17 - INTO THE SUN
Lacey
I was home Tuesday evening when my phone rang.
Dad's name on the screen. I let it ring twice while I considered not answering. My father felt like the last person I could talk to right now, but if I didn't pick up he'd know something was off.
I answered. "Hi, Dad."
"Lacey!" His voice was up, bubbly. "How are you, sweetheart?"
"I'm okay."
I meant it the narrow way you mean things you say to your father. The version of me he was talking to was the only version he'd ever asked to know.
"Good. Good." A small pause. "Work busy?"
"The usual."
"How's the house? Have you heard from Brad?"
"He keeps writing me about the equity. I keep telling him to talk to my lawyer."
"Hm. He always was a piece of work about money. Anyway." There it was. He went on quickly. "Listen, Lacey. I wanted to tell you something."
A pause he stretched on purpose.
"I've been seeing someone."
I sat down on the arm of the couch. "Oh," I said. "Wow. Dad."
"Her name's Carol. We met a few months back, at Eleanor's birthday, you remember Eleanor down the street, and we've been going out since. Should've told you sooner. I wanted to be sure it was real." A sheepish little laugh. "It's real."
"That's great, Dad."
Great. The word people use when they don't have a real one yet.
"She's a good one, Lacey." He was still going, all of it coming out at once.
"She's funny. She listens. You know? She actually listens to me.
Makes me laugh till I can't breathe. I forgot what that even felt like.
" He stopped, started again, like the words kept getting away from him.
"I don't know how to say it. It's been a long time.
Your mother, that was a long time ago now.
And Carol, I don't know. I feel like myself with her. That's the only way I can put it."
He stopped, slightly out of breath, like he'd run somewhere.
"That's wonderful," I said. "I'm really happy for you."
The words came out fine. The ache in my chest didn't move.
"Yeah?" He sounded so eager I almost couldn't stand it. "You really think so?"
"Of course."
Of course I was happy for him. The man had spent more than two decades closed off, to me, to my mother, to any woman who tried to be in a room with him without catching the cold edge of his disappointment, and now somebody had come along and lifted it right off him, and he was blooming down the phone like a houseplant moved into the sun.
I was happy for him. And under the happiness, there was another feeling, almost foreign.
Anger.
I was angry.
Angry that he was happy. Bubbly.
Angry that I hadn't known, until tonight, that my father was a man capable of bubbly.
Angry that Carol, whom I'd never met, was getting the version of him I'd wanted since childhood and been told didn't exist. Angry that she actually listens was a thing he could say out loud about a woman of three months, when he had never once listened to me.
He had never, in any phone call of my life, asked whether I was seeing anyone. Before Brad or after.
He was talking again. About Christmas, and Carol wanting to meet me. I made the sounds.
"Lacey?"
"Sorry, Dad. I'm here. That all sounds great."
"I'd like you to meet her. Tell me a good time for us to come visit."
"Yeah. We'll figure something out."
"I'm glad I told you. I was nervous."
"I'm glad you told me too."
"Love you, sweetheart."
He'd said it many times in my life. The voice was familiar. The man speaking through it was someone else.
"Love you too, Dad."
I hung up first.
The living room was dim. I hadn't turned on the lamp. Whiskers came around the leg of the chair and looked at me.
I held the anger in my chest like a vital sign.
I tried to read. The pages didn't take. I put the kettle on and stood there with the tea bag in the cup and never poured, and when the kettle screamed I turned it off and the cup was still empty.
I needed out of the house.
I pulled on leggings and the windbreaker I hadn't worn since I don't remember when and wheeled my bike out of the garage. The streetlight popping on overhead, the only sound the hiss of the air pump. I clipped the helmet on under my chin.
By the end of the block my legs were finding it. By the second I was moving.
The streets were quiet. Dinner-table light in some of the windows. A man jogging the other way, breathing hard. The wind was clean and I pulled it in and let it out.
Dad has a girlfriend.
The road rolled under me.
Dad has a girlfriend named Carol and I bet he doesn't tell her how to dress.
That made me pedal harder.
I bet he doesn't tell Carol what's appropriate for a woman her age. I bet he's never once mentioned her hemline. I bet Carol wears whatever she wants and he tells her she looks nice and means it.
A car came up behind me and gave me a wide berth.
He's off Brad's side now too. Six months ago, a man like Brad didn't just throw away a good marriage. I must have done something. Now Brad's a piece of work.
I thought he was a piece of work too. I thought it first. So I can't hold it against him that he caught up. People are allowed to catch up.
Except something in me held it against him anyway, the way he asked about Brad and never about me.
Catching up now doesn't undo the years he didn't.
The road bent and I leaned with it. My legs found the old rhythm, the one from college and residency, the one I used to ride at midnight after shifts to come down off whatever high the shift had triggered.
Somewhere along the park the old voice showed up, the one that sounds almost like mine, but isn’t. It's his. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Look at everything you have. A roof, a job, a body that works. You don't get to be a grown woman on a bike sulking because your father met somebody.
It was a strong voice. It had run me for thirty-five years. But now I didn't believe it.
I stood up on the pedals on the flat stretch and let the anger have the road.
I had run out of that club. Run out on a man who looked at me like he was glad I existed, and I hadn't called him, and I'd told myself that was caution.
It wasn't caution. It was the same good girl who isn't allowed to want things, and I was so tired of her.
Anyway, I thought, as I laughed out loud into the empty street, Derek fucking Harrington is a millionaire and he looks miserable, so there's that.
The laugh came out short and mean and surprised me. The wind took it. God, I'm being a bitch. Derek was miserable from loss. But the petty thought was the first thing in twenty minutes that hadn't hurt.
I rode the park loop twice. By the second time my legs were spent and my chest was open and the anger had cooled into a manageable thing, but wasn't gone.
I was going back. Not to ask Janice whether Ricardo was angry, whether there was some way to smooth it over.
But rather to tell her I wanted into the Second Circle.
My running out had felt like the only thing I could do.
It didn't feel like that now. Now, it felt like the good girl was losing, and I was so ready for that.
Catching up doesn't undo the years he didn't. I thought it again, and it landed different this time, because I wasn't only thinking about him. The years he didn't were his. The years I didn't were mine. And I'm not dead yet.
I turned for home and texted Janice.
Can you do lunch tomorrow?
Three dots.
Of course. Where?
The usual. Noon.
She didn't ask why.