“My dad lives in Caster City,” I’d said, my bulbous ten-year-old belly sticking out under the bottom of my shirt.
“That man,” my mom had said, her eyes fiery and narrow, “was never a dad. A dad doesn’t just abandon his child. Ronnie would never be that kind of dad.”
I knew she was right, of course. And it wasn’t like I had any deep connection with my so-called dad in Caster City. Even by the time I was ten, I couldn’t remember what my real father looked like. I didn’t have one single memory of the two of us together. But I always kept Ronnie at a distance anyway. Maybe being abandoned by my real dad was why I’d always kept Ronnie at arm’s distance. How many dads was I going to give the chance to hurt me?
I stood outside the room for a few seconds, key card in hand, while I took a deep, readying breath.
But when I pushed open the door, Ronnie’s unmade bed was empty. The bathroom door was open, the light out—he wasn’t in there, either. Relieved, I shut the door and hustled to the bathroom myself, anxious to put on some clean underwear and then eat a quiet dinner by the TV.
It wasn’t until somewhere around 3 AM, when I woke to find the TV still on and Ronnie’s bed still empty, that I began to wonder where he might have gone.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Ronnie didn’t return until late the next day. I squinted, sitting cross-legged on my bed playing cards, and held my hand up to shield my face from the strip of sunlight that flooded the room when he opened the door.
“Where were you?” I asked.
He let the door close behind him and turned to open the curtains. The heat of the afternoon sun blazed through the window onto my bed.
“You need to get your stuff together,” he said.
I gathered the cards and dropped them into their box. He paused for a second at the foot of my bed, as if he was going to say something, the lines deep in his face and shaded by the several days’ beard he had grown. There were bags under his eyes and he had a smell about him that I recognized as stale alcohol. But he only stared at the bedspread uncomfortably and then moved on toward the bathroom. I heard him unwrap a plastic cup and turn on the faucet.
“Why?” I said. “Where are we going?”
The water ran for a while longer and then he reappeared, the edges of his hair damp as if he’d splashed water on his face.
He let out a sigh. “Listen, Jersey, I don’t know how to say this,” he said, but then he didn’t say any more. He sank down on his bed, sitting with his back to me.
“Say what?” I finally prompted, turning and letting my legs dangle over the edge of the bed. “What’s going on? Is it the funerals? Are they today?”
“I don’t know about the funerals. Stop asking me about the goddamn funerals.” He smacked the bed, a muffled whump. He took another breath, wiped his face. “I can’t… I can’t even think about it,” he said more softly. “I can’t think about anything. The funerals. The house. You. Every day I wake up and there’s all these things to do, and I can’t even get my head around them.”
I wanted to get up and go to him, sit next to him, wrap my arms around him and tell him how much I missed them, too. I knew it was what my mom would want, for me to comfort him and for him to comfort me, for us to be there for each other. But I stayed put, staring at his back, at his hunched shoulders and blackened elbows and the ragged hole in his T-shirt, that same invisible barrier keeping me at a distance.
“We’ve got to have the funerals sometime, though,” I said. “We can’t just let them… rot… in the morgue.”
“I know what needs to be done,” he said. “But it isn’t that easy. I’ve lost everything important to me.”
I slipped my big toe along the bumpy inside of my flip-flop. Almost, I amended for him. I’ve lost almost everything important to me. But I knew he’d said what he meant. He’d lost Mom and Marin—the important things. He was as stuck with me as I was with him.
“I did, too,” I said instead.
He finally turned to face me. “I got hold of your grandparents. Billie and Harold Cameron.”
I frowned in confusion.
“The ones down in Caster City,” he added.
“I know,” I said. “I know who they are.” They were my father’s parents, the only grandparents I had, and Ronnie knew that all too well.
Mom’s parents had disowned her. In all my life, I’d never heard her talk about them unless one of us asked a specific question. But she’d talked about Billie and Harold Cameron. I don’t remember ever seeing them, and I never once got a birthday card or a Christmas gift from them, but I knew who they were in a vague sort of way. I knew that Mom disliked them. She thought they were cold as reptiles, and they’d probably gotten that way by being screwed over by their own kids so many times. I knew that she’d blamed them, in part, for my father leaving us, but that she’d kind of felt sorry for them, too, because all they ever did was clean up their kids’ messes and they never had any enjoyment of their own. She said they seemed depressed and jaded. Like life, and everyone in it, was out to get them.
“You told them about Mom? Why?”
He finally raised his tired, bloodshot eyes to meet mine, which made my shoulders shrink and my stomach slip. “Jersey, I’m sorry,” he said, and that was pretty much all he needed to say. I got it from just those three words.
“But why?”
He spread his hands apart, and I got some satisfaction from seeing them shake, from seeing his chin quiver and the string of saliva that connected his top tooth to his bottom lip. “I can’t do it. I can’t raise you alone. I never meant to…”
Call me your daughter, my mind supplied, and that right there was the reason I could never embrace Ronnie as my dad. It had nothing to do with being abandoned by my drunk father down in Caster City. It was a barrier that neither of us could acknowledge but that we both knew was there. Ronnie never intended to call me his daughter. I was simply part of the package deal he got when he married my mom.
“So they’re coming up here to help you? Is that it?”
He shook his head miserably. “They’re gonna take you down there.”
“What? I don’t want to go down there. I want to stay here. I was planning to help you rebuild. I don’t need some vacation from the storm.”
“It’s not a visit. They’re taking you to Caster City to live with them.”
“Uh, no they’re not,” I said, standing suddenly. “No way.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“But why? I can help you. We can help each other. You’re overwhelmed right now. We both are. But it’ll get better. Besides, my friends are all up here. I can’t just leave them. I need them.”
“You need a mother, and I can’t give you that,” he said.
“Billie Cameron isn’t my mother! Mom was my mother! She’s gone and I’ll never have another mother, and sending me off to live with strangers isn’t going to change that.”
“It’s the only option you’ve got,” he said.
I moved toward him, reaching for him. “No, it’s not. It’s not an option at all. I want to stay here. I want to stay with you. Please, Ronnie, don’t make me go live with them. I don’t even know them.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and turned onto his side, his face smushed against the ugly bedspread. He said something else, but it was too muffled for me to make out.
I turned and looked around frantically—for what, I didn’t know. I felt like I needed to do something that would show him what a bad idea this was. Something that would make him change his mind.