3. Now
Now: September 13th
H ow’d you sleep, Sweet P?” Dad asks me when he finally looks up at me from over his paper. He always looks so tired these days. He works from home and is done no later than four every day, but the dark circles underneath his eyes are always present.
He doesn’t openly talk to me about his exhaustion, but if I had to guess, I’d say it has to do with Mom leaving us sixteen years ago. I don’t ask him about it because I’m pretty sure he’d deny it and chalk it up to his workload. He does stress about work a lot, but I doubt that’s it.
Ever since she left, I don’t think he’s been able to sleep properly. I’m sure I’d feel the same way if I’d slept next to the same person for well over a decade and suddenly had to learn how to sleep on my own again. I can only imagine what that might be like because I’ve never had anything like that with someone else.
I pull out a chair at the small table, wood scraping against the rough wood of our floors, and sit down. I wrap my hands around my mug and stare down into my coffee. “Fine,” I say flatly, and take a sip. Without looking up he shuffles his newspaper and turns to another page.
Dad and I talk, but more out of necessity than for conversation. It’s like we have to speak to one another because we are in each other’s space often, not because we have real things to talk about. At least I think that’s what we both believe.
Our talks are nothing like the ones Mom and I used to have, giggling like teenage girls and gossiping about which boys we thought were cute. I had been a teenager at the time, while Mom pretended to be one.
There was one time when I’d brought home one of my yearbooks, and we’d sprawled out on my bed flipping through it page by page, laughing and making up stories about my classmates. I’d point to a football jock and she’d tell me his entire, made-up life saga. And then we’d gush over which boys we thought were dreamy and which ones we predicted might be single forever.
Thinking about it now, it was probably an immature thing to do. But I loved her for it. I didn’t have any siblings. It's always just been me and my parents. The fact that she had been willing to do something as small as gushing over a high school yearbook with me had meant so much. I couldn’t name a single person I knew at my school who would have wanted to do that very thing. Yet she didn’t even have to think twice, she just did it. I loved and hated that aspect of my mom. She rarely thought twice about things, she just did them.
We both finish our coffee before either of us speaks again. I break the silence this time.
“I think I’m going to work in the study today.”
He’s wearing his thick, black-rimmed reading glasses. He doesn’t wear them when he’s working, but always uses them whenever he’s studying the newspaper. He looks at me with his pale, tired gray eyes and nods .
We both work from home. He owns a large accounting firm, and I’m an author. Usually, I’ll work in my room. I’ve set up an office space in the corner, complete with a desk, bookshelves, and pull-out filing cabinets with drawers. Dad, on the other hand, is what I like to refer to as a migrating worker. He doesn’t like to work in one spot. He’ll always start in his study, but he never remains there. As the hours tick by he’ll move to the living room and work on the couch with his laptop perched over his lap, and a headset propped up next to him.
Other times he’ll work in his bedroom or downstairs in our half-finished basement, and on warm days I’ll find him sitting outside on the porch swing typing away. For the first half of my life Dad had always worked outside the home—your typical eight to five, only he’d leave before seven and not return home until close to six. The second half of my life he’s been here, with me. If only it hadn’t taken something traumatic to bring him closer to me. Funny how life works out that way.
There were a few years right after Mom left when we’d become close. It hadn’t always been that way, but something about losing one parent brings you closer to the other. We were all we had, and for a time, we’d both needed one another, in the same sort of way that you need water and air to survive. It wasn’t until I’d started classes for college and Dad had picked up more complicated cases at work that we started pulling apart again. As if we hadn’t really been attached to begin with, and our rope was beginning to fray.
Eventually, we stopped relying on each other as much. I’d become an official adult and stayed busy with my studies and writing. He poured all his time into work, and when he wasn’t working, he was watching TV or reading the paper. We existed together but didn’t really need each other anymore. Not like we did before.
On the days that I request the study, he knows I’m in the middle of either starting or finishing something big. Currently, I’m in the middle of finishing a big project. And by project, I mean story. I am mere chapters away from completing my current novel. Today, I need the study to focus. I need the space, I need the quiet, I need the one room in the house that doesn’t make me think about Mom.
Gathering his newspaper, his eyes don’t meet mine this time. I know he hasn’t been sleeping well because I’ll wake up in the night and hear him puttering around in the kitchen or the laugh track of a sitcom on the television. But I can usually fall back to sleep within a few minutes, and he always acts normal the next morning, as though he hadn’t been awake for most of the night.
“That’s great, P. Are you getting close to being done with this one? Remind me what it’s about?”
There he goes again, calling me P. Short for my real name, Phoenix. I haven’t gone by that name in years. My pen name is Nicki Larrs. It’s close enough to the real thing without having to be the real thing. My birth name is a name that I no longer care to be associated with anymore. Yet, he still insists on calling me by the shortened version of it.
I choose to let it go. I don’t feel like fighting him on the issue right now. It’s something we can discuss later, or not. It will most likely be the latter.
“Yes, I am. I have a couple of chapters to wrap up and then it’ll be ready to send off to Wendy for edits. This is the third and final book in my most recent trilogy.”
I don’t bother elaborating more about my story, despite his request. I get up to pour myself a second cup. I gently push my chair back in, ready to get started.
I can hear him scoot away from the table, and I look away. There’s a tugging from within that makes my chest ache when he walks away. It’s nothing new, this is how we exist on any given day. But some days, like this one, it strikes me harder.
I feel a small tug on my arm, and I force my eyes to meet his. My worn and tired father, whom I’ve grown a little closer to over the years. Not by a lot, but a little. I wonder if he feels the same little tugs that I do from time to time. Almost as though we know we belong here together, yet we are both too set in our ways to be the first one to bend.
His eyes crinkle and a soft smile forms on his lips, “Happy Birthday, P.”
Today seems like an ordinary day to me. There’s nothing significant about it, other than the fact that yesterday I was thirty-one, and today I am not.
I swallow the lump in my throat. I want to say a lot of things, like: Does it even cross your mind to try and make pancakes like Mom used to? Are we doing anything special later? Do you see her when you look at me? Instead, I say nothing at all.
I spend the rest of the day typing away at my computer until my fingers are cramped and my hands are sore. Pouring out my heart and soul on paper. Because in real life, I could never say any of these things out loud.