Chapter 8 #2
“No, he hates us,” my sister corrected me when I voiced that concern. “He definitely hates you and Mom, anyway.”
“Thank you!”
“I mean, it’s worse that he doesn’t even notice that I exist. And it’s probably even worse for Max that he looks at him like his heart is broken with disappointment,” she told me.
That sounded very, very dramatic. “But I think it’s true,” I told Shane the next day.
We were talking on the phone after a lot of texting, and it was a relief to hear someone besides my immediate family and the police.
I needed an outside opinion on this. “That must be really awful for my brother. Maybe it’s why Max doesn’t seem all too worried about Dad.
” As a person, I didn’t like my father much either.
But I would have been sorry if something happened to him, and I was very concerned about Walter’s.
“You three know him best. You have no idea where he might have gone?”
“He doesn’t have any friends. We never travel, so he doesn’t have a favorite destination. We owe money but it’s not to the Mafia or other criminals who would make him disappear.”
“Does that really happen?”
I didn’t know the answer to that, either.
“I’ve been trying to look at maps and be scientific.
I’m sure that his car wouldn’t take him very far because he does literally no upkeep on it.
” I heard traffic in the background. “Are you driving right now?” I asked.
It was night here in Michigan and it was in Ohio, too.
I knew Shane wouldn’t have wanted to be on the road in the dark, especially not while he was distracted by a phone conversation.
“I’m walking back to my hotel,” he answered. “What about your relatives? Didn’t you say that you had an uncle in Chicago?”
We talked for a while, mostly about my father’s disappearance.
The police had asked all of us a lot of questions and I went over those again.
No, Dad had never done anything like this before.
No, he didn’t have any medical issues, no, he didn’t have a girlfriend or a secret family.
They had phrased it more politely, but they had been very focused on extramarital stuff.
The answer was still no, because he wouldn’t have had the time. He was always at the restaurant.
“I can understand why he wanted to get away,” I told Shane. “I feel like that, too. Sometimes, I just want to escape and maybe he went ahead and did it.”
“Maybe—good golly!”
A lot of loud noise came through the phone, crashing and banging.
“Shane?” I asked. “Shane!”
“Yeah,” he answered after a moment. “Yeah, I’m here.” He was breathing kind of hard, almost panting.
“What happened? Did you drop your phone?”
“I fell,” he said. “I’m going to go. Let me know if you hear anything about your dad.”
“Ok, but—ok,” I said. I didn’t want to hang up, though. “Ok, but be careful.”
“Yeah,” he said again and then he was gone.
And now, I was worried about two people.
Three, actually, because my mom was losing her mind.
I didn’t blame her—our family restaurant didn’t work without my dad in the kitchen.
It didn’t work great with him there either, but it was all we had.
She had been in her room, refusing to come out and refusing to turn on the lights.
What were we going to do?
I lay awake that night worrying about my dad, my mom, Shane, and a new addition, my sister. She had told me that she could hear Max in his room if she left her closet door open, but she wasn’t aware that I could also hear her if I opened mine. That night, I listened to her crying.
Things didn’t get better in the morning.
Max even mentioned that he could cook so that we could get Walter’s back open, but no one took him seriously since he had been so useless there in the past. It had been a hardship for him to pick up trays, so what would he do around the hot grill and the deep fryer?
He brought his girlfriend over, the one we’d seen in the picture on his laptop (the one where she’d been licking a beer bottle).
She seemed ok, nice enough, but her presence wasn’t helpful.
What could she have done, anyway? We were clueless and the police seemed to be, too.
As far as they knew, my father had voluntarily left and that seemed totally reasonable to them.
They were looking but I couldn’t tell how hard they were pressing it.
It was funny to be stuck in this weird stasis—until suddenly, we weren’t. As we uselessly milled around the kitchen, Max, Morgan, and I heard our mom scream.
We knocked into each other as we raced into her room and found her as pale as one of those deep-sea creatures, like my sister had been before. “What’s wrong?” my brother shouted.
She held out her phone to him.
“I’m leaving you,” he read out loud from the screen. “I’m done. Won’t do it anymore. Fuck it.” Then he stared at Mom. “Dad wrote this? He left you?”
“He left us,” Morgan said. “Hurensohn. He left us with his family house that’s falling down and his family restaurant that’s sucking our lives away.”
My mom was about to pass out. We got her into a chair and then my sister, who liked to read the old books some relative had left in our garage, started running around and looking for brandy to give to her because “that’s what people do when someone faints!
” Max looked shell-shocked and his answer was to flee.
I heard his car start in the driveway and it screeched as he pulled away down the street.
I was left with my mom. There was obviously no brandy in the house, so I got her some water and then helped her to bed.
I texted Dad from her phone, demanding more information, but he reverted to his previous behavior and didn’t respond at all.
I let the police know, though, that they didn’t need to waste more resources searching for him and I let Shane know what was going on, too.
He had a funny response, not amusing by strange: “Are you ok?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I didn’t feel ok at all but I knew that I had better get that way. Someone was going to need to fix this situation. Even if I didn’t have a clue of where to start, I also knew that the “someone” was actually me, Molly.
“No, I don’t think that I am,” I wrote back.
“I just landed.” And an hour later, which was the time it took to drive from the airport to my house, Shane was at our front door. Then I saw that he was also not ok.
“What happened to your arm?” I asked. I reached for it before recalling that it wasn’t a good idea to grab someone’s casted limb that was in a sling. “What happened?”
“I tripped last night when we were on the phone,” he said. “Can I come in?”
Yes, that was a much better idea than making him stand on the porch in the rain, especially since he was injured. “You broke something?” I asked as I took his coat and ushered him toward the couch. I wanted to push on him to make him sit, but we didn’t do touching.
“I broke my wrist, some kind of fracture.” He was careful as he lowered himself to the cushion. “There’s a special name for this break but I can’t remember it.”
He seemed unfazed by it all. “You don’t remember the name of what happened to your actual bone?” I asked incredulously.
“It doesn’t much matter. I’ll have this cast for a while, then a splint, then I’ll do PT. I don’t need surgery and it’s my left arm.” He looked down at his appendage. “It’s not the worst thing but it’s not great. Driving is harder.”
So now, he was operating his car with decreased vision and with only one hand. Perfect! I shook my head.
“Sit down here and tell me about your dad,” he said.
There wasn’t much to say besides what I’d already gone over, but I did sit and I showed him the text that my mom had received.
I had screenshotted it and sent that to myself, so he was able to understand exactly how awful it had been.
He read it over and his eyebrows raised, and then he looked at me.
“That’s a terrible thing to do to your wife of thirty years, and to your children.”
“I think he’s a terrible person.”
Shane didn’t disagree. “At least you don’t have to go on worrying that he was hurt somehow.”
“Or that he’s dead,” I added. It was especially good that he wasn’t dead because now, I would be able to kill him.
“I have all new things to worry about. Like, how will we keep the restaurant going? It could have been a temporary problem but this message makes it clear that his absence is permanent. The Woodsmen will be at their practice facility in July and it’s already spring.
” We made most of our money in the summer—we had to have that income.
“You’ll be graduating soon,” he noted, but that was hardly important now.
“I was thinking that we could take this time to try to make the repairs on the roof at Walter’s, because honestly, we hardly ever get enough business during these weeks to justify staying open,” I mentioned. “Maybe we could also train someone as the new cook.”
“Who?” he asked. “You? Are you talking about yourself, that you’d step into that job?”
“Maybe me. I don’t know,” I said. “The problem is that there’s no money for repairs and if we’re closed, there’s no hope of earning any. If we hire someone, that person will need a real salary. It’s a mess.”
“I brought something, just in case.” He moved gingerly and managed to reach into his pocket to pull out some tissues. “If we need it, I also put a different T-shirt for you in the car.”
A different one, since I had never returned the T-shirt I’d cried into before. “Thank you,” I said. I was crying again now.
The front door opened and my brother came in. He still looked shell-shocked to me, and then he looked confused when he saw me wiping my eyes. “I thought you said he wasn’t dead,” he said.
“No one’s dead,” I agreed. “I’m crying because this has all been—I’m not sure what—I don’t have any answers. I still don’t have any answers.”
“How could you? It just happened,” Shane reminded me.