Hey, Siri, are you getting all this crap?
I always nod and smile. Even when Therapista is wrong—the universe has failed me, Kathi Kannon has escaped me, and there is nothing that can replace her.
* * *
I’m dreaming I’m drowning in quicksand—except it’s more like slow-sand, and no one is around to help me. I’m clutching my phone in my dream as in real life, waiting for a call from Kathi Kannon, and it starts to vibrate, and I realize it’s not just the dream. The wind-chime ringtone finally wakes me. I bolt up in bed: Is it her? Am I in? Did I get it? I reflexively hit the green button, only to accidentally answer a call from my father. I freeze, as if maybe not saying anything will make him go away.
“YOU GONNA ANSWER?!” he yells.
“Hello.”
He lets out a sigh, a hot breath of air. “A CAT scan found FOUR polyps in my colon! I thought that you, OF ALL PEOPLE, would LOVE hearing about it.”
Silence on the line. Both of us starkly quiet, suddenly serious, our chat quickly leading us onto thin ice, a tiny crack away from an entire conversation about how my father wrongly thinks being gay means I have an obsession with the workings of every human anus.
I’m thinking, He’s calling to tell me he’s dying.
I’m thinking, He will die and I’ll be officially, profoundly alone.
I’m thinking, Maybe I’m still dreaming.
“Don’t worry,” Dad says. “I don’t have COLON cancer.”
“That’s good,” I breathe.
“But while they were doing the CAT scan, they found a tumor on my KIDNEY!” He drops the news like he’s ordering a number three at McDonald’s, and I’m not sure how to react.
“Wait. You have kidney cancer?”
“Yeah,” Dad says. “Well, it’s a kidney tumor. They have to cut it out and do tests and all that.”
“Dad, I’m sorry. What can I do?” I ask out of habit, out of the politeness he bred deep in me. I regret it even before the words have escaped me.
What can I do?
Hey, Siri, how do I get out of this?
* * *
One moment I’m angling for a new life with Kathi Kannon, and the next I’m heading home to Louisiana to help my dad through kidney surgery. My life is actually going backward.
I meet Dad at his truck, parked at the curb outside baggage claim at New Orleans International. He looks me over, not a mystery in his eyes. “TUCK IN YOUR SHIRT! JESUS CHRIST!” he yells.
I shove a clump of my T-shirt into my waistband. I avoid his gaze, again, as usual. By this point in our lives he must know me best by the whites of my eyes. I get in his truck for the long ride to his house, the house I grew up in.
“I REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE USED TO DRESS DECENT TO TRAVEL!” he shouts over the hot wind gushing in through the open windows—he says the AC burns too much gasoline.
Huge green metal signs on the highway chronicle our journey to my childhood home north of New Orleans. Those green metal signs, with white block letters, are announcing my fate: PERRIS: 200 MILES, and then 100, and then 50. Those signs, they jeer me toward my hometown, that little country speck-on-a-map with its cliché one traffic light. Those green metal signs, they’re morbid taxpayer-funded mileage countdowns to my old house, to my dad’s house, that rural home where I grew up so quickly, too quickly, me and him and, briefly, Mom, a dead woman I more and more realize I barely knew.
Dad moved us “to the country” to get away from the government, he says. He bought a gun. He unbanked. He buried gold in the backyard. His nightstand is a 370-pound fireproof safe full of bullets and silver and a tattered, dog-eared book about Freemasons. He sold us the idea of living in the country with talk of tree houses, canoeing, animals, and adventures on the five lush acres we would own, only to discover the land is crap. The pond in the back barely holds water, maybe mud, at best, in the winter, and in the summer, it’s dry and cracked like the surface of Mars. The land is mostly red clay, so nothing grows. Chunks of the driveway wash away after a hard rain, our gravel and crimson clay trickling down the street like blood. The developer who put the subdivision together planted pine trees in straight rows for miles. He wasn’t even trying. Nothing looks natural, nothing like the wild, real country we all imagined. I’m so, so far from Beverly Hills. My dad’s neighborhood is called Jolly Pines Estates, though there are no “estates,” and there’s certainly nothing jolly about it. When I was a kid, I’d fool myself that living here was fun, then I downgraded it to interesting, then to harmless, at the very least. But now I look at all this, the pines and the red clay and my father, and all I see are lies.
“THE FUCKING GARBAGE MAN RAISED RATES AGAIN!” Dad yells as we pull into the driveway, past a pile of trash that will sit there until Dad or the trash man concedes.
My mind is racing, retreating into itself to cower from my father’s random rages, longing to be anywhere but here in Perris. Over and over, I’m rewriting my awards speech, the one Kathi asked me about. If only my speech were better, maybe I’d be there, with her, in her employ, with a great excuse about why I can’t be home helping my father through his medical moment, forcing him to inconvenience his neighbors or drinking buddies or church friends into helping him. Kathi, I should have told her, grabbing the imaginary microphone and screaming at the imaginary audience, I’d like to thank my father for teaching me I don’t matter!
Therapista says change your thinking, change your life.
Therapista says emotional maturity is questioning our thoughts.
Therapista says hating others is hating yourself.
I hate it here, the house my father built, the home he never finished. The cobbler’s kids had no shoes and the contractor’s kids had no doorknobs, no paint, no carpet. The floors were (and still are) particleboard, strips of thin wood glued on top of one another that leave feet splintered and socks shredded, nothing like Kathi’s smooth wood floors. My mom would complain about having to eat dinner while sitting on empty upside-down five-gallon paint buckets instead of chairs. My father would shout, “IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, THERE’S THE DOOR!” He’s not the kind of guy who could easily, mindfully handle criticism, or stress, or, finally, his own private nightmare when my mom did choose “the door.” She told Dad she was leaving him, divorcing him, though she never had the chance to do it, never had the chance to be free, never had the chance to either regret it or revel in it. I was twelve when she died, just a week after announcing she wanted out but with no time to even file the paperwork. She collapsed at church, of all places. Her sweet, kind heart had a defect no one knew about, and her life, her suffering, was over in an instant. My father changed after that, becoming kinder, softer, rewriting their time together as something sweeter than it was. Over the following months, we moved on without her, and eventually Dad moved on, too, but backward, to become the same asshole he was before she died.
Therapista says how you are right now is how you will be forever.
My dead mother now lives in Dad’s basement, all her stuff piled high in a corner, her clothes, her toiletries, her ashes. Everything was moved down there years after she died. It’s not so much a shrine as it is an inconvenience. Dad uses the basement to store his construction-job tools and generally fix things—his relationship with my mother, the most perpetually broken and unfixable of them all. Across from a steamer trunk of her childhood memorabilia is a tractor engine, an ironing board that needs a new cover, a box of trampoline springs. Mom’s boxes, marked DRESSES and TOILETRIES, are all in the way, but Dad won’t part with them. He both hates them and treasures them. I feel the same way about her stuff. I like that everything is down there. It brings me comfort sometimes to see her hairbrush and flash to a happy memory—anything to disrupt the memory of her death, in the middle of offering the sign of peace, her collapsing, congregants screaming, me praying. And at the same time, I hate it that she’s down in the basement, still trapped in this house she wanted so badly to flee.