My father couldn’t stay away from other women, either. He left us and came back a bunch of times. Mom would tell him, “Stay gone this time.” Then he’d come back and she’d let him. He’d call her “Dree” and beg and say he loved her more than anything. Then, right before I started high school, my mom said he was leaving forever this time because he’d found a twenty-six-year-old version of her in Austin, Texas.
He must have known what was coming, because the week before Mom kicked him out he spent a lot of time with me and Dixie. He got us a cat and played us his old records. He took us all around the city. It was like a good-bye tour of his favorite bars and clubs. He let us skip school. He brought us to dark, dirty places where we got free Shirley Temples and peanuts. Dixie would sit up on the bar while Dad’s friends or whatever they were told her how cute she was, how when she got older she’d be trouble. I guess she was around eleven then. I could already tell people liked her better than me. She was soft and bright, and I was bony and I never smiled. I guess I’m still that way. I remember sitting in the shadows trying not to touch the sticky tables, making sure I could always see the door. He made us promise not to tell Mom where we’d been.
Dixie remembers it all as an adventure, the best times we’d ever had with him. She’d tell stories to her friends about meeting the drummer from My First Crush at one of the bars. And how we named the cat Ringo Starr because Dad once interned at a studio in LA where Ringo and maybe one of the other Beatles recorded an album. After he was gone, she told her friends that Dad worked in “the music industry” in Austin and was coming back to Seattle to open a club and name it Dixie’s.
I remember it more like the drummer from My First Crush throwing up in the bar halfway between the jukebox and the bathroom. And Ringo Starr disappeared off the fire escape only a few weeks after we got him.
The internship at the studio in LA was the last real job my father had in music, and it didn’t even pay. I don’t count playing bouncer at bars in Austin as being in the music industry. I don’t think anyone would.
And I want to tell Dixie’s friends that, actually, it was Gem. They were going to name the club Gem.
“That’s all I have so far,” I’d told Mr. Bergstrom after I read it out loud. “I was going to write about my grandparents next but I had to do geometry homework instead.” I handed him the pages and he shuffled through them and didn’t say anything. “Is that what you wanted?” I asked. “Is it okay?”
He nodded. “It’s really good.” He just stared at the pages and we were quiet for the longest time I remember us ever being quiet.
“It’s kind of a sad story, I guess.”
“Yeah,” he said, and looked at me. “It kind of is.”
4.
DIXIE ENDED up going home with Lia after school that day, and spent the night there. With the letter. I tried not to feel like she was punishing me somehow, like she’d made the plan with Lia just because she knew how bad I wanted to see it. I heard Mom come home in the night, but when she came to our bedroom door and said “Gem?” I pretended to be asleep.
Then it was Saturday. Dixie came home around noon. Mom was still asleep and I sat at the table doing homework. Dixie dropped the letter onto the table.
Dad’s handwriting made it hard to read, his script skinny and slanted to the left.
Hey Dix,
I tried calling the last number you gave me but I guess you got a new phone or something. I hope you’re still at this address because that email I had for you isn’t working either. Are you trying to hide from me or something? Ha. Anyway, I’ve got great news at least I think it’s great and it’s that I’m coming back to Seattle. After I left and everything I figured I’d get a fresh start, some new—
“What does this say?” I pointed to the word and held the letter out to Dixie.
“Dreams,” she said. “New dreams.” She pulled something from her bag and sat across from me. It was a burrito. Before I could ask for half of it, she said, “I got it for you. I already had one.”
I slid it in front of me and kept reading.
—dreams out here. But Dixie, there’s no water to look at to help you think, and no real mountains, and it’s hotter than goddamn hell all summer. Not to mention there are assholes everywhere you turn. So I thought I’d come back. I like my old dreams better anyway.
I don’t like to say this because it seems like I shouldn’t have to report in to my kid, but I’m clean. Have been for a while. I want to see you and your sister but please don’t tell her I’m coming because she’ll worry. You know how she is. I want her to see how good I’m doing before she makes a judgment on me. Also I want to surprise your mom, same deal, so let’s keep this all between us.
I held it out again to point to a sentence I couldn’t decipher, something about Mom. It ended with a question mark.
“I can’t really read it, either,” Dixie said. “But I think the point is he wants to know if she has a boyfriend.”
“Does he think Mom has been sitting around at home every night, in case he came back? After all that?”
Dixie shrugged and turned away for a second, like she didn’t want me to see in her face how she still believed in some fantasy version of him, of them.
Anyway, don’t bother writing back because I’ll be on my way. And we’ll be together soon, how ’bout that? Can’t wait to see my girl.
Love,
Dad
Couldn’t wait to see his girl. Singular.
Dixie watched me as I skimmed back over it. I want to see you and your sister. I latched onto “and your sister” and wished I could have been alone with his handwriting, his words, the paper he’d touched. I wished I could have understood what I felt, what the burn in my cheeks meant, the ache in my chest. He did want to see us, he said. Us. That was the ache, I think. The burn was probably for how he hadn’t even used my name, the name that had once been so important to him and my mother. Or so they’d said.
I read through it again, and in the span of a few seconds the “your sister” went from seeming like a certain kind of hope to making me feel I’d been crushed under a heavy weight. I shoved the letter back at Dixie.
“Don’t be mad at me, Gem,” she said, taking it. “At least I showed you the letter when he said not to.”
That’s what was supposed to substitute for feeling special, feeling loved?
“I shouldn’t have let you see it,” she continued. “I knew I shouldn’t. I got you the burrito. I got you this.” She pulled a Mars bar out of her jacket pocket and flung it on the table. “I wanted you to feel better.”
I scooped up my stuff—including the food, which I’d save for dinner—and took it to our room. I dumped it on my bed without arranging anything in the usual way; it didn’t seem to matter. Mom’s voice came from the hall. “Dix? That you?”
“Yeah, Mom,” Dixie called back.
I knelt on the floor and pulled out my box of cigarettes, got a fresh pack. I took my jacket back to where Dixie was.
“Don’t tell Mom,” she said.
“She already saw the letter, stupid.”