Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [60]
The process had gone smoothly: I’d donated my eggs in late May and deposited my check when it arrived ten days later. Six weeks after that, my father was in Willow Crest doing a twenty-eight-day inpatient stay, which would include a physical and psychological evaluation, group therapy, individual therapy, music therapy, and art therapy. He’d made me a collage full of pictures cut from magazines—girls running, girls leaping, girls laughing over their bowls of salad—and he’d smiled when I’d told him, straight-faced, that I would cherish it forever.
I knew I wouldn’t be hearing from him for a while. The counselors had explained that residents weren’t allowed to have cell phones or send e-mail. There was one pay phone that was made available for an hour each day, and usually there was a very long line. As my father worked through the twelve steps, they said, he would make amends to those he’d wronged, but I should be patient, should “manage my expectations.” When I’d gone out to Pittsburgh to take him to Willow Crest, he’d come to the door of the apartment to meet me. I’d peered down the dark hallway and glimpsed Rita in the bedroom, but she’d shut the door before I could call “hello.” His hair was clean, cut short, combed back from his forehead, and in the new shirt and jeans he wore he looked better than I’d seen him looking in years.
We had lunch together in the place’s cafeteria, a loud, lowceilinged room that reminded me of a school, with posters on the walls (covered in AA slogans, instead of warnings about Stranger Danger or invitations to the Summer Reading Program), flimsy paper napkins and square cartons of milk. The food, too, seemed intended for children: mac and cheese served on segmented plastic trays; cheap metal spoons and forks, no knives. I’d chattered about my job, turning my pig of a boss into a charming character, telling my dad about the three meals a day they had delivered and leaving out the part about how we got free food because our corporate masters didn’t want us taking longer than twenty minutes for breakfast or lunch. I made much of the Friday-night happy hours, where the analysts would gather in an Irish pub around the corner from our office, a place so generic it could have been plucked from a mall in Minneapolis. In truth, these were grim affairs, marked by too many drinks and ill-advised hookups, and they rarely began before eleven p.m. because all of us worked so late.
“Proud of you,” my father muttered, forking noodles into his mouth. His hands shook as he scooted his tray closer. At twelve-thirty, a counselor wearing lots of turquoise jewelry stopped by the table. “Time to say goodbye now,” she announced. I tried as hard as I could not to look relieved as I walked out into the sunshine.
On the bus ride back to the Port Authority, I’d done my best to reassure myself that it would all work out. Willow Crest had the highest success rate of any place my father could have gone. Besides, he wasn’t a typical addict. He was intelligent; he had people who loved him. People who needed him. Me.
Kimmie sighed in her sleep. Her face was still flushed, her hair a tousled, fragrant mess. I put my hand on her shoulder, shivery with delight. Over our first months in the city, Kimmie and I had spent all of our free time together, reading New York magazine and picking out a restaurant we wanted to try or a play we wanted to see. I was in charge of transportation, using subway and bus maps to figure out the fastest and most economical route, while Kimmie scoured the Internet for coupons and discounts and last-minute tickets, doing such a good job of it that one day, I joked, the performers would pay us for attending their plays, and the waiters would leave tips on our table.
All through July, we’d traded pieces of our history. Kimmie’s parents, Korean immigrants who’d met in an English as a Second Language