24. Dominic
TWENTY-FOUR
Dominic
As with all days lately, I wake up the morning of Thanksgiving looking forward to the nighttime, when I can sleep again.
Just sick and tired of the mundane boredom hell, with too much time and yet not enough sleep.
This morning, however, is the morning Frankie finally decides to talk to me, sliding it into our regular morning conversation, like oh, by the way, we need more milk . She does it so seamlessly that it takes me several seconds to realize that she’s said something of more importance than the items we need to add to our grocery list.
“What?” I ask, my skin prickling with that weird protective mode activation thing that parents sometime experience.
“By Ramona and Evie,” she continues.
“Back up, please. What about Ramona and Evie?”
“They’ve been bullying me,” she repeats.
I blink. “Your best friends Ramona and Evie?”
“They’re not my best friends anymore,” she says, like duh .
A million different questions pop into my head. Something my parents would do is rapid-fire all of them, like it was an interrogation and my fault that the bad thing was happening to me. So I force all the questions all down before blurting them all out and upsetting her. Questions like, why are they bullying you, what are they bullying you about, do their parents know, are you okay, what can I do about it, can I beat up their parents ?—
“Anyway, it’s getting better now, and I have a new best friend. His name is Mateo, and he likes the MTA as much as I like pirates.”
I pause, rolling some words around in my mouth, testing them. “I have a lot of questions,” I finally say. “Can I ask you some of them?”
She shrugs.
“The first one is—can I beat up their parents?”
Frankie giggles. “Lina says violence is never the answer.”
My heart sinks when I remember Lina’s been helping her through this. “Are you okay?” I decide to start with.
“I wasn’t okay for a little bit, but now I am okay,” she says confidently.
“I—what were they doing? Were they being physical with you?” The prickling feeling in my skin increases.
“No. They bullied me with their words,” she says, quite eloquently. “They said I was weird for liking space and Titanic and pirates so much. They also stopped playing with me at recess.”
I nod. “I’m really sorry that happened to you. Maybe they’re jealous because you’re so smart.” Jealousy is a feeling I’m all too familiar with after the last time I saw Lina. Jealousy towards that fucking guy that I fucking knew would be a problem. Jealous that I didn’t have a cool job like him. Jealous that he probably doesn’t have to go to bed at nine thirty every night. Jealous that he doesn’t have all these neuroses. Jealous that he’s someone easy, someone Lina could easily be with. That he gets to see her in her new lingerie set.
“Are you okay, Daddy?”
“Yes,” I say, with gritted teeth.
“You look like you have to poop.”
“I’m fine,” I tell her, very clearly not. Because I’m too late. It’s too late for us now. It’s okay , I’ve been repeating to myself. Frankie, Frankie, Frankie , like a mantra. I clear my throat. “Why do you say you’re okay now?”
“I have a new best friend who likes the MTA. He knows every single subway stop in the city.”
“That’s great.”
“Also, Lina said I have to be kind to myself and love myself. So I’m not embarrassed to like the things that I like. I am curious and smart and brave,” she says confidently.
“She’s right,” I say. I’m starting to think that Lina is right about everything.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Why doesn’t Lina come over anymore?” she asks bravely, calmly.
My reaction is the opposite. My face gets hot. My stomach crawls up my throat. “It’s not because of you,” I manage to say quickly, but after that, I freeze. I don’t know how many times I’ve practiced this answer in my head, trying to be intentional about the depth of detail I should get into, but it all becomes static in my brain. And that’s because the more time I’ve had to myself to ruminate over these reasons, the less valid they’ve become. The answers have changed, morphed into something unrecognizable.
“Lina and I had… a disagreement,” I finally say. “We’re going to be spending some time apart.”
“Was the disagreement over me?” she asks in a quiet voice.
“No,” I tell her firmly, pulling her into my lap. This is the moment; don’t fuck it up, Dom . “It had nothing to do you with you. It was all me and Lina. We had a disagreement over working too hard and pushing ourselves and not being kind to ourselves. Which, as you know, is very important. We… both made some mistakes after that, and that led to me getting kind of angry, so we need to be… apart. But I still love you, and she still loves you more than anything in the universe.”
I take a deep breath, willing my heart rate to slow. I hope and wish and pray that this is enough, that she won’t internalize this and be traumatized for the rest of her life, doomed to unpack the shitty decisions her father had made with a rotating cast of therapists and stints with SSRIs and?—
“That’s dumb,” says Frankie.
I blink. “Huh?” I respond eloquently.
“Don’t you always say that mistakes are okay? Because they’re not on purpose and because we can learn from them and move on and be a better person after?”
I blink some more. “Well, yeah.”
“So then that’s dumb. It sounds like your fault. You’re the one who’s still angry.”
“Wow.”
“And don’t you say we should always forgive the people we love when they make a mistake?” she goes on, unfazed.
I run my hand down my face.
“You said you still love me and Lina still loves me… and I love you and I love Lina… but do you love Lina?”
“Jesus, Frankie?—”
“Well?” she asks impatiently.
All images of a forty-year-old Frankie in a downward spiral and OD’ing on antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy are thus replaced by her standing confidently at the head of a conference table, eating men for breakfast as the CEO of a multi-million dollar company. Or maybe just straight up as the President of the United States.
I think about lying to her, then realize I can’t. “Yes,” I finally admit.
“Then why do you have to be apart?” she asks, eyebrows furrowed.
Honestly, I have no idea anymore.
I’m saved by Tita Gloria barging into our apartment. “Frankie,” she exclaims.
“Hi, Lola,” she says, jumping off my lap, totally friendly and upbeat and unaffected by crippling anxiety. She runs to give her a hug.
“Can you help me make the lumpia, Frankie? I’m running behind.” I know that this is code for please make the lumpia because it is the worst, most tedious task and no one ever wants to do it .
Frankie, who I know for a fact loves to massage the raw meat and shrimp and random other things with her bare hands, sprints downstairs.
“Ask Lolo Ben to get you started,” Tita Gloria calls after her.
We hear the door to their apartment open and slam shut.
She fixes her gaze on me. “This seems to be a theme,” she tells me.
“What?”
“You torturing yourself for no reason.”
I rub my eyes. “Please, don’t hold back.”
“I thought you came to the right conclusions after Rhode Island.”
“I thought I did, too.”
“You went on vacation,” she continues, as if I’m not speaking. “You got yourself a girlfriend. You started sharing your responsibilities. You started leaving Frankie with us to go enjoy yourself. With your new girlfriend. You went on overnights!”
“Mmhm.”
“And now, because of some misguided sense of parental duty, you’ve given this all up.”
I glare at her. “How do you know all of this, anyway? I haven’t told anyone about this.”
“I have my ways.” (Read: Oliver and probably his sisters.)
I pause for a moment. “It’s not only me, you know.”
She raises a tattooed eyebrow.
“It is probably partially a misguided sense of parental duty. But that’s because she fucked up, too. She ran from me instead of communicating.”
Tita Gloria rolls her eyes so hard I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself. “For what, two whole days?”
“The level of detail you know about this is really alarming?—”
“—ruining you for her and all women? Ang dramatic dramatic mo . Please.”
“I don’t want to have to ever explain to Frankie why someone has left us ever again!” I explode.
The kitchen is silent for a few beats.
“But she didn’t leave you, hah ?” Tita Gloria says quietly. “She came back right away.”
“Yeah, but?—”
“And you’re telling me you’re going to stay miserable and be a hermit for the rest of your life, shutting yourself and your daughter away on an isolated island, all because Lina made one mistake ?”
Mistake, mistake .
“How unfair those expectations are, Domy. Reminds me of your parents,” she sniffs.
I freeze.
“Always expecting perfection. No room for error.”
With that, Tita Gloria reads me and pokes the last hole in the thin fabric of my excuses, rendering the entire thing useless.
Because putting it like that, fuck. How many times have I reminded myself to not be the same way with Frankie? And now, instead, I’m doing it towards my partners, really the only partner I’ve had in years?
“And doesn’t all her good outweigh the one thing she’s done wrong? And wouldn’t it, regardless of how many mistakes she makes? Because no one is perfect Dom. But she seems to be perfectly flawed.”
I put my head in my hands. “I’m tired of fighting.”
“Fighting what?”
“I don’t know. This, it, that. Myself. Her. Everything.”
“Love is a fight, Dom. Love is worth the fight.”
But Frankie? Frankie, Frankie, Frankie . But Lina, with Frankie. Her support of my daughter in productive and positive ways, her bold, brilliant brightness. Her ‘good.’ Taking care of everyone around her, putting herself last. Teaching Frankie how to be strong, how to be kind, how to be brave. Making sure we all get out and have fun, pushing us out of our comfort zones. Is it too late? I think about the bits and pieces of longing, of apology she’s sent my way over the past few weeks.
“It’s not wrong to want happiness for yourself, Dom. You’re a good father already.”
Take for yourself .
I let out a slow, measured breath. “You give Yoda a run for his money.”
She waves her hand, dismissing me. “Who needs a Yoda when you have a Lola?” She stands up, reading my mind. “Let’s go get Frankie.”
We move downstairs, where Frankie is already elbow-deep in a large mixing bowl of raw pork.
“Frankie, do you know what Lina’s doing for Thanksgiving?” I ask her.
“Depends,” she says shrewdly. “Are you gonna go say you’re sorry?”
I wonder in this moment if there’s some sort of Flores-women-specific gene that prevents them from taking any sort of shit from men.
“Yeah, actually. I am.”
“Great,” she says, clapping her hands together like Tita Gloria, bits of pork flying around the kitchen. “I’m coming.”
“Where are we going?”
“Lina’s staying home with her mom. She’s being kind to herself and relaxing and not cooking. They’re ordering Chinese food.” Frankie shivers in disgust at this last part, unable to fathom a holiday without lumpia made from scratch. She hops down from her chair and begins washing her hands with the diligence of a surgeon, and I am pretty proud of her. She eyes me afterwards. “You look bad. You need a better apology outfit.”
I look down at what is absolutely not my depression outfit—t-shirt and sweatpants, both originally black but now a faded gray and riddled with holes. The elastic is long gone from the sweatpants. My big toe is fully sticking out of a hole in my sock. “I’ll go change.”
“And maybe shower,” she throws in.
“And shave,” Tita Gloria adds.
“Anything else?” I ask Tito Ben.
“Maybe just look in a mirror before you leave,” he winces, somehow the nicest person in the room.