“Holy shit, Sharon. My ears.”
“Oh, save it. People my age still get those!”
“What? I didn’t—that’s—that’s not the point.” I move over to the counter, pour myself what’s left of the coffee, and close my eyes against the sudden thought of Kit and how I left her, naked and sleepy and smelling of much better coffee than this. Sharon waves goodbye, letting herself out, and the kitchen is quiet but for the faint squeak the ball makes when my dad squeezes it.
“Nice night?” he says, keeping his eyes on the paper, but I can see him smiling.
“Yep,” I say, turning my back to reach into the fridge.“We’ve got to get you ready for your appointment, huh?”
“You know, if you’re wanting to be out more—I don’t need someone staying with me at night now,” he says.“You heard the doc.”
I did hear the doctor, late last week, when Dad had passed all the tests determining whether or not he was still a fall risk. So long as he kept the cane by his bed at night, he had enough weight-bearing flexibility to get back and forth to the bathroom, to get water if he needed it. But I still didn’t feel comfortable with it. I wouldn’t have left him last night without Sharon.
Which—about that.“Dad,” I say, keeping my back turned as I pour myself a bowl of cereal. I may be thirty-one years old, but I’m not sure I’d ever have the balls required to have this conversation with my dad face to face.“You got something going with Sharon?”
He barks out a sharp laugh.“Do I ‘got something going with’ her?” he repeats, laughing again.
I feel my face heat in embarrassment. My dad and I are close, I think, but we don’t usually talk about this kind of shit. Once, after I’d moved to Texas, I’d asked him if he was interested in dating—I worried, sometimes, about him growing old alone—and he’d laughed sort of the way he’s doing right now.“Never mind,” I say, sitting across the table and hunching as far down into my cereal bowl as I can without actually dipping my face into it.
“You got something going with Kit?”
Even her name, it makes my skin prickle with anticipation, heat.“Yeah.”
“Well. Then, yeah. I got something going with Sharon.”
I blink up at him, just—shocked, completely fucking shocked.
“Since you were about fifteen, I guess,” he says, so casual, as if this is not a big deal at all.
“What? Since I waswhat?” Dad’s calmly squeezing the ball, and now he’s added in some of the slight knee lifts he does for his leg.“I—I can’t—how?”
“How? Well, here’s how it is, son, when a man…”
“Dad, don’t finish that sentence. I beg you.” Jesus, if this keeps up, I won’t even be able to go back to Kit’s tonight. My buddy down there will go on permanent hiatus.“Just—explain yourself.”
Dad lifts his good shoulder in a casual shrug.“Nothing to explain, really. You know Sharon’s my best friend. Turned into something else after a few years, that’s all.”
“You’ve never said a word,” I say, feeling a little mad now.“You guys have—been togetherfor over fifteen years and you’ve never said a word to me? Jesus, why don’t you live together? Or get married?”
“Live together! You must be crazy. Sharon and me, it’s good the way it is, us having our own spaces. We thought about it, once you went away, but I suppose we do best how we are.”
“Jesus, Dad. I feel like an idiot. Probably Sharon wants to be taking care of you, and I flew in here like I was saving the goddamn day. Why wouldn’t you have told me this?”
“Don’t see as how it mattered, right at first, when you were a kid. You were going through a lot back then, anyhow, so it didn’t seem right, and Sharon and I kept it pretty casual back then.”
I don’t dare ask if“keeping it casual” means the same thing to Dad as it means to me, and anyways, now that he’s said it, little things about those last few years I was in the house come back to me, and I see them in a new light—a couple of times, early in the morning, when my dad came in the house, saying he’d just been out for a walk, even though so far as I knew he never walked only for the sake of it, or the time I found one of Sharon’s baseball jerseys in Dad’s laundry basket.“Then after a while,” he says,“it seemed it’d be strange to tell you, I guess.” He clears his throat.“Sorry.”
I take the ball from him, squeeze it myself.“You’re supposed to rest after five minutes,” I say, because now I’m more embarrassed, both by his obvious discomfort and by what this entire conversation reveals. The truth is, I thought my dad and I were tight—I thought I kept up with him and his life, considered myself a good son to him. But if he’s been with the same woman for all these years and I didn’t even know? I didn’t evennotice? That doesn’t say anything good about me, and this feeling I’ve had since I’ve been home—that Dad’s life is going by without me, that I was wrong not to have known the kinds of risks he took at work—it’s overwhelming right now, settling right into my temples for what I know will be a day-long headache.
“Hey, you got nothing to feel bad about,” Dad says.“I should have told you. Sharon and I should have told you. Though she’s probably going to tear a strip off me when she finds out I let it slip.”
“She didn’t want me to know, either?” This hurts too. I feel as close to Sharon as I do to anyone here at home, and I think of the effort it must have taken her, all these years, to keep this from me, to never betray anything other than friendly affection—but mostly annoyance—with my dad.
“Ah, Sharon’s private in some ways. Not about her gynecology appointments, I guess, but about other things. Don’t take it personal.”
Oh, man. But Ihavetaken it personal. It’s ridiculous, but I think of Kit asking me if Sharon was my stepmom. I was such an unholy terror when I was a teenager. Sharon probably hadn’t wanted to be all in for that. After all, even my own mother hadn’t.
I swallow down more of my breakfast, pulling the sports section in front of me, but not really registering anything on the page. After a few minutes of silence, Dad speaks up again.“Ben,the thing between Sharon and me, it’s how it’s always been. She’s got her life, and her space, and I have mine. We’re as close as we want to be. And you coming here...” He pauses, clears his throat again.“That’s what I needed to have happen, after I fell. That was more important to me than anything.”
