He looks very proud of himself. He has said this exact sentence so many times I hear it in my dreams. The optimistic part of my father forgets the past so easily, so fully, that we have entirely different experiences of our lives together.
“I’ve met someone special,” he says. And I know that at least at this moment, Arizona and I have hearts and bodies and breath working in sync. Hearts drop. Bodies tense up. Breath stops. “I wanted to let you girls into this journey so we can go through it together and emerge together.” I think he memorized that last part when he was at his support group. He says it too fast and too proud.
Dad started going to support groups after Mom left. Divorced men in random churches all over the city sipping coffee and handing one another tissues with as much masculinity as they can muster for that particular gesture. That’s what I imagine, at least. They tell themselves they are making the right decisions. They use words like journey and codependency and positive energy and staying in the present.
I sort of hate these guys, who are on their first divorces, not their fourth, like my father. They don’t know us, and whenever he’s spending a lot of time in the group sessions, he makes grand pronouncements like this and feels very good about himself.
I’d have to hate any group of people who make my dad feel that happily announcing another girlfriend at this point is a good idea or some “change.”
“I’m sorry?” Arizona says. Arizona is polite until she isn’t. She has excellent manners, but pushed too far she’ll eventually explode. She’s broken more than one cell phone from throwing it on the ground.
“All I want is for you girls to have what I had growing up,” he says. “That’s what I’ve finally realized.” His parents live on a farm in Vermont. We are never going to have that. On cue, an ambulance rushes by outside, the whining sirens growing and shrinking in volume.
“I’m good with things the way they are right now,” I say. It’s not a lie. I prefer things the way they’ve been since Tess left to the way they’ll be if he’s dating someone new. I like making my dad coffee in the mornings and going to Reggio with him on weekday nights. Splitting prosciutto sandwiches and the world’s best lattes. Listening in on old men and first dates and disgruntled waitstaff. I like that he tells me about his day, instead of telling whatever wife is waiting for him at the kitchen counter. I like knowing the nurses’ names and how many procedures he’s done and what the worst part of paperwork is.
If I was not full-on wasted, I’d tell him.
But I am full-on wasted.
The kitchen twists and turns, checkerboard tiles shifting around on top of one another and making me motion sick.
“I thought you were taking time off from dating,” Arizona says. Her arms are back over her chest and her face is contorting to stop itself from crying.
I can’t stop moving my head from side to side. It won’t stay up all the way, and it feels good to let it give in to its own weight. I’m trying to catch the conversation in my mind, but it keeps slipping through the cracks the champagne caused. I can’t quite keep it straight.
“What’s this now?” I say. Arizona sighs and Dad pours me more water.
“It’s different this time,” Dad says before I fall asleep on the kitchen floor. The words are like a fairy tale—something I’ve heard over and over, so many times, that it can lull me to sleep.
When I wake up in the morning, I’m at the bottom end of my bed and I have lines all over my face from sleeping so hard and for so long on a textured blanket I keep there.
I don’t remember how I got here, but I remember enough of the night to know Dad has a new girlfriend and Arizona has a new body and Roxanne has a new life and I only really have Karissa to keep me sane and happy.
I wake up with this ache I get sometimes after I think about my stepmothers too much. It’s like missing them, but it hurts more because I also sort of hate them. Nostalgia meets rage. The kind of combination that can make you throw up, like orange juice and milk mixed together. All wrong.
Roxanne texts that she’s on her way over, and I tell her what to bring. Coffee. Cigarettes. Hair dye.
June 3
The List of Things to Be Grateful For 1 The rubber-stamped poodle still on my wrist, declaring I’m twenty-one and Karissa’s friend and old and cool enough to go to Dirty Versailles.
2 An Elmo shirt that smells like smoked cigarettes and rain.
3 The summer ahead with Roxanne and Arizona and getting back to the life we used to all have together.
four
I am cooler today than I was yesterday.
Arizona is bustier and sadder, things that go hand in hand in my opinion.