But he didn’t keep moving. He gentled me with soft kisses and fingers in my hair, a hand stroking down my thighs. I drifted, suspended in the beautiful afterglow.
Chapter 17
Huey
The day began like any other day. I woke when Felix got up for work and kissed away his sleepy complaints. I lifted weights. I showered. I ate oatmeal. I did payroll.
But something was buzzing beneath my skin. It wasn’t the itch that often propelled me out the door to run errands or distract myself working at the bar. It was anticipation. A promise.
As the day wore on, though, I realized what had been scratching at my mind all week, ever since we’d gotten back from Felix’s childhood home. Watching the Raineys—the way they talked and teased, confessed and forgave, irritated and adored—had shaken loose memories I’d buried years ago.
Memories of the years before my mother died, when my father was a smiling, speaking person. How we used to go for ice cream at Dairy Queen and my father would get coffee and my mom would get strawberry and he’d take a lick of hers and say it was too sweet and she’d take a lick of his and say it wasn’t sweet enough. How sometimes they’d danced in the living room.
Where had that man gone? Was he still in there somewhere? Could I have done more for him? Should I have tried harder?
My stomach churned as I picked up the phone, and the time between rings felt endless. I hadn’t planned what I would say, and at my father’s familiar voice, my throat tightened.
“Hey, Pops,” I said. My voice sounded choked and strangely high.
“Son. Been a while. How are you?”
“Good.”
It was the first time in a long time that I’d said it and meant it. I was good, and every day with Felix just made me feel better. Made me feel like I was actually living the life I’d worked so hard to save all those years ago.
“How’s work?”
“Fine,” he said.
And there was nothing else to say, unless…
I’d picked up the phone to call him with Felix’s words on my mind: Don’t you think it hurt him to not know his son? Now, hearing my father’s detached voice on the line, I knew the answer.
Yeah. It probably had hurt him. Just like it had hurt me not to know who my father might’ve been if my mother hadn’t died. But she did die, and he did crumble, and it did hurt me. Then I hurt myself even more.
If I were Felix, I’d tell my father everything. I’d give him the gift of my truth in the hopes it might be returned, might heal the wounds between us and lay a new road for us to walk together.
But I wasn’t Felix, and I’d stopped needed my father a long time ago. Telling him about my own troubles wouldn’t heal him, and I didn’t need our relationship to change. I didn’t want to take care of him, and I didn’t think he wanted it either.
I walked to the window and looked at Felix’s diorama, which was nearly done. I didn’t understand how he was able to work in such detail, but each figure, each object was perfectly rendered. Life in miniature—a story told in a box.
There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.
That’s what Frank Herbert said, and I’d always taken it to be about death. Now, though, looking at Felix’s bounded story and listening to the sound of my father breathing, I understood it differently.
Things were never truly over until you stopped engaging with them.
My relationship with my addiction persisted because I dwelled in it still, instead of shifting my attention to the ways things had changed.
My story with Felix was just beginning. And I wanted to give us endless blank paper to write it on.
My relationship with my father was still ongoing, so I could still change the story. But that wasn’t the relationship I felt guilty about. My father wasn’t the one I needed to make amends to.
“You take care, Pops,” I told my father, miles away in the Virginia house I’d grown up in, and hung up the phone.
Then, a miniature world in a box to my right and the teeming world of New York City out the window to my left, I dialed a number I hadn’t called in seven years.
* * *
—
Rachel had cut her long blond hair short and had a few more lines around her eyes, but other than that she looked the same, and when she walked into the coffee shop two eras of my life slammed together like meteorites.
I stood, and her eyes found me instantly. She made her way to the corner and hesitated a moment before she reached out and squeezed my shoulder in lieu of the hug or kiss she once would have given me.