“I was,” he says, whining a little, as if hurt by my accusation that he might have lied about attending his Gamblers Anonymous meetings. “But those groups are a total downer. The people in there…you should see them. It’s enough to make you want to jump off a bridge.”
“Why? Because they’re actually trying to get help?”
“They just sit around and bitch and cry and moan about life.” Dad belches and comes over to stare at the food. “That looks amazing, kiddo.”
“How much money do you owe?”
He takes another long sip of beer and then walks over to the small table. “Just forget I mentioned it, kiddo.”
“Don’t call me kiddo. I hate when you patronize me.”
“It’s nothing,” he says, but I know he’s lying.
This is always how it starts. I feel enraged, helpless and frightened all at once. I finish making the food and serve it up. Dad eats on the couch in front of the computer on the rickety coffee table, as he watches three different college basketball games.
I eat by myself, standing at the counter and trying not to scream at him. I’ve screamed at him before and it does nothing.
We had a good few months, I think. Three months of my father keeping his hands clean, no gambling debts, no screaming phone calls to bookies, no sobbing because he’s lost everything yet again.
But here we are, and it’s all starting back up.
We already lost our house.
We already lost our savings. Dad’s cushy teaching job is long gone. He’s been working odd tutoring jobs here and there, but I’m certain whatever he saved is now evaporated and replaced by debts.
It can go fast when he’s gambling. A few years back he lost fifty thousand dollars in a weekend partying in Atlantic City.
The last couple of years, I’ve been mostly paying the bills and keeping us afloat. I work as a receptionist at an urgent care walk-in clinic. The pay is decent, benefits are great.
But I can’t keep going on like this, not if my father is going to sabotage me every single time I start to get my head above water.
I finish my food and then get dad seconds and another beer. He’s grumbling about his games, and I know he’s got money riding on them. I consider walking out on him and never looking back.
Let him fall as far as he needs to in order to hit rock bottom.
I’ve been told that I’m enabling his addiction.
The problem is, Dad is the only person who has been there for me in my whole life. When Mom walked out on us, I was seven years old. She left and moved to Ireland with a guy she met online. I still remember her cheerfully promising to have me spend half the year with her, all the places we’d visit together.
But instead all I got were phone calls and promises. Next month, next month, it was always next month.
The phone calls got fewer and further between. Eventually, the calls stopped.
She wouldn’t phone me back and she changed her number, moved to a new address.
I found out a few years later through Facebook that she’d started an entirely new family. Her and the new guy have three kids together.
During all of that, during the pain and crying and heartbreak, Dad was there for me. He never wavered, never faltered.
He has a disease, and yes, it’s fucked up our lives completely.
But how can I walk out on him?
I’m so frustrated, I could scream.
But I don’t scream. Instead, I do the dishes, clean up, and get dad a light blanket when he finally falls asleep on the couch after beer number four, snoring, the games still playing on the computer.
I shake my head, kiss his forehead and turn the volume down.
Not long after, I go to bed and fall into a heavy sleep. But I’m awoken some unknown time later by a large crashing sound. It’s so loud that it almost sounds like a gunshot, and I sit bolt upright in bed, shrieking.
My next thought is Dad fell. Badly.
I run out of my bedroom and down the narrow hallway.
That’s when I find my father in the living room where I left him, only the apartment door is standing open, hanging really, from its hinges.
And three men are standing in our tiny apartment.
They look mean. They aren’t huge, muscular guys like the types I pictured bookies would send to collect money. Instead, they just look cruel. Their eyes are cold and dark, their mouths humorless, and the dead stare they hit me with is enough to chill me to my bones.
One of the men punches my father. He is workmanlike as he punches him methodically, without emotion. “Pay up, dumb ass.”
Smack.
“You going to pay?”
Smack.
I cry out for them to stop.
They ignore me.
The punches continue. My father is wheezing, hardly speaking or even crying out. They hit him in the belly, the chest, the face.
“I can pay,” I tell them. “How much does he owe?”
The shortest one, and also the oldest, with gray around his temples and a receding hairline, turns to me. “You got a hundred large on you, sweetheart?”
He means one hundred thousand dollars. I know that, unfortunately, because of my father’s constant gambling terminology that he speaks, like his own language.
I lick my lips. “You’re joking. He doesn’t owe that much.”
“I don’t joke about money. I won’t even tell you how he managed to get so much credit with us, but he did.”
“I can pay you three thousand right now. It’s all I have,” I tell them. I walk to get my checkbook.
“Three grand? That’s dog shit. I won’t come back here for less than half of what he owes. And if I don’t get half by the end of the week, then…” he shrugs. His eyes tell me all I need to know. I realize at that very moment, how real this is. I can tell that this man will murder my father over this debt, and it won’t even ruin the man’s night. He will continue on as if nothing happened.
Another day at the office.
He means it, and the certainty of his criminal coldness frightens me beyond any terror I’ve ever felt before.
If I’m around, he might just kill me too. That’s what those cold dead eyes say, all without ever uttering a real threat.
“I’ll get you half by the end of the week. Just please stop hurting my dad.”
“You really want to vouch for it? Because then your name is on there right alongside his.”
“I will get it,” I say, even as the fear threatens to overwhelm me.
“Okay, then,” the killer says, and flashes a little grin, almost as if he’s enjoyed adding another name to his list. Another person to potentially hurt and victimize.
The three men slowly troop out of the home, they don’t even bother closing the broken front door. When they leave, I run to my dad and check on him.
He’s dazed and in a little shock, but basically okay. He refuses to go to the emergency room.
“For what?” he says. “Nothing they can do but add more money to my bills.”
“We need to call the police,” I tell him, as he gets his tool box and begins to repair the door as best he can.
“Don’t be silly,” he says, as he rummages through the box, grumbling.
“Silly? Three men broke into our home and assaulted you. Threatened our lives.”
Dad turns and glances at me incredulously. “Do you have any idea who those guys are?”