asked. From his apartment complex, it’s a short trip to a strip mall, with a diner and a barbershop. I walked closer to the traffic. My dad walked beside me, his gait a little unsteady, his eyes on the ground.
We went to the barbershop, where I paid for my father to get a haircut, flipping through Sports Illustrated while the barber made small talk, then sprinkled talc on the back of his neck. Back in the apartment, I straightened up some more while he made coffee and read the paper. At one-thirty I handed him the plastic bag, my haul for the month.
The shaking in his hands had gotten worse, I saw, as he opened the bag and rummaged inside, pulling out four paperback novels, a razor and a can of shaving cream, a jar of Kiehl’s moisturizer, and three bars of Dial soap, all of which I’d scavenged from campus. It was easy: my classmates were constantly leaving their buckets of toiletries in the bathrooms, their clothes in the dryer, their bookbags and backpacks everywhere. Sometimes I would slip into the boys’ bathroom and slip out with a razor and a canister of shaving cream in my bathrobe pocket, or I’d hang around the basement laundry room and wait until it was empty and I was alone with a dryer-full of men’s clothing. It wasn’t as if the boys at my school couldn’t spare a little soap or a copy of whatever book it was fashionable to tote around that semester. Because of my job, I knew who had money and who, like me, was on work-study, and I was careful to take stuff only from the ones I knew could just buy more, in the unlikely event that they even noticed what was missing. I was, I told myself, like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and entitled and careless, giving to my father, who needed it more than they did.
“What are you reading?” I asked him. This was a safe question, because he was always reading something.
“Great Expectations,” he answered. “It’s spring.”
“Oh, I loved that one,” I said, not taking the bait, not mentioning that he’d taught that book every May. “Magwitch was my favorite.” Magwitch, Pip’s mysterious benefactor. Someday, I thought, I would like to be somebody’s mysterious benefactor, too; giving gifts to someone who didn’t know me; watching, from a distance, their delight.
I looked out the window as my father went into the back of the apartment, where I’d never been, to put the soap and shaving cream away. The kids who were playing soccer had taken their ball and gone home. Now there was a woman in a bright orange sari outside, standing behind a baby slumped in the plastic cradle of a swing. She pushed him back and forth as the chains creaked. The baby sat quietly,