My dad picks me up from the office at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. I’ve left Lena with detailed instructions on how to reach me if anyone calls with something that can’t be put off until Monday. She rolled her eyes as I went through the plan for the third time. She probably thinks I’m control freak or that she’s made a terrible mistake working for me, and both could very possibly be true. I feel guilty leaving her in charge on her second weekend, but she assured me she was up to the task, and I’m only an hour outside the city. But the panic attacks are basically a continuous thing now. Something is throbbing behind my right eye, and the look on my dad’s face says it all.
“When was the last time you ate something?” he asks as we pull onto the highway.
We don’t talk much as we drive, which takes a while, even though we left early in the afternoon. Everyone trying to get ahead of traffic, instead creating the traffic they wanted to avoid.
Dad’s got a buddy with a cottage at the south end of Lake Simcoe. No idea where said buddy is this weekend, but I’m so past the point of caring right now. I sounded about five years old when I called Dad this morning.
“Can I come over?” was all I said. Instead, he said he’d come get me and we’d take the weekend away.
“Go fishing. Drink some beers. You sound like you need it.”
Fuck, do I ever. I made some kind of protest about work and Lena and the football phone, but my dad wasn’t having any of my bullshit.
“No. Pack your things. Do whatever you have to do, but I’m coming for you and we’re leaving.”
Dads, man. I don’t call, I don’t write, but when I need him, he’ll drag me out of the office kicking and screaming.
The cottage is exactly what I want. Basically plywood. It smells like mice and vinyl. Pretty sure the mattress in the room my dad gives me has been on that bed frame since before I was born. But the place has a cute porch that faces the lake, which washes toward us on a small beach.
We could take Nash’s kids to the beach.
I must make a noise, because my dad, who has just handed me a beer, says, “You want to talk about it?”
“About what?” I say, trying to drown myself in MGD. I cough as I finish swallowing.
“Whatever made you call me.” He sits down in an old folding chair that creaks but holds together.
“No.” I finish the beer. He doesn’t say anything about it.
No one must call the football phone, or else Lena truly is the saintly miracle worker I want to believe she is. The plan is, if she needs me, she’ll call the cottage’s ancient landline. The old phone can’t be more than six months newer than the last of the rotary phones. And it stays silent all through Friday night and into Saturday.
Dad finds a few fishing rods and some tackle. We take a tippy aluminum boat out on the lake. I’m not much for fishing, but I’m all for sitting on an open body of water in silence, feeling like the world is a million miles away.
We could take Nash’s kids fishing.
They’re probably city kids, like their dad. They think fish come on foam trays from the grocery store.
The boat wobbles. I sit suddenly.
My dad says, “You want to talk about it?”
I glare at him, pulling my hat down low. “No.”
We don’t catch anything. Dad cooks up dinner—pickerel he buys in town. It comes packaged on foam trays. We play cribbage under a lamp with a stained-glass shade that was probably the height of fashion fifty years ago but is now vintage in a delightfully tacky way. I beat my dad at the first two games. He beats me at the next two. We’re neck and neck on the last one as we cross the skunk line.
Dad looks at me over his cards and says, “If I win, you tell me what’s wrong.”
I peg like hell and beat him by two points.
We don’t talk about it.
Lena doesn’t call. I start to believe maybe I can escape the football phone after all.
I dream about Nash. I’ve never bottomed for him, but in the dream he’s deep inside me, moving like I know he would. But no matter what we do, I’m always reaching for a climax. He’s with me, but he won’t let me come.
I wake up hard and aching, so I jack off into a tissue. It should be hot, but it only leaves me empty and lonely. The cottage is stuffy. I feel like I’m sticking to my bed. When it becomes clear sleep has left the room, I wander through the dark little house and out onto the front porch.
The stars are out. I need to get out of the city more. We’re only an hour away, and I’m amazed at how dark it is here and how much clearer the stars are.
