“Dad,” I say, my throat tight.“It’s only been six months. I send the checks directly to the management office—”
“I’m not being evicted,” he snaps, and I slump back in relief, and confusion.“I’m moving in with my—I’m moving in with a woman. Her name is Candace.”
“Oh, Dad,” I sigh, rubbing an aching spot on my forehead. It’s not unusual for him to be dating—despite the fact that he’s lived hard most of his life, he’s still a good-looking guy, tall and lean like Alex is, with salt-and-pepper hair, and, when he works at it, a charming smile. For Dad, women were part of the life—he didn’t usually indulge in his vices alone. And while none of them tended to stick around long—my mother the exception, but only to get through the pregnancy—they usually managed to be part of some new brand of trouble my dad would get into.
My dad coughs on the other end of the line, clearing his throat, and it’s a thick, wet sound that makes me wince—what a lifetime of smoking Camels has done to his health. I wait for him to tell me more about Candace, but really I’m already picturing her from experience. Blond, probably, big hair, too much makeup, lots of jewelry, enough so that it makes noise when she walks. It’s no small irony that I make a mental ten to one bet he met her at a casino.
“I met her at church,” he says, his voice still rocky and uneven with phlegm.
What the…what?
“What kind of church?” I’m glad he can’t see my eyes narrow in suspicion.
“Just a church I go to,” he says, and then he raises his voice.“It’s none of your business!”
He’s always been this way—volatile, quick to anger, especially when he thinks I’m asking for an accounting of his decisions.“Okay,” I say calmly. This is a tactic I’ve honed over many years—do not engage. Maybe I haven’t done such a good job of it in the practical sense, seeing as how we’re about to discuss where I should send his checks, but I’ve improved immensely in the verbal communication part of things.“Let me have the address.”
He rattles it off, a P.O. Box, and I shouldn’t ask, but curiosity gets the better of me.“Where is—what kind of place is this, Dad? An apartment, or…?” I trail off, unsure of how much to press here. Despite everything, despite his almost complete negligence of me for my entire life, I worry over him. I want to know he’s at least someplace warm, safe. And I don’t want to be sending money to some woman’s P.O. Box.
“It’s a trailer,” he says gruffly.“Nice place.” A trailer actually could be a pretty nice place, compared to a lot of the apartments we lived in over the years, and I’m resolved not to judge—but at least with the apartments my dad’s been in, I’ve been able to talk to a property manager, or visit a website. I’ve been able to keep some tabs.
“Maybe I could meet Candace sometime. Does she have a computer? We could Skype.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, but I can tell he’s already finished with this conversation.“Maybe.”
I take another deep breath, because I always do, before this part of almost every call we have.“Have you checked out any of those meetings I suggested, Dad?”
“I’ve got to run, Ekaterina,” he says, and I nod uselessly, feeling as defeated as I always do.“You take care,” he adds, which is as close toI love youas my father gets.
“Thanks.You take care too.”
But he won’t. He never, ever does.
I try to get Dad out of my mind while I heat up some leftovers, but I’m a dog with a bone when it comes to his issues, and I’ve been worse about it since the lottery. The only positive here is that I’ve got a legitimate excuse to text Alex, who’s still dodging me about my proposal. I fire off a quick message, asking whether he knows anything about Candace, and send an email too—he’s doing a shoot in South America, I think, and his phone contact might be spotty.
Tomorrow is going to be a long day. I’ll get up early and be at the lab by six so I can start the repairs I need to do. I should probably just eat and head to bed, but instead, I grab my phone again and send a group text to Zoe and Greer.Bring candy, it says, and within five minutes Zoe has texted back,On it. Greer writes that she’ll be over within the hour.
I smile in gratitude, in relief. Then I navigate back to my email and hover over the message Ben sent this morning, the one with all the pictures. With barely a hesitation I trash it. Today was lousy at work, sure, but it doesn’t take much to remind me of what really matters. That call with my dad—his constant wayfaring, instability—is a check on what I’ve worked so hard for here. No matter what Beaumont has down there in Texas, it doesn’t have Zoe and Greer, and it doesn’t have myhome. I’ll fix the microscope, keep going with all these renovations, keep focused on all the things here that have made me happier than I’ve ever been allowed to be in my life.
And if I spend a little too much time thinking about that pained, tired look on Ben Tucker’s face, well—that’s something I can deal with another time.
Chapter 8
Ben
I don’t mean to be dramatic, but right now, I can’t think of one fucking thing I’d like to be doing less than having lunch with my mother.
I’m at the Crestwood, Barden’s oldest and most revered hotel, and home to my mom’s favorite restaurant. It’s the hottest it’s been since I arrived in town, but of course you can’t wear a fucking t-shirt to the Crestwood, so I had to walk three blocks from my street parking space in suit pants and a dress shirt, and I can feel sweat rolling down my spine. I rushed to get here, because Dad’s PT session for his arm today was running behind, and I had to drop him back at the yard with Sharon before I ran home to change. This afternoon, I’m supposed to meet a contractor at the yard who’s trying to replace every single sink and tub in the three houses he’s working on, and I doubt we have the inventory.
And—and—I fucked up, again, with Kit.
I clench my teeth, take a drink of water, willing myself to relax. It’s not easy—since yesterday, the week’s really been going to shit, though if I’m honest, things were getting stressful even before that. Dad’s PT is really ramping up, and so my days—shuttling him back and forth, coordinating schedules with Sharon and now River too—are more complicated. Even though it’s good to see Dad making progress, he can be difficult and antagonistic, especially when the pain is getting to him. Usually he takes this out on me, which is okay, but on Wednesday he’d snapped at the therapist, frustrated by the restrictions she insisted on about his weight-bearing limitations. He’d apologized—I can tell he knows this is unlike him, the frustration, the temper—but I’d felt so bad that I’d sent the office two dozen cupcakes. I have a new appreciation for caretakers of all kinds after only a couple of weeks here.
Plus, there’s River, who’s almost as unpredictable as my dad. Sometimes, like yesterday when I was trying to help him with his homework, it seemed as if the kid was warming up to me. Other times, like when I told him he needed to head home for the night, it became a polar-vortex freeze out, just complete silence and disinterest. It’s not my problem—itshouldn’tbe my problem—but the kid’s got trouble, and hell if I’m any good at ignoring it.
The worst of it, though, is Kit. Or the job. Whatever the fuck it is. Yesterday, I’d stepped directly in it. And I hadn’t meant to—when she’d said she’d had a bad day, I hadn’t been thinking about the job at all. Honestly, I’d been thinking,thank God it’s not just me. I’d been looking for a little of that harmless commiseration friends do over their shitty days. But despite Monday, and Tuesday, when she’d come to the yard and stayed for the evening, I guess we’re not really friends. We can’t be, and that’s down to me, not her. I’m the one who’s put the job between us, and I can hardly admit to myself how many times I’ve wished over the last few days that that wasn’t the case. I wish she’d come into the yard one day while I was working. I wish she didn’t know me as a recruiter at all.
But there was no point in thinking that way, so after I’d gotten Dad settled last night I’d sent an email to Jasper, updating him on what I’d learned about Kit so far, letting him know that since the materials I’d sent hadn’t seemed to sway her yet, I was planning on digging in to some research on the funding sources Kit’s department had more generally. Sometimes this could be a good way to negotiate recruiting deals, to have Beaumont fund some of a university’s project agendas. I’d had trouble sleeping afterward, which is why I’m probably taking this lunch break with a little more annoyance than I might otherwise.
