I give him a disgusted look he grins at, but I can picture my young mother dancing these same steps much smoother than me and with a smile on her face. I can hear her laughing and her bracelets jangling.
Nash dances by with a woman who giggles as he spins her. Over her head, his eyes meet mine.
“It’s a lonely life spent without the one you love,” Cap says as he draws me toward him a few inches before guiding me out. “I loved your mom,” he continues. “But I loved the idea of getting rich on that lost gold more. Thought it would put my name on a museum or something. In a history book.” His oxygen tank slips from his shoulder and he adjusts it as our feet shuffle. “I let go of a lot of things I wanted to keep in the name of chasing smoke.”
I stop dancing and look at him fully. “You think the gold is smoke?”
“I think what I thought the gold would give me is smoke,” he says with a gentle tug of his hand. “Thought that once I had it, I’d be able to give everyone everything they needed. All the time spent and wasted? Smoke.”
“I’m only here two weeks chasing your smoke. And what I’m here to fix needs the gold. Your sage words hardly apply,Dad.”
His bushy brows raise—rock-step—as he says, “Maybe chasing the gold isn’t your problem. Maybe you’re after something else. Maybe for the wrong reasons.” My eyes lock with Nash’s again as my dad nonchalantly says, “Maybe the things we need most don’t even need to be chased. Maybe they just are. Right in front of us.”
Now he sounds like Sylvia.
Sunny yells for us to put some sass into it, and we oblige the best we can.
“Maybe,” he adds, spinning me in front of him, “there’s more to be found here than gold.”
I puff a laugh. “You give the same piss-poor pep talks as Mom.”
His face lights up as our hands rejoin. “Must mean it’s not so piss-poor.”
At my flat look, he chuckles, moving as smoothly as a man in his condition can as we dance.
“I don’t know if anything is as easy as either of you think,” I say as we step together then step apart. “I’m engaged and married. Mom needs surgery. We’re broke. I have a secret kid. It’s—” I laugh cynically. “More complicated than just changing my mind about something.”
“What do you want?” he asks. “And I don’t mean for your kid or your mom or the business. I mean for you.”
“I want—” I think about it as we shuffle through the steps. Because it’s easy to say what I want for Bennie. Easy to be selfless for her. Even for Mom and Old Vines. My eyes meet Nash’s. “To be so enough for someone that they don’t need to constantly chase something else.”
“I know about chasin’,” Cap says. “Also know that time changes us all. Things that mattered before usually don’t after enough days go by.”
“Hindsight,” I say.
“Hindsight,” he echoes.
In another spin, he coughs, wincing slightly as he does.
“You okay?” I ask, stilling my feet as his chest heaves with a hack in the middle of the dance floor.
“Live long enough, you get old, kiddo. What say we go have a meeting with Penny in the parking lot?” He holds up Penny with a wry grin. “Two leading ladies in my life.”
Cap may have the roughest exterior a man can have, but there’s a softness to him too. He sees more than he lets on. Has a layer of sweetness beneath all that salt. I’m struck in this moment surrounded by senior citizens and Sunny’s obnoxious presence by how glad I am to know him. It took four days on top of forty-two years for me to get here, but here I am. With a secret dad I didn’t know I needed.
Outside, we sit on a bench as he puffs on Penny, Sunny’s shouts barely muted by the cinder block walls of the building.
“I like her spirit,” my dad says.
I make a disagreeing sound. “She hates me.”
“Nah,” he says, slipping Penny into his pocket. “Just sees how much he still loves you is all.”
A humiliated heat crawls up my neck at the fact I spent the last hour hating her and Nash for a fabricated sordid affair. I need a therapist and medication—a shitload of both.
“Cappy baby,” Sunny’s voice calls from the open front door. “I need my partner.”
He stands.
