“Are you still drunk?” Tal’s wide awake, standing in the kitchen doorway, her hair hidden under the wrap of a pink scarf.
“What? What kind of thing is that to say to someone? To someone who’s your father?” When Tal’s quiet in response, and stands there till I feel my guilt starting to answer for her, I say, “I’m not drunk, okay? Anymore.”
“You’re not high, are you?”
“Jesus, Tal!”
“It’s just, you were a mess last night. And now you’re, like, entirely too upbeat for seven o’clock, Saturday morning. You’re, like, serialkiller upbeat. It’s freaking me out. Please stop.”
“I’m just looking on the bright side. Of things.” In response to that, Tal keeps staring at me. I go back to putting the milk away. Then drinking what I’d poured into a glass. Tal keeps watching, motionless, without comment.
“I need things. And I’m going to tell you what they are.”
I put down the glass, say, “Okay. Hit me.”
“I need quiet. At night. Late at night. After midnight.”
“That’s totally understandable. I do too.”
“And no drinking. Not like never, but not like, on the regular. I mean, wine, that’s okay, but no heavy stuff. Of any kind. I’m done with that. With how it was with my mom, even with Irv. Not doing that again.”
“I don’t drink often,” I lie. “I usually don’t get drunk,” I clarify, which is closer to the truth.
“It just turns people into assholes.”
“Glad you don’t think I’m already an asshole,” I tell Tal. Her response is just to continue staring at me, the process judgment visible in her eyes.
“Good,” Tal says, and keeps standing there. I take another drink of milk. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what her life has been like. I know that I wish I had been in it, but I don’t know where she was all that time, really. I know what it is like to lose a mom, but not to lose her mom, and not the way she did.
Tal steps forward, hand outstretched. We shake. And it’s not enough; it shouldn’t be enough. So I pull her in, wrap my arms around her. After a moment, her arms lift up and hold my back. I’ve never held my daughter this long before, and it’s only a few seconds. The thought makes me grip tighter.
Before Tal can pull away, I say, “I’m going to have to go out, get some things this afternoon. But I’ll be back to take you to dance practice, okay? I’ll give you a ride to campus.”
“Oh God, not on the bike. I can’t sit for an hour after I get off that thing.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got a car now.”
“That car?” Tal says, and releases me to point out the window, where the Constables of the Police of the City of Philadelphia are hooking up their tow.
—
I don’t call George. I call Tosha. I ask Tosha to talk to George, tell her that they’re trying to impound my dad’s car just because of an overdue inspection, a missing registration, and twenty-seven unpaid parking tickets dating back to 1982. Sirleaf Day’s number leads to a recording of him saying “Hello?” followed by a three second pause. I fall for it, talk into the space, then hear the beep. The joke is old, but young compared to him. Into his voice mail I beg him to get over here before I’m stuck on a bench at the 14th Police District, staring at a linoleum floor. All I get in response is a beep, which is more than the dead expression I get trying to explain that my dad is deceased to the cops. The officers seem pretty intent on having me take “a trip” with them to “sort everything out” until George pulls up.
He’s wearing a fedora and a raincoat. He’s been a detective for four years and yet he’s still playing at it. The awkward part about talking to George is that our friendship is based entirely on the fact that, despite my closeness with Tosha in those younger years, I never tried to seduce the girlfriend who became his wife. What George and I have is not even a real friendship, more of an established truce.
“Sins of the father,” he says, and he laughs at me. It’s the first smile he’s broken since the uniformed guys pulled away. “Man, you got a $3,439 bill on a car that hasn’t had legal tags for two years.”
“Well, it runs. It did last night. Or rolled, at least.”
“It won’t again if you don’t pay in ninety days.”
“Yeah, well, we all got our problems.” I try to shrug this one off. He laughs again. Harder this time, longer. Sighs at the end of it. “So Tosha told you.”
“She told me. Sorry man.”
“You are sorry, but not as sorry as my ass. My life is all kinds of fucked the hell up.”
He slaps his hand on my back as we walk up the hill to the garage. It’s a relatively weak tap, like he knows not to push me too far right now. “What else did she tell you? I mean, what specifically?” he asks.
“She said you moved out. That you come in the mornings so the kids don’t know. She thinks you met someone else. She thinks,” I start to say, and then I pause.
“You want me to help you? You got to help me. Just tell me what’s going on so I can fix it.”
“She thinks you might be fucking some white dude.”
“ ‘Some white dude?’ She thinks I’m gay? What the hell?”
“Hey, I don’t know what’s—”
“You don’t know because it’s none of your business. Man, just show me what you got to show me.”
I open the garage door. I bring him over to the corner to look at the cigarette ashes, but he’s sighing, barely paying attention. I stand on the perimeter of my imaginary crime scene and point to them, like on cop shows. I give him my theory: that the crackheads moved in when my dad was gone. Maybe they were here when he was sick, but he couldn’t do anything about it. “And they smoke too. By this old, wooden house. That’s really dangerous, you know? I don’t want there to be a fire,” I tell him, and say it louder to break him out of his distraction. I try to sound as somber as possible on the f-word. Fire. Glorious fire. All-changing fire, destroyer of worlds, lifeblood of the phoenix, god of renewal. All that.
“Of course they smoke. They’re crackheads. It’s not like they’re shoving rocks up their noses,” and with that, George pulls his own cigarette out, pads himself for a lighter. He turns, barely even looks at the evidence I have so generously provided.
“That’s some shit, that I’m gay. Man, I wish I was gay. I wish I got a pass like that. I’m the opposite of gay: I’m not happy. I’ve been unhappy for a lot of years now; she knows that. And I know — and trust me I know this — I got no no good reason to be unhappy. I got a beautiful wife, beautiful kids, beautiful house and all that, but I’m unhappy. That’s the fucked up thing. If I was gay, I could point to that and say, ‘Sorry, I fucked up. Turns out I’m gay,’ and no one would be mad at me. Instead I’m unhappy with the perfect life and everybody hates me.”
He’s right about this: I hate him right now. That could have been me in his house. Those could have been my kids, even the ugly one. He took that. George is a good cop, because he can read minds. He turns to me and says, “Don’t get no ideas. She ain’t single.”
I know she isn’t single. I knew when I went to Wales, got drunk every night, then eventually married a woman who would give me her own well-earned “I’m not happy” speech. He gave his wife kids and yet fared no better. You start with “I love you” and then you build everything on those three words, but then it only takes those three other words to strip it all down. “I’m not happy,” and then the misery goes from the speaker to the recipient. Speaking it wasn’t the end to unhappiness, it was the transfer of it.