“What do you mean?” he asked. “You’ve been together nearly a decade. Can’t you work this out with him? You know your mother and I loved each other, Hazel. In our way. But if we’d been concerned with joy and self-actualization and all that, we wouldn’t have made it. It’s all about excitement and thrills with your generation. If you’re not having fun, you want to throw in the towel. Have you even considered lowering your standards in terms of general happiness? Did you think about how lucky you are that he married you in the first place? You were a nobody!”
She felt her mouth curl into a defeated smile that would definitely creep her father out, and that was good; that was a smart instinct on behalf of her face. Her father was the type who had to be a little creeped out before he’d shut up and listen. “It got really bad. You don’t know the half of it.”
This did quiet him. He glanced into Diane’s eyes for support, shrugged. “Okay. Let’s run with that. Maybe I don’t. But look around you, kid. This is a long way to fall. There’s one bathroom. A single bathroom. This week? I do my business at night. It’s different all the time though. Wildly variable with little advance notice. If I get a heads-up forty-five seconds before showtime it’s a good day.”
Her father was a hard man to read. For example: there was a time in college, pre-Byron, when she’d decided to live rent free in an anarchy squatter house so she’d have more money to use for monthly minimums on credit cards and could buy more clothing at the mall. The toilet there was a white bucket that got knocked over constantly because most people who used the white-bucket toilet at the anarchy squatter house were not wickedly sober. Would telling him that she’d once used that toilet make him feel better about letting her live there with him now? Or worse?
“How long are we talking here, Hazel? What’s your time frame to get back on your feet? I think you should swallow your pride and ask for a little bit more dough from the guy if need be, just to set yourself up.”
“You don’t understand; this is what I’m telling you. I’m not even taking the prenup money. I can’t leave him and take his money at the same time, Dad. Money’s a way to track me and know what I’m doing.”
Hazel felt herself pretending to take a drink from her empty can; she wasn’t sure why. But she went along with it and soon had the firm opinion that there was a drop left inside she could get to if she just tilted the can right. Then a little later came the realization that she’d been trying to get the drop for several seconds, maybe longer. Maybe both of her hands were pawing at the can’s bottom and she was handling the can a little roughly and her father knew that she was drunk now.
She came up for air and crumpled the aluminum can, hoping the sound would be cathartic, but it could not have made a more alarming noise. It was the sound of property damage occurring several yards away.
“Dad,” she continued, “I haven’t thought too far ahead. That’s probably not a grand surprise.” She’d meant to plan a little more, but she’d also come to the understanding that there was no point in planning because she had to leave Byron without taking anything. Plus she’d gotten pretty scared that morning. There had been blood, and that was that. “I guess I just figured on staying till I can make it on my own.”
“I could die before that happens!”
“What about a year? Could you give me a year? That seems like a pretty modest ask in terms of length of time to start a completely new life, right?”
Hazel looked at her father and had to sit back down. She was expecting to see the cheeky sails of his rage-face puffed full, or maybe even what she and her childhood best friend used to term his “thermometer head,” an Easter-egg-dye scarlet rash that moved from his forehead to his face to his neck to his chest in clear gradients and always told them, with sundial clarity, just how pissed he was and how in trouble she’d be.
Instead he was looking at her with soupy eyes that seemed to have burst. As if they’d tried to hold in all the pity he felt for her but had buckled under the weight.
“Dad . . .”
The moment she spoke his hand flew up in a sporting gesture, catching her thought and stopping all play. He leaned into Diane’s robe and wiped his eyes, blew his nose a little too loudly. Was that a generational thing? Hazel wondered. She’d never felt entitled to blow her noise to the point where it made an unpleasant sound. Not even in front of family.
“All right,” he said and nodded. “Stay if you want. Slide all the way back down the ladder.” The crushed beer can was lying on the floor by her foot; Hazel gave it what she thought was a small tap but it leaped theatrically into the air and landed inside the coffin like it had been trained to do so. “This is no longer the honeymoon evening I’d envisioned. I’ll be honest about that. Could Diane and I have a little privacy first? Before we never have any again? Maybe there’s a neighborhood bar you could walk to.”
Yeah, there probably is, Hazel thought, but I’d rather not amble about when Byron is so into the idea of killing me. He was far more likely to have goons pull up in a van and abduct her from an alleyway than to bust down the door of her elderly father’s home and cart her away in front of the neighbors. The conversation with her father seemed to be winding down, though, and Hazel knew this information was a pretty flammable log to throw on a dwindling fire. Better to approach it in a more generalist fashion. “So you’d like me to walk alone to a bar in the dark and then walk home even later at night when it’s darker still and I’m more inebriated, all so you can scream sans guilt during conjugal play with a doll? If I’m following what you’re saying.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“It’s not dramatic! Do you know how frequently women get assaulted?”
“Well, if that happens to you tonight, I’ll really owe you one. How could I make that up to you? Maybe by letting you stay in my house for a year for free?”
Hazel felt the back of her neck prick with warmth—she was flushing. She knew he thought she was spoiled. There were ways in which she was a coward, sure, and he knew those ways, and that’s why her father thought he was right about this. Well, so much for his comfort then. “Yeah? Stupid me for leaving him? He wanted to put a chip in my brain, Dad.”
With his right hand, her father revved the engine of his Rascal, as though to inject more horsepower into his head—he was thinking. Eventually he shuddered and buried his nose in Diane’s hair. When he looked back up, he said, “Chip? Like a tracking thing?”
“Sort of. Like a file-share thing. So I’d be wirelessly connected to a chip in his brain and he would be wirelessly connected to mine. We would meld. The first neural-networked couple in history.”