Chapter 50

50

After my mother left us, my father continued as if nothing had happened. Logistically this wasn’t difficult—she’d become less and less a part of our routine as the years had passed, a casual observer of us, like she was watching a movie she might turn off before the ending.

The only thing that changed was that he moved my toothbrush and my hairbrush to the top drawer in the bathroom, which was stained with years of makeup and tacky hair products that had leaked from her aerosol cans. That I no longer kept my things under the sink made me feel like I had new responsibilities now, although I didn’t know what they were.

My father began to have friends over to play poker on Friday nights. I would go to Mrs. Ellington’s and stay there with Thomas, watching movies and eating popcorn, until she turned off the television and offered to walk me home, where I’d go straight to bed. But one night I lingered in the dark hallway outside the kitchen and listened. The house smelled of musky cologne and beer.

I didn’t mind those nights, the house full of men and their smells—it was one of the only times my father seemed like a real person. My dad didn’t drink much then beyond his one glass of whiskey after a shift, but the others did. They were swearing at one another over slurred words and then someone banged on the table. I heard a waterfall of poker chips hit the floor.

“You’re a cheater,” my dad had said in a way I’d never heard him speak before, like it was hard for him to breathe between those three words. And then someone said, “Your wife was the cheater, you weak piece of shit. No wonder she left you.”

When I lifted my eyes from the hallway floor, I saw my dad staring at me, shaking with rage in the doorway to the kitchen. My legs had been too numb to move when I heard his footsteps coming. He yelled at me to go to my room. Someone slammed a bottle on the table. Someone said, “Sorry, Seb, things got out of hand. He’s had too much to drink.”

In the morning my dad said he was sorry I had to hear that, and I had shrugged and said, “Hear what?”

“Blythe, people might think bad things about you that aren’t true. The only thing that matters is what you believe about yourself.”

I drank my orange juice and he drank his coffee and I thought, My father is better than those men. But something had been said that night that rang in my ears—weak. You weak piece of shit. I thought of all the times he never stood up for himself, never asked her to stay home from the city. I thought of the wet dishcloth hanging from the side of his head. I thought of the man who’d called, of the clumps of fleshy blood in the toilet. Of the pills he never took away, of the smashed dishes he always cleaned up. Of his quiet retreats to the couch. I hated that my mother had left him, but I wondered if he ever really tried to stop her.