Find The Melody #2
Once, I came home from class and his truck was in the driveway with him sitting inside it.
Just staring at the house like he couldn't bring himself to walk into it.
I went inside. Hours later I woke up at one in the morning, looked out the window and he was still there, head against the steering wheel.
At night, you could hear him crying. Deep, guttural sounds that came through the walls, muffled but impossible to ignore. Sometimes for hours. Simone would crawl into my bed some nights, pressing her hands over her ears, and I'd hold her until she fell asleep, pretending I couldn't hear it.
My father had always been the strongest man I knew. He'd taught us everything about being a man. About protecting family, about loving a woman, about standing up and providing. He'd been our king.
Now he was disappearing a little more each day, and none of us knew how to help him.
Months later, I was the one signing Simone's permission slips, mailing checks to pay utility bills, maintaining lists of what was needed around the house and grocery shopping.
I'd practiced his signature on a yellow legal pad until I could do it without stopping to think, first because he kept forgetting to sign critical WadeHouse invoices, employee payrolls, and other expenses, then because I'd stopped trying to remind him. I’d make necessary calls and pretend to be my father.
I learned that nobody on the other end would question a calm Black man's voice if it was steady enough.
Zion’s school called about his constant fighting.
Pops was supposed to meet with the school, but he didn't leave his room.
So I went. I sat across from a vice principal who looked at me and asked if my father was coming.
I told him he was unavailable. He looked at me with sympathy, or pity.
Everyone in town knew my parents, and I could tell he was trying to give us as much grace as he could as I argued the case for Zion to not be suspended.
I signed his alternative discipline plan and walked out of that office a nineteen-year-old, feeling forty.
One night I was studying for a final when I heard raised voices in the kitchen. Uncle Reggie's first, frustrated and tired.
“Zay, you got to pull yourself together, man. These kids need their father.”
“Don't tell me what my kids need.” Pops’s voice shot back.
“Then start acting like you know. You think Niecy would want this? You think she'd want you wasting away while Julian's trying to hold you all together?”
“Don't.” Daddy's voice broke in the middle. “Don't speak on what she'd want.”
“You need help, Zay. I done looked into it, and there are professionals out here that are experienced in this kind of thing. Some even got nice relaxing retreat-like place you could go to.”
“I’m not crazy, Reggie! I don’t need a damn shrink! You don’t know what I’m going through!”
“I know what it looks like from the outside. And it looks pathetic.”
“Pathetic? Easy for you to tell me to move on when you treat Althea like she's dirt. Don’t know how to treat the wife you have, tryin’ to tell me how to feel about the wife I lost. Fuck you! I love Niecy. She’s the air I breathe.” His voice broke. “You wouldn’t know nothin ‘bout that.”
“You take that back!”
“I won’t!”
Chairs started scraping, and the sound of grunts and bodies colliding tore through the house. By the time Zion and I got to the kitchen, the two of them were throwing punches and Reggie had Pops pinned against a wall.
“You're lost! We need to get you some help, Zay!” Reggie pleaded, shaking him. “Let us help you, man! Think about your kids!”
Pops looked over at us with bloodshot eyes and his expression crumbled. Shame and the understanding of what we were witnessing. He shoved Reggie off and walked out the back door without a word.
Didn't come back for two days.
That became a pattern. He'd disappear for a day or two, then show up looking even more broken down than when he’d left. Each time, there was a little less of our father and a little more of a stranger wearing his face.
One day when Pops had been gone for days again, I got a call from Lydia, the office assistant at WadeHouse.
“Julian, baby, you need to get over here right now. We tried Reggie, he ain't answering.”
“What's wrong?”
“Your daddy. He been locked in his office since yesterday with a bottle. We can't wake him up.”
I rushed over and found him slumped over his desk.
Empty liquor bottles next to a stack of unsigned contracts that had been waiting on him for weeks.
The staff was standing around in the hallway pretending not to look, Lydia wringing her hands, because an artist had come in for a meeting and she didn't know what to do with them.
“How long?” I asked Lydia.
“Since about ten in the morning yesterday. He came in, didn't speak to nobody, locked the door.” She lowered her voice. “Julian, what we supposed to do? We got artists coming in. Meetings on the books. Deals supposed to be signed.”
I looked around the building my parents had built from nothing and the people who'd worked for them for years and depended on WadeHouse for their living. And right then I made the call my father couldn't.
“Cancel today's appointments. Reschedule any others for next week. Two if possible. I'll handle the contracts.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.
I got Pops conscious enough to walk him out and get him home, and spent the rest of the night going through paperwork I had no business going through, learning what was urgent and what could wait.
That was the day I began to understand he wasn't coming back from this anytime soon. Not really.
But the real breaking point came the next day. Simone fell off her bike in the driveway. Scraped her knees up bad with blood streaming down both shins, gravel embedded in the skin. She came hobbling into the house wailing, calling for Pops.
I found him in the living room. Staring at a photo of Mama in his hands.
“Pops. Simone's hurt.”
He looked at me with the blank expression that had become too familiar. Like he was looking through me instead of at me.
“Simone fell. She's bleeding. She needs you.”
He stood up slowly, moving toward the kitchen where I had set her in a chair as she continued to cry for him. But when he got there, he just stopped. Stood over her like he didn't know what came next.
“Daddy, it hurts.” Simone held out her bloody knees.
He knelt down beside her and I handed him the first aid kit. He took it with trembling hands, pulled out a Band-Aid and tried to stick it directly over the dirt and the blood.
“Pops,” I said, carefully. “You have to clean it first.”
He stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
“The wound,” I said. “You have to clean it before the Band-Aid.”
He looked back at Simone's knees. At the Band-Aid in his hand. And I saw the exact moment he gave up. Shoulders sagging, hands dropping. He stepped back from her.
“I don't —“ he started. “I can't. Julian… you —“
So I did.
I cleaned her scrapes. Pulled the gravel out with tweezers while she sniffled against my shoulder. Antibiotic ointment. Pops stood in the doorway watching for a minute, then turned and walked away.
That night I sat in my bedroom with the same yellow legal pad I'd used to practice his signature, and made a list. Bills.
Appointments. School forms. WadeHouse contracts, vendors, payroll.
Simone's well-visit. Tre's varsity travel. Zion's college applications. Pops’s medication he'd stopped taking. Copies of Mama’s death certificate; order ten, everybody wants an original. Submit the life insurance claim that Pops couldn’t bring himself touch. Mama’s headstone, still not ordered, and overdue now that the ground had settled on her plot. The list went on.
Somewhere in the time since she’d died, I had a birthday. Nobody had said anything, and I only realized it later when a form asked my age. I had to pause to do the math.
I had just turned twenty, and I was making a list of how to be the man of the house.
Five months and some change after Mama's funeral, I came home from class and the house was eerily quiet in a way it had not been since the day she died.
I called for Pops throughout the house. In the basement studio that he had destroyed the day after Mama died.
Upstairs in their bedroom. The bedroom was wrong.
The rug he slept on was still there, bed still made up.
But the closet was half-empty. The dresser where Mama's perfumes and his cologne had sat side by side was wiped clean.
Drawers were open and emptied. The photos of the two of them over the years gone from the wall and dressers.
I went back downstairs and that's when I saw the envelope on the table with his handwriting
My Precious Babies.
I sat down and opened it.
My Dear Children,
I have failed you, each of you, in ways I can never undo.
Your mother was the light of my life. When she went, I went with her. I should be strong enough to stay. I am not. Every day gets harder to bear. I am nothing but a shell.
My heart, my mind, everything I am is frozen in the moment she died in my arms. I cannot move forward. And the truth is, I don't want to.
But you must.
You have so much life ahead of you. Dreams waiting. Milestones to reach. Love to discover. If I stay, I will only hold you back. You'll feel obligated to carry me, to tiptoe around my grief. I cannot let that continue to happen.
You deserve to live without having to carry what is broken in me.
I cannot stay here anymore. Not without her.
I will make sure you are cared for. The house is paid off. Food, utilities, school tuitions all accounted for. Trust accounts are set for each of you. You will want for nothing. Aunt Lorraine and Uncle Reggie will help with anything else.
Julian. I am proud of the man you’ve become in the wake of my weakness. I know you will keep them safe. I know you will grow into the man I cannot be.
Stay together. Take care of each other.
I love you. Forgive me if you can.