There are few things that terrify me as much as a text from my wife.

I’m standing at my dad’s front door when it arrives. The words are clear enough — pick up mustard on your way home — but they’re laced with a test I’m not so sure I can pass. Yellow? Dijon? If I ask I make an ass of myself, but if I don’t, I risk screwing it up. And, according to Lisa, I’ve done a little too much of that lately.

I knock on the door, and a couple white paint chips stick to my knuckles like little scales. I expect to see my dad when it swings open, but it’s Holly, his wife, instead. I look away because we went to high school together, and no one you went to high school with should ever marry your dad. At least that’s how I thought it should go. I catch enough of her to see that she’s wearing a tight pink tank top and sweatpants that are rolled at the waistline, but beyond that, I pretend that the stains on their doormat will make her my dad’s age or that this is all one big, stupid joke.

“Mikey,” she says, wrapping her arms around me and pulling my head close, “it’s so good to see you.”

I try not to think about my dad’s perverted lips making their way across the skin she’s buried my face into. “He said it was pretty urgent.”

“He’s not doing well,” she says, releasing me. “The doctors don’t seem too optimistic.”

Six months ago, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. The news came as a surprise to none of us given his decades-long relationship with Pall Malls, and it really didn’t change much, either. He smokes as much as ever, but he’s taken to asking favors of my brother and me on account of his illness. I can only assume this is why I’m here today.   

“How’s Lisa?” Holly asks. She holds me at arm’s length, like my mother used to.

“Good,” I say. I’m lying, at least I think I am. Truth is, I have no idea how she is aside from needing mustard and being on Day 12 of her fifth Whole30. “She’s good.”

“You’re lucky to have her,” Holly says. “She’s good to you. Always been a sweet girl, too. I remember being in Bio with her –”

“Let’s not talk about high school.”

Holly smiles, still looking every bit the homecoming queen she was our senior year. “How about we see your dad?”

Times like these, I’m pretty sure I’m an asshole for feeling the way I do about my dad’s marriage. Most days, though, I’m fine with it. He’s spent so much of the last twenty years hopping from job to job, woman to woman, that it’s hard to take him seriously. His life’s like a shitty game of roulette, giving no concern to where he lands or how he gets there, making it difficult to take Holly — just like Karen, Allie, Veronica, or Melanie — seriously.

I make my way through the foyer and into the living room, where my dad’s sunken into a burnt orange recliner that looks like cat vomit and smells like bong water. For a second, it reminds me of Lisa. We had a rug that color once, straight out of IKEA, with chevrons that we thought looked modern but probably weren’t. I loved that rug, more for the sentiment than anything else, but Lisa threw it away when she earned her promotion and we moved to Summerfield Estates.

It’s stupid, the way we connect to things, isn’t it? On all accounts, it was a shitty rug. The chevrons stained too easily, and it clung to every piece of dust, hair, and filth that came near it. But it was our rug, our first rug, and it carried a younger part of our relationship that Lisa didn’t seem to give two fucks about.
I half-wonder if my dad feels the same way about his chair, a question I immediately regret on account of the numerous women he’s probably slept with in it.

“Mikey,” he says, lifting his eyebrows. “Where’s Lisa?”

This shouldn’t bug me, but it does. “She’s busy.”

I fall into the couch adjacent to him, and Holly disappears into the kitchen, my dad’s eyes trailing her as she goes.

“She has a damn fine ass.”

“Jesus, Dad.”

“What?” he says, swatting at me. “Don’t be a wuss. Lisa has a fine ass, too.”

“Stop,” I say. “I know.” But it hits me that I don’t, at least not as well as I should. Is that something husbands keep note of?

“Now your mother, she had the –”

“Please don’t.”

“Fine,” he says. “But tell me about yourself. How you been? You look like you’ve put on a few.”

I look down at the growing bump of a gut creeping over my belt, half picturing the buttons screaming at me as they get choked out against the fabric.
Goodwill us! Please!

“You used to be so skinny, you know? And now — now you’ve been gaining all this weight. I’m starting to worry.”

Before I can respond, Holly walks back in, a glass in each hand. “Two whiskey and cokes,” she says, leaning across me to set it on the side table. She does the same for my dad, who makes no effort to keep his eyes from her cleavage.

When she leaves, I shake my head. “You’re sick.”

“You’re gonna tell me you don’t appreciate breasts like that? You’re the sick one.”

I want to talk about how I went to school with Holly before she had those breasts, and how he could have walked her to the bus stop or been her teacher or bus driver or something age-appropriate, but I swallow it down. “So, what do you need?”

Dad narrows his eyes. “To see my son.”

“Cut the shit.”

He reaches to his breast pocket, only to stop halfway there in a coughing fit. His hand jerks up to his mouth, covering it as he hacks against his cancer, protecting himself — and me — from the loosening phlegm that makes its way free.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs.

A sort of guilt hits me, and I think of Lisa sitting at home. When I’d invited her to come, she’d wanted to do meal prep again, insisting that if she didn’t she’d fall victim to her sugar dragon or whatever the hell her new diet lingo was.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. It’s weird to see how much smaller he looks, like pieces of him have melted away or fallen off or just disappeared. Growing up, he was a hulk — his nickname was Bear, for Christ’s sake — and even though he’s dressed in the same half-buttoned flannel he used to wear, it falls over him now in a way that reminds me of the hand-me-downs I used to get from my brother Nate.

By the time I go to look him in the eye, a cat’s made its way around his shoulders, sprawling across them like a snake. As soon as it sees me, it buries its face into the space between my dad’s back and the chair.

“When did you get a cat?”

“This is Bert. Your step-mother said it would be good for me to have a pet.”

Bert pulls his head out and scans me in quick, jerky movements.

“He seems weird.”

Dad smiles at this, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out an envelope. He tosses it into my lap, and Bert stares at it.

“I need you to do me a favor.”

I pick up the letter. The envelope’s old, wrinkled, and on the front, my dad’s scribbled something.

“Since when do you quote Wilco?”

My dad scoffs. “What the hell’s a Wilco? I got it off the inside of your journal. You left it in your bedroom.”

“What?”

“Your journal. The one you wrote in when you were in college.”

Suddenly, I’m young again. “Why were you going through my journal?”

“Don’t be a bitch about it. You haven’t written in it in ten years. I just thought it was a good line.”

“You don’t go through people’s shit.”

“Come on,” he says. “I’m dying. If I want to look back on memories of my son, I think I have the right to while I can.”

The dying card. I should have known it wouldn’t take him long to pull it. I want to ask more questions, but I can’t figure out what they are, like they’re stuck in a traffic jam on the way from my head to my mouth, so I take a sip of my whiskey and coke and move on. “So, what is it?”

“It’s a letter. I need you to deliver it for me.”

“They have people who do that, you know.”

Bert’s eyes dart up at me, judging.

“It’s not that simple. I don’t know where she is.”

I flip the envelope over, where my dad’s scribbled a name on it. Sandra Watson.

“Who is she?”

Dad scratches the back of his head. “She’s kind of an ex-girlfriend.”

“From when?”

“Before ‘Nam. She said she’d wait ‘til I got back from the war, but I got stuck over there too long. By the time I got back, she’d moved on. So, I married your mother.”

The way he mentions Mom, like an afterthought, half convinces me to punch him.

“She was the love of my life, Mikey.”

Holly walks in, kisses my dad on the forehead, and sits on the armrest of the cat vomit chair. Bert buries his head between their shoulders, and the whole thing looks like one of those bizarro Christmas photos you see on Buzzfeed lists around the holidays.

“You hearing this?”

Holly looks up. She’s running her fingers across my dad’s chest hair. “Sandy? Oh yeah. It’s sweet, isn’t it?”

The fact that Sandra is Sandy makes me want to scream.

“This doesn’t bother you? You know, as his wife or anything?”

Holly’s found a particularly large patch of hair, which she twirls around her finger. “Who am I to judge it? It’s not like any good’ll come of that.”

I refocus on Dad, who hasn’t stopped staring at me. “So Mom was a rebound, then?”

“Don’t put it like that. You know what it’s like.”

I don’t know if it’s shock or confusion, but this leaves my throat dry and my mouth open. Bert looks up at this, then bends backward and starts licking his ass. In a weird way, I’m almost convinced I’d rather watch him than talk to my dad about whatever it is he’s getting at.

That, unfortunately, isn’t an option. “What are you talking about?”

“Vanessa. I read about her in your journal.”

“She seems sweet,” Holly adds.

I almost want to throw my drink at them, glass and all, but that would only add to their perfect bizarro Christmas picture, which somehow seems too fair. Instead, I guzzle it down and set it on the table.

“What the fuck?”

Dad holds up a hand, as if I’m preparing to jump him. “Don’t be angry. There’s nothing here to be ashamed of. If there was ever a time to screw around on your girl, college was it.”

“Why would you read that?”

“It’s been sitting in your room for ten years, Mikey. I was just goin’ through things is all.”

I think of Lisa, doing yoga or whatever it is she does at home. The fact that I don’t know makes my stomach churn, so I start montaging through the memories I have. Her laugh when I asked her to prom. Our pizza date when we both got into IU. Kissing her at the airport before she left for Montreal. These are poisoned, though — the whole thing is, really — with the memories of everything I fucked up afterward. Kissing Vanessa at the beauty pageant in college. Choking up when Lisa jumped on me and told me how much she missed me. Trying to break up with Lisa when she got back. Sneaking in and out of one house or another. These scenes run faster and faster as I go through them, and I’m catching glimpses of hair, Lisa’s blonde against Vanessa’s black, until it ends and I’m sweating all over.

“So, will you do it?

I look at the envelope, half crinkled in one fist. My dad’s message reads I AM TRYING… until it disappears into my hand. I want so badly in this moment to be different from him, but I’ve never felt more similar. “What’s it say?”

Dad shrugs, and Bert shoots him a look. “That I’m sorry. That I wish it could have worked out differently.”

The dejection falls over me like a wet blanket. “You know that ‘I am trying to break your heart’ isn’t the best way to start that, right?”

“Yeah, but it’ll get her to open it, right? Sometimes, all it takes is a little trick to win a girl over.” He says this like Gretzky talking about hockey.

The look on his face makes his cancer look more prevalent than ever, and I want to punch him and hug him all at once. He’s pulled this act before, threading it differently each time:

I don’t have any money.

I’ve been so lonely since your mother left.

I was fired from my job.

It always comes up in different ways, always finding a way to weasel me into a favor or loan. But cancer? It’s like the two were meant for one another, that he made a deal that let him pity everybody into anything as long as the cancer could shack up in his lungs for a while. It’s a reality that, despite how much of a dick I know he is, has cornered me.

“I’ll think about it.”

Dad nods, as if he expected this. “I guess that’s fair.”

***

On the way home, I stopped and bought every variety of mustard I could. Yellow. Brown. Dijon. English. I’m staring at them before I go inside, trying to figure out the difference and betting on which one Lisa wanted. I’m pretty sure I’m doing this more for myself than for her, as if predicting the correct one will make her fall in love with me all over again.

I bet on dijon.

I take a breath and open the front door on the exhale. Lisa’s peeling carrots when I enter, and she looks up just long enough to make sure I’m not a burglar.

“You get mustard?”

I walk up next to her and dump my collection on the counter. The bottle of dijon — at least, I think it’s dijon — tumbles onto her cutting board and sends a couple carrots rolling to the ground. As soon as they hit the tile, I know I’m screwed.

Lisa turns her head, staring at the wreckage of bottles and carrots sitting in front of her. “What’s this?” 

“I didn’t know what kind of mustard to get.”

“So you didn’t think to call me?”

“I uh, I don’t know. I guess I thought it would be cute.”

She grabs the yellow mustard from the pile and sets it in the fridge. “So, are you going to eat the rest of these?”

The fact that she picked yellow surprises me more than the question itself, and even though I’m staring at her like an open-jawed jackass, I can’t put the words together to try to fix whatever it is I’ve figured out how to screw up.

“Yellow? Really?”

Lisa rolls her eyes. “How’s your dad?”

This doesn’t help. I think about the letter, folded in half in my pocket, and of Bert’s big eyes and Holly kissing the top of Dad’s head, and alongside all of this, I almost forget that he has cancer.

“He’s good.”

“Good,” she says.

Lisa starts peeling her carrots again, and I stand there for a while, trying to figure out what to do but at a loss, feeling like one of those guys in the movies who gets kicked out of a plane and spends his fall grabbing at the air until he hits the ground and splatters.

“I think I’m gonna go upstairs.”

“Okay,” she says. She doesn’t look up.

I move to rest my hand on her lower back and kiss her on the cheek, but before I do, I stop. She doesn’t notice me there, at least she doesn’t show that she does.

“I’ll see you later,” I say, patting her on the shoulder.

“Sounds good. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

When I get up to my office, I pin the letter over a picture of me and Lisa on the cork board behind my desk. I fall into my chair and stare at the montage I’ve created over the years, the letter sticking out from its middle. Concert tickets. Notes. Photos. The way the lamp shines on it makes everything look older than it is, throwing dark slivers across it all, and it hits me that I don’t even like doing this anymore. That it might just be time to quit.

I open my laptop and pull up the Wilco album on iTunes despite this, half-certain I haven’t listened to it since I wrote that crap in my journal however many years ago it was. Once the album starts playing, I start searching for her.

# # #

Adam Shaw lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction writing as a student at Eastern Kentucky University’s Bluegrass Writers Studio. His work has previously appeared in The Tecumseh Review and The Louisville Paper. http://www.theshawspot.com

Photo credit: Dirk Dreyer  www.dreyerpictures.com