Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 106001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
My phone blinks with a text from my dad. He’s downstairs, but he always texts me goodnight.
I’m off to bed. Sleep well. Joan will be back in the morning. Xoxo
I smile faintly, a vague sense of appreciation for his note floating past me as I drift into sleep.
But in the middle of the night, I’m dreaming of takeout cartons of Thai, and Vietnamese, and tacos. My stomach growls, and I wake with a hungry start.
I blink my eyes open.
I wish my mother were here to send me off. Even though I remember her less and less, I still wish she were here, especially since Paris was our dream. She loved the city she lived in when she attended college. We’d visit as often as we could, traipsing around museums, lingering in chocolate shops, playing in the Tuileries Garden. Even after so many years without her, there are moments when the missing coils inside me. But then it unwinds seconds later. It’s weird, grief. Weird the way it lingers sometimes, like a trailing scent of faint perfume long after the wearer has left the room. Sometimes you notice the scent. Mostly you don’t.
My stomach growls again. I focus on the practical matters rather than faded memories. I didn’t eat dinner, so I go downstairs.
The brownstone is eerie and still, as it should be after hours. I pad quietly to the kitchen. In the fridge, I snag hummus and carrots. As I dip a carrot, I hear footsteps and turn my head.
Seriously?
I learn two things in the next few seconds.
My father has a new lover.
And she sleeps topless. She wears only boy shorts. Her magnificent tits fly free as she walks past the dining room table, toward the kitchen before she stops short, startled.
“Oh my god,” she says, her hands shooting up, covering her breasts.
I grit my teeth, swallowing down my disgust. I show nothing. I am the portrait of unflinching as I lean against the kitchen counter. Impervious.
“Hungry?” I ask as I crunch into the carrot.
Even in the dark, I can see her face turn red. “I’m so sorry.”
But she’s not moving. Perhaps her bare feet are stuck to the floor of the entryway.
“I had no idea you were going to be in the kitchen,” she says, stumbling on words.
I smile. All plastic. “That’s clear.”
She spins around, rushes off.
I finish the carrot in the silence, then return to the upstairs bedroom. I can’t wait till I don’t live here anymore. If I could never set foot in this house again, it wouldn’t be soon enough.
When groans slink up the stairs and curl down the hallway, I grab my headphones, punch up the soundtrack for Ask Me Next Year, a little-known Broadway musical, and let it help me blot out the sounds of my father’s sex den below.
The next morning when I go downstairs, still humming the bittersweet tunes, I brace myself for a run-in with the new lady. But the amply endowed woman is nowhere to be seen. Instead, my father is brewing tea and listening to NPR’s morning report, dressed for the day in a polo shirt and beige slacks.
He turns my way and smiles. “Ready for the big day?”
“Yup,” I bite out.
“What’s wrong, poppet?”
I’ve had enough. I’ve swallowed years of lies, and I’m done. “I’m not here that often,” I tell him. “Just summers and breaks. So, do you think you could ask your sleepover guests to, I dunno, wear clothes when they wander around the house at night?”
A slow grin spreads across his face, and he rolls his green eyes—the same shade as mine. “Poppet, it’s nothing. You have all the same parts.”
That’s his argument? “So if you were queer, and had a half-naked man as a guest this would be not okay. But because you’re straight, it’s okay?”
He furrows his brow, trying to work out my logic. “Is this about orientation or identity?”
I huff. There’s no point. He doesn’t get it. I grab a bagel and bite into it, ripping off a hunk.
As I chew, the front door creaks open and Joan sails in, just arrived from Boston. “I couldn’t miss sending you off to Paris for the semester, sweetheart,” she calls out, kind and oblivious.
My throat squeezes. My father fucked someone else while you were out of town. Her tits are perkier than yours. Instead, I say, “Thank you for coming.”
I know better than to tell her the truth.
When I was thirteen, and my father was married to Roselyn, wife number three, I let slip at the dinner table that his friend Graceanne had spent the night a few weeks before. I’d thought she was simply sleeping over in the guest room.
The next day, Roselyn checked into a spa. My father sat me down in the living room and told me I needn’t have concerned myself about Graceanne. After all, he and Roselyn had an arrangement. An understanding. “Darling, I know you’re trying to be helpful, but it’s better you don’t get involved. Roselyn doesn’t need to know about my guests. It’ll only upset the delicate balance of an adult relationship.”