Chapter 55
FIFTY-FIVE
DADDY’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET
*Denver sends picture*
I release a breath as I stare at the ‘property’ in front of me.
It’s not what I imagined.
Or is it?
My memories of my grandmother have faded as time’s gone by.
She died six years ago, and I remember her always carrying the massive Chanel purse my dad bought her to commemorate his first big contract with an NBA player, a cigarette in the other hand, and a baseball cap on her head.
She wore things Dad didn’t approve of—jeans and camisoles and flip-flops.
Her nails were damaged from bleach, she said, and her fingers bore the stains too…
Whenever she ate a snack, she halved it and used to put the rest in her purse for a merienda the next day. She’d berate Logan for using too much ketchup and wasting it if he didn’t eat it, and I’m pretty sure she stole the toilet paper in her bathroom from one of the coffee shops down her street.
Twelve-year-old me never picked up on those things as signs of someone who’d endured poverty, but now? It’s staring me straight in the face.
Dad: What the fuck are you doing there?
The aggression would have taken me aback another day. Now, I’m looking at the remnants of a slum and it makes a sad kind of sense.
Me: You know how I convinced you to sign off on this half semester abroad by telling you how soccer is massive and it’s a growing industry in the US and I could be networking, yadda yadda yadda?
Me: I lied.
When my cell buzzes, I’m not surprised. It does surprise me that I dive into this headfirst by answering the call.
“Why are you there?” is his immediate snarled greeting.
“I get it.”
And I do.
My dad, the poser, grew up in the exact opposite of the gated community where I did—with twenty-four-hour armed guards, pool houses beside the pools, and housekeepers who cleaned up around us.
“I didn’t even know Madrid had shanty towns,” I admit into the silence growing between us.
“That’s because I never wanted you to know.”
I jolt when the sound of a collision hits my ear drums, like a fist into a filing cabinet.
“Did you just punch something?”
“Why did you have to go there, dammit?” he thunders.
“Abuela used to talk about back home,” I ruminate, toying with the petal of a daisy I dropped into the brooch Zach bought me. “I wanted to see it for myself.”
I hoped to find something of her back here. A connection to the woman I didn’t know well enough. Who, like any child that didn’t understand the concept of death, wasted the time I could have spent with her.
But there are no memories to peruse, no nostalgia to appreciate.
“Home,” he sneers. “Like that drug den was fucking home. Please, Denver, leave that place. It isn’t safe. Especially at this time of day. It must be, what? Going on six?”
“It’s mostly cleared and I have a ride waiting for me.”
“Get away from there,” he shouts. “It’ll be dark within the hour and it’s a drug dealers’ paradise. I read in the news about how they were clearing the slum away, but obviously they weren’t!”
As I stare at busted planks of wood, litter and trash and, randomly, an abandoned guitar, amid piles and piles of other detritus that is proof of this part of the shanty town being dismantled by the authorities, I answer, “No. It’s all barren stretches of land now. It’s really sad, Dad.”
“Why did you have to go there?”
That he keeps saying that tells me he’s lost for words.
Skewering my toe into the dirt of thousands of broken homes for thousands of displaced people, I think back to the past couple years. How everything twisted. Got yanked out of joint.
Before Abuela died, life was normal.
Then, of course, I look at this place and I recognize that nothing about this fucked-up world we live in is normal.
“Before the divorce, I felt like I knew you, Dad,” I say eventually. “We didn’t get along. Not always. But we… Our family made sense. We were connected. Linked.
"Then you and Mom split and that shattered. I-I guess I was looking for that. The connection to past you. The dad that did make sense to me.” I clench my fingers into a fist. “Maybe I was just looking for justification. I’m not sure I found it, but if you’d let me take Psychology 101, then I probably would. ”
Okay, it’s a low blow… I don’t have it in me to care.
“Ouch.” It’s the first time he’s sounded anything close to mild.
“Truth stings.”
I peer at the sky overhead. It’s gray and dark, clouds rumbling over me with the promise of an incoming storm, and it makes this place all the bleaker. I googled it before I came, wanting to make sure I was heading to the right area, and it’s nothing like the town I imagined.
Valdemingómez.
A word that was part of a single sentence I heard my grandmother say on her deathbed—time to go home to Valdemingómez. She’d even spoken it in Spanish and she rarely used that around us kids.
“They say that people had to use tin cans instead of toilets here. No running water, no paved streets. Just mud and damp and cold in the winter. Then insects and unbearable heat in the summer…”
Did you live like that?
I don’t voice the question, but he hears it anyway.
“Madre moved away before I got to experience the joys of living there.”
“Why are you so bitter if it was her life and not yours?”
Couched behind the words is a desperation to understand him. This man who raised me. Who abandoned me for a woman a couple years older than me. Who left his family behind in the wake of his midlife crisis.
“You think we upgraded when we arrived in the States? Grow up, Denver. Jesus. You don’t even want to think about what my mother did to get us over here.
” He spits the words at me. “Do you know what I’ve done to give you the life you and your brothers so casually denigrate?
The safety I’ve cultivated because I’m well aware what it’s like not to have that? ”
“Did Mom know?”
“Of course not,” he jeers.
“Why not?”
“Because she didn’t need to. How the fuck did you even learn about it? I asked Madre never to mention it to you. I made her vow to me she wouldn’t.”
“Hard to keep secrets when you’re dying. I was with her in the hospital when she said it. Always remembered the name and wrote it down in a diary I used to keep. I let it tickle my curiosity, and then the opportunity to come here arrived and I leaped at the chance.
“It always seemed so strange to me how you gave her everything, to the point Mom used to complain how your mother came first before us all, but when she wanted to go home to Madrid, you refused to pay for her trip.”
“Madrid wasn’t home,” he strikes back.
“She didn’t agree.” I stick my hand in my pocket and play with my keys, anything to break the restlessness inside me. “I don’t agree either. This is a pilgrimage. Where it all began. Where our family came from, where it ended.”
“Don’t say that!”
“How can I not? You’re the one who broke us,” I shout, uncaring that the words echo around the clearing—until a train rattles past in the distance, rupturing the sound.
“And for what? Because you’re running from this place?
Always aiming for more, for better than what you were when you were born?
Needing to prove to yourself and the rest of the world that you’ll never end up back in someplace like this?
“And the bitch of it is, you already had it all. We weren’t perfect, but we were yours.
Now, I don’t even know what we are. You’re a name on the screen of a cell phone when you call me to talk to a prospective future client who’s my best friend.
You sign the checks on my bills and pay my way for a degree that I suck at while forcing me to be friendly with the woman you cheated on my mother with…
“Because that’s just it, Dad. You stopped trying. You snapped up Franwhoever and forgot about us—”
“That’s not true, goddammit. You can think whatever you want, but I did not forget about you. Everything I do, every day, is to keep you all safe. To provide for you, to—”
“Maybe we just wanted our dad around, you know? Maybe Mom shouldn’t be relying on her new squeeze to discipline your sons because they’re nightmares.
Maybe you should have come to visit me in Poughkeepsie when I didn’t show up for Thanksgiving.
Maybe you should have cared beyond signing checks.
” Anger ripples through me, especially when he doesn’t answer. I heave a sigh. “Never mind.”
I cut the call and don’t pick up when he rings back.
The bitch of it is, I didn’t head into that conversation with an argumentative or petty or mean attitude.
It’s probably the first time I’ve told him how much the divorce hurt me and all he cares about is me uncovering his dirty little secret. One that’s only dirty in his imagination.
With one final look at the place that shattered something in my father before he even had the chance to begin, I trudge over to the taxi that’s waiting for me.
The driver’s relieved to see me.
Only a hundred euros got him to agree to stick around, and considering a couple of the guys I’ve noticed loitering seem like they’re interested in his hubcaps, I appreciate his staying power.
My mind refuses to settle during the long trip back to the center where my digs are.
I think about my grandmother and her past and the secrets that Dad’s kept from us all for decades. I think about the divorce and how it hurt. How it affected me. How I should probably have had therapy like Mom forced the boys to go to…
Mostly, I think about how we weren’t perfect but I thought we all loved each other.
By the time I reach my building, I remember the Erasmus party I was supposed to attend today.
The taxi driver looks even happier to extend my fare, and I’m happier still to charge it to the card Dad gave me when I went to Oakwood.
Spying one of the guys I share a couple classes with at the event, I wave at Jean-Paul when I see him hanging around by himself. He kinda reminds me of Callan—awkward in social situations.
He does that French thing where he kisses my cheek. But it’s five times. A custom, he told me, that’s traditional in Corsica, where he’s from.
“You okay, Denver?” he asks in heavily accented but perfect English. “You look pale.”
“I’ve been better.” I share a weak smile with him. “I really need a drink.”
“You won’t get one here then.” His tone’s teasing. “I know where they have something stronger…”
I roll my eyes. “The mini supermarket on the corner?”
He chortles at my joke, but as he makes to reply, my phone buzzes. Ignoring him, I glance at the screen and see it’s Zach, not Dad. I wince at the time, realizing this is when we hang out together on Wednesdays.
“Someone you don’t want to talk to?” JP asks me knowingly.
“Quite the opposite.” I answer the call and shoot Zach a wave.
“Hey, babe!”
He looks as tired as I feel. I get it. The time difference is killing us. Slowly.
I gesture at JP behind me. “Hi! I’m so sorry I forgot about our call. It’s been a day. This is JP. We have a couple classes together.”
“Where are you?” His brow furrows as he graces JP with a grim nod.
“Just a party. It’s an Erasmus program thing. Can we call later?”
“Sure.”
When he just hangs up, I blink. Then, I realize JP put his arm around my shoulders and I frown at him then shrug off his hold.
Both relieved and disappointed about the delay in my chat with Zach, one during which I hoped I could let spill the day’s events, I repeat, “I need a drink.”