“He wasn’t a gangster. My dad was a football player, in college, like I told you. He was born and raised in North Vancouver. He went out east for college, where he met my mom. They got married right out of college. After that, he was basically a leech. He lived off my mom.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He was advised, by my mom’s parents, to give up football to dedicate himself to being the husband of Christiana Davenport. And he accepted that role. He basically did whatever he was told. He was a trophy husband.”
“Wow. I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
“It really shouldn’t be,” I said dryly.
“Go on,” Devi prompted. “I want to hear the rest. Were they in love?”
“I have no idea. I think they probably were, for a while. But then my dad cheated on my mom. Probably a lot. She found out, tried to make it work, but then she caught him again. So, inevitably, she divorced him. He wasn’t painting the picture of the perfect husband that she needed him to, publicly. He came back here, lived in a mansion my mom paid for. He got a small fortune in the divorce, definitely more than he deserved. Especially since he also slept with her sister, as you know. And I guess… my mom knew about that part all along.” I rubbed my face. “Look, I know he’s my dad. He wasn’t a terrible dad or anything. He wasn’t a good dad, either. I fucking idolized him growing up, though. Wanted to be just like him.” I kind of laughed bitterly. “I guess I bought into the image they sold me. The same one they sold everyone.”
“So, why do you dislike him so much,” Devi asked me, “if you didn’t know about the affair with Laurinda? You knew about the other affairs?”
“Kind of. After my mom divorced him and kicked him out and he left, I was pretty angry. Mostly at my mom. I thought everything was her fault. She broke up the family. She sent my dad away. I was fourteen and I really didn’t know shit. At the time, I didn’t really understand all the stuff that I heard about him cheating on her. In my fourteen-year-old brain, I thought that meant he’d fallen in love with some other woman. I was just a kid. My dad was my hero.”
“Understandable…” Devi said, when I paused to take a breath.
“So, I gave my mom a lot of grief about it. I basically acted like a spoiled brat for like a year. Until she finally turned around and told me that I could just go out west if I missed my dad so much. So I did. When I was fifteen, I flew out here, and I lived with my dad for the next three years. Until I finished high school. I lived with him in that mansion my mom bought for him. And over time, I saw who he really was.”
“Who was he?”
“Just… a guy who’d achieved nothing with his life. His greatest feat was to peak in college and then live off his wife… his ex-wife. All her hard work, her family fortune, he milked it for everything he could. I don’t even know why she let him. I always thought they just kept taking care of him to keep him quiet. So that he’d never badmouth them in the press. But I’m coming to think maybe there was more to it than that. Like maybe my mom actually still cared about him or something? Or, I don’t know… felt guilty for her part in it all? Maybe she loved him more than I knew. Maybe he broke her heart when he betrayed her.”
I rubbed my eyes. No matter how much I slept lately, I just couldn’t seem to get enough.
Devi rubbed her hand up and down my back a little. “What happened, Dane?”
I looked into her eyes, and did my best to force out the rest. She was my wife, legally. She had a right to know all of it. And if I wanted her to trust me, I had to be honest. I had to tell her every dirty detail that I was aware of, where my family was concerned.
“By the time I was sixteen,” I told her, “I was losing faith in my dad at high speed. But my mom wouldn’t let me come back. She said I had a lesson to learn. She said that I wanted to leave her and go live with my dad, so that’s where I’d stay until I finished school. So I had to stay for a couple more years. You might’ve noticed I was in a slightly bad mood at that point in my life.”
“Yeah. I might’ve noticed that.” Devi smiled at me softly.
“I did my best to make sure that I was nothing like him,” I said. “My second year at Beaumont, I quit the football team and tried out for hockey. I’d played recreationally, and at least I was good enough to stay on the team. It kept me busy, and I needed that. I tried not to spend any more time with my dad than I really had to. I was embarrassed by him. My other friends’ dads had jobs. They had purpose. They’d done shit in life. My dad smoked more pot and played more video games than my high school friends. It was like living with an irresponsible brother who could barely take care of himself. Without the whole staff of people we had at home in Toronto, he was basically incompetent. He was a spoiled brat, and I never saw it because I was such a spoiled brat myself. The older I got… the more obvious it got.”
I paused, really thinking back to that time. It wasn’t something I liked to think about much. I’d run away from that place, so fast. And yet I didn’t realize until I lay on that beach on the other side of the world that I’d taken parts of it with me.
“I was pissed at my mom for leaving me here with him,” I confessed. “But honestly, I also respected her more. Every day that went by in that house with my dad, I respected my mom and her family more for how hard they worked and what they built. No one gave them anything. They worked for it. Even my mom, who inherited so much, she worked hard. I wanted to be worthy of that life they’d worked so hard for. I never wanted to be like my dad. I just wanted to graduate from that fucking school and get the fuck out of here.”
“Well, you did,” Devi said. “You were one of the top students in the school. It was kind of grotesque how good you were in every class.” She smiled again, like she was trying to make me smile.
“You never smiled at me back then,” I said softly. “You never liked me. And I really couldn’t blame you.”
“Dane. I would’ve liked the hell out of you if I ever thought that you might like me back.”
I studied her face. Those big brown eyes looking back at me. And in that moment, I knew it.
We were both idiots.
She’d been too strong to ever admit any feelings for me. And I’d been too weak to admit my feelings for her.
“The night I graduated from high school,” I told her, “I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. There was this girl I liked who didn’t like me back. She came to grad with my best friend. I brought this girl, Kelli, as my date, but I didn’t even like her. And I had a terrible night. I got really drunk. I did some embarrassing shit. And that girl I liked? I kissed her and she slapped my face.”
Devi crept a hand slowly up over her face and peeked at me from between her fingers
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I deserved it. But, uh, after that particularly humiliating moment, my night actually got worse.”
