Page 11 of Wait for Him

“He’s still an asshole.”

Bennet misses his shot, but we don't give him shit for it. They both know enough about my dad to know there isn’t really a funny version of this conversation.

He’s been an addict for most of my life, and not the tidy, single-vice kind you can name in one word. It’s alcohol and drugs and gambling and women, a rotating buffet depending on which one is closest to hand on any given week. Sometimes he strings together a few good months, and I start breathing again. Then the phone rings at two in the morning, or money disappears, or he doesn’t show up somewhere he promised he would, and I realize I was fucking stupid enough to believe him again.

I told him before he went into treatment that this was the last time. Either he gets clean or I’m done. No more picking him up. No more money. No more listening to him tell me he knows he fucked up while I stand there wondering how many times a person can say the same apology before the words stop meaning anything.

I even drove up there for family night so he could do his amends. Sat in a room with a bunch of strangers while he stood in front of me with wet eyes and shaking hands and told me how sorry he was for everything he’d put me through.

Same performance in a different building.

Same script. Same wet eyes. Same nothing behind them.

Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe he meant every fucking word while he was saying it. That’s the part nobody tells you about loving an addict. They can mean it. They can love you, regret hurting you, swear on everything they have that this is the last time, and genuinely believe themselves.

Then tomorrow comes.

Bennet studies me for a second. “Do you think he’s going to stay clean?”

Fuck no.

It’s the only answer history repeating itself has left me with.

He’s not my biological father, for the record. That man cleared out the minute my mother told him she was pregnant and was never heard from again. No name worth mentioning, no absence I ever learned to miss, just a blank where a person should’ve been.

Dad married Mom when I was a year old and adopted me not long after, which technically makes him the only father I’ve ever had. He taught me how to ride a bike, threw a baseball with me in the yard, showed up to school shit when he was sober enough to remember and scared the hell out of my first girlfriend when she came to the house.

There were good years.

That’s what makes it so fucking complicated.

If he'd always been terrible, maybe I could hate him properly. Instead, I remember sitting on his shoulders at baseball games. I remember him teaching me to shave. I remember falling asleep on the couch and waking up in my bed because he'd carried me upstairs.

I also remember searching his pockets for car keys because Mom was crying and begging him not to drive. I remember hiding her purse because he'd already emptied their bank account once that month. I remember learning, way too fucking young, how to tell what kind of night we were going to have by the way he closed the front door.

Both versions of him are my dad.

I’ve never been able to decide whether I’m grateful for that.

When it came time for school, my grandfather had to mortgage the house to cover my tuition, because Dad had run the entire fund through a Vegas table a few weeks prior — every cent gone in the span of a weekend. And my grandparents still made excuses for him. Losing my mom did something to him, they said, gentle as anything, like grief is a coupon that never expires. Maybe it did. Doesn't change the arithmetic of a mortgaged house and an empty college account.

Or the part of that I've never been able to put down: that there was no house left to mortgage a second time when my grandmother was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after I started school.

I've done the math on that more times than is good for me. She died six months later.

My grandfather went not long after her, the way people sometimes do when the person they've spent most of their life waking up beside suddenly isn't there anymore. I never knew my mother's parents. They were both gone before she was grown, so by the time Grandpa died, that was it.

Dad and me.

Whatever the fuck we were to each other.

“That bad, huh?”

Bennet's hand lands on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze, pulling me back into the bar. I realize I never actually answered Bennet’s question. I've just been standing here staring at the pool table while my brain wandered through twenty years of shit that I had no intention of visiting today.

“It is what it is.” I shrug and reach for my beer.

They let it go.