He stares at my pink socks before his eyes roam toward the ceiling. I follow them, and we study the new, flat white texture that was probably Rich’s doing.
“What are we looking for?” I ask.
“When Arnez was a girl, this was the only way she’d feel comfortable enough to talk to me about some things. She’d scoot over in her bed and make a spot just for me. She’d say, ‘Come on, Daddy. Come lay with me for a while.’ It’s how she broke the news to me that she had started her period. I was the last one in the house to find out.”
I smile to myself, even though my time with Arnez was tumultuous. But that part of Rich that lives inside me tells me I can’t hate a woman who’s just as broken as I am.
“I think I get it,” I reply. “I’m sure telling you this way felt less intimidating than facing you head on.”
“Am I that scary?”
“No. You’re just a dad. I imagine it’s hard for little girls to talk to their dads about such sensitive topics.”
He chuckles. “I was only twenty-one when she came along. I ain’t know shit about raising no girl. As far as I knew, Lovelaces didn’t make girls.”
I smile bigger. “She was the anomaly.”
“And the troublemaker too.”
We huff out laughs together.
“The first time she looked at me in that hospital room, I fell in love. She taught me about a world that was foreign to me—hormones, periods, bras, punk-ass boys, and the complicated nature of love.”
“I thought you didn’t believe love was complicated?”
“I never said that.” He laughs. “Iknowlove is complicated. I’m the old man here. I’ve got almost thirty years on you, no matter how many lives Faye-baby thinks you’ve lived.”
“You remember that conversation?”
“The doctor says I’ve got a neurological disorder—not dementia.”
I sputter out a laugh, blinking at the white on the ceiling. “Understood.”
I try to picture Rich in his paint-splattered Dickies, standing on a ladder with a paintbrush in his hand, painting smooth white strokes and leaving his energy behind. Butterflies swarm in my stomach, tickling the edges of that light feeling inside it.
Senior sighs. “Raising Arnez made me understand how unconditional a woman’s love is. It was something I never saw growing up because Lovelaces didn’t keep women—because to keep a woman meant you’d eventually have to break her heart. My daddy raised me by himself, and his daddy raised him by himself. There was always nothing but testosterone around and then here comes this itty bitty baby girl that cried if I stayed out too late, cleaned my wounds when I came home from Lucky’s, got jealous anytime she thought a woman loved me more than she did. She was hard…and soft, and still is. I’m fifty-two years old and still raising a daddy’s girl.”
“And your son?”
“What about him?”
“How’d you feel the first time you saw him?”
Another round of thunder quakes outside, and neither of us moves.
“This white ceiling is a safe space,” I say. “I won’t judge whatever it is you’re holding in over there.”
I turn and stare at the side of his face, studying his chiseled cheeks and that raised scar in case I never get the chance to be so close to him again.
“I felt relieved at first,” he mutters.
“And then?”
“Proud.” His Adam’s apple jumps as he swallows. “I didn’t need another anomaly. I needed a boy to mold into a man, a boy that could take care of this baby girl I made by mistake until she was old enough to take care of herself, a boy that could hold hisown in that pit as soon as possible because something in me was changing. The morning he was born, I couldn’t even smell the Johnson’s I put on Arnez before we went to the hospital. And that was my favorite smell. Shit,shewas my favorite smell.”
My stomach twists into knots. “You knew you were sick back then, didn’t you?”
He nods.
