When she decided to call it quits, it wasn’t because of anything specific. Something that had been there before was now missing, and neither of us could figure out what. Our relationship just wasn’t working. So when I moved into my parents’ house, I was really down. I don’t generally wear my emotions on my sleeve, but my dad could tell I was upset.
“Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder while I was eating breakfast one morning about a week after I’d moved back home.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to try to cheer me up,” I replied.
“Shit, I know that,” he said. “But I figured I had to say something. Otherwise, just grabbing the cereal from you and leaving might seem a little callous.” He chuckled, hoping to lighten the mood.
The next day I woke up at around six-thirty in the morning. Unable to go back to sleep, I groggily sauntered out into the living room in my boxer shorts. My dad was sitting at the dining room table eating Grape-Nuts and reading the paper.
“When’d you wake up?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, five maybe. Like usual.”
“Jesus, that’s early. Why do you wake up so early?” I said.
“Always have.”
“But why? You’re retired now. It makes no sense.”
“Son, am I being interrogated here? I’m an early riser, what the fuck you want from me?” he said before resuming reading the paper.
After a few moments he put the paper down.
“Why are
I told him I had woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep. He got up from his seat, walked into the kitchen, and poured me a cup of coffee.
“You want that bullshit you like in your coffee?” he asked, holding a mug filled with the dark black liquid.
“Creamer? Yes. I want creamer.”
He set my coffee down on the table and went back to reading his paper. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, and we sat in silence for a few minutes. My mind was quickly consumed with thoughts of my girlfriend and all the good times we had had, like one of those cheesy montages in eighties movies, when the angsty protagonist envisions himself and his ex holding hands on the beach, feeding a small puppy, getting into some kind of zany wrestling match with whipped cream. I interrupted my cliché memories by saying aloud, “Ugh, I’m feeling pretty low about this whole thing.”
“You just gotta try to put it out of your head,” he said, folding the paper halfway down to look at me.
“I know, it’s just hard. I mean, I still have stuff at her place. What am I gonna do about that? I still have a TV . . . ,” I said.
“Fuck the TV. Leave the TV. Cut your ties.”
“It’s a fifteen-hundred-dollar TV,” I insisted.
“Go get that fucking TV.”
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to accomplish by having this conversation, but it wasn’t making me feel better. So I went to take a shower, got dressed, and began working on my latest Maxim.com piece, which was, ironically, a flow chart detailing the differences between the male and female brain during an argument. I worked straight until twelve-thirty, when my dad came into the living room. He had his fanny pack on, which indicated he was ready to go somewhere.
“I’m buying you lunch. Put your flip-flops on and let’s go.”
I dragged myself off the couch, followed him outside, hopped in his car, and we headed down the hill to my favorite lunch spot, an Italian place near our house called Pizza Nova. We got a table outside in the sun that overlooked dozens of white clusters of sailboats and motorboats in the San Diego harbor. The waitress brought us a basket of garlic rolls and a pair of iced teas. My dad took a sip of his and looked up at me.
“You don’t know shit about me.”
“Um, okay,” I said, a little confused.
“About my life. You don’t know shit about it. Because I don’t tell anybody.”
It wasn’t until he said it that I realized he was right. Sure, I knew the rough outline of my dad’s biography: He grew up on a farm in Kentucky; served in Vietnam; had two sons with his first wife, who passed away from cancer shortly after having my brother Evan; married my mom nine years later and had me; and spent his career doing cancer research as a doctor of nuclear medicine. But that was it. Now that I was thinking about it, I realized he was probably the most private person I knew.
“When I was in my early twenties, I was head over heels for this woman. She was gorgeous. Just a real beauty. And full of life,” he said between bites of a garlic roll.
Most of us like to assume, or wish, that our parents only had sex with each other, and only the necessary number of times it took to produce us and our siblings, so it was strange to hear my dad talk so highly about a woman other than my mother. He never had before, and I was intrigued.
