He glanced up for a second, then quickly looked back down at the plate still in front of him. He looked like he was praying as he quietly said, “Gambling debts. And who the people are don’t matter other than they want their money by the end of the month or they’re gonna kill me.”
I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was sad, but I wasn’t that shocked by what I was hearing. Honestly, I was more shocked that it hadn’t happened sooner.
“How much do you owe, Dad?” I asked the question calmly, even though my insides felt as if they were being ripped to shreds. “Dad? Look at me and tell me how much you owe.”
His eyes came up slowly as he blew a long breath through his round cheeks. He wiped the snot from his nose on his hand again and brushed a knuckle from the other hand under his eyes. “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, dad! How can you lose seventy-five-thousand dollars playing cards?” I barked at him without meaning to and he flinched at the tone of my voice, like a pup being scolded by its owner. My fists came up and settled on the table, ready to be thrust into the air or into his nose.
“I lost it playing cards,” he said. “And betting on horses.”
My mouth literally fell open and my head bobbed as if it had gotten too heavy for my neck. “Horses? Dad, what the fuck do you know about horses?”
“Don’t use that language in this house,” he said, giving me a frown. “Your mother wouldn’t approve.”
“My mother wouldn’t approve of you losing seventy-five-thousand dollars either!” I screamed. I was suddenly furious with him and I couldn’t help but pound my fists the table. “Oh, my god, dad, what the fuck were you thinking?”
“I don’t guess I was thinking,” he said. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back from the table as if he thought I was going to punch him and he needed to be out of arm’s reach. “I just got caught up at the track. I was ahead in one race, so I doubled down and won that one, then won another.” He looked at me, pleading for understanding with his eyes. “I swear, Katrina, it was like I could do no wrong. Like God was finally rewarding me after so many years of losing.”
“I don’t think that’s quite how God works, dad,” I said, huffing at him. “Otherwise there would be slot machines in church. Then what happened?”
He shrugged and looked away. “So, I doubled down again and, well, the horse didn’t win.”
“Oh my god,” I said again, covering my eyes with my fingers and shaking my head. “These people that you owe the money to, who are they?”
“People you don’t know and don’t need to know,” he said forcefully, as if he was warning me to stay away. “But they will kill me if they don’t get their money. I have no doubt of that in my mind.”
I held out my hands to signal that I needed to catch my breath and process what he’d told me. I got up from the table and went to the coffee pot on the counter and filled two mismatched cups. I had bought a pecan pie for dessert, but I knew there was no need to slice it. You don’t tell your daughter that you’re going to be killed by hoodlums then ask for a slice of pie. At least not in this house.
I didn’t bother putting anything in the coffee. We both drank it black to save money. I set a cup in front of him and sat back down with mine. I could feel my heart racing in my chest as I held the cup to my lips and blew a cooling breath over the surface. The mist settled beneath my eyes.
“I’m sorry, Katrina,” he said, his voice hoarse and low. He took the cup between his hands and stared down into it, as if he thought it held the solution to his problem. “I’ve been a lousy father to you. And now, well, I don’t know what to do.”
He glanced up at me with tears in his eyes and quickly looked away. If he expected me to feel sorry for him or to defend his fathering skills or was just fishing for compliments, he was shit out of luck. He had been a lousy father and I would never tell him otherwise. He blamed his heavy drinking on his grief and his incessant gambling on his desire to make a better life for us. It was all fucking bullshit and we both knew it. He was a degenerate drunk and a chronic gambler before he met my mother and resumed it quickly after she died. She kept him tempered during the marriage, but I think after a while she, like me, got tired of trying to keep him on the straight and narrow and just let him run free.
He could blame his shortcomings on her death until the cows came home, but we both knew the truth even though we’d never spoken the words. Still, he was my father and the only family I had left. Even with his faults, and they were many, I knew he loved me in his own way and would never intentionally put me in danger, but this could affect us both in tragic ways. If these people were as ruthless as I thought, they would probably kill him, then come after me. Or at the very least force me to sign over ownership of the bar, the only asset the poor Donovan family had left.
I hated him at that moment, but he was all that I had left, the last link to my mother, the one person who loved me completely and unconditionally. She said loving me was as easy and natural as breathing in the spring air. I won’t lie, after cancer took her I cried myself to sleep many nights, often wishing that it had been my father who had died rather than her. But life wasn’t built on wishes, she’d say.
The best thing I could do to honor my mother was to set my own course and follow it. That’s why I had applied to MIT. I wanted to be a cancer researcher, even though I had no idea how I would cover the massive tuition even if I was accepted into the program at the ripe old age of twenty-one.
I would apply for grants and loans to supplement the ten-thousand dollars I had managed to save working as a dishwasher, fry cook, and busboy in the bar since I was fourteen. Seven years of hard lab
or and that was all I had to show for it. Ten grand wouldn’t pay for one-quarter’s tuition at MIT, but it was a start… Then it hit me. That money, the money I had saved for my future, now might have to go toward saving my father’s life. Fuck.
I finally broke the silence by asking the obvious question. “How are you going to pay them back?”
He let his shoulders go up and down. “I don’t know.”
“Is the bar worth anything?” I asked. “Can you get a loan on the building?” I knew the place wasn’t worth much. Tommy’s Bar & Grill, and the ramshackle building that housed it had been in his family for years. It was originally started by his grandfather, Tomas Donovan, then passed down to his dad, Thomas, and finally to him. It was all we owned and it wasn’t much. The bar occupied the entire bottom floor and we lived in the tiny eight-hundred-square-foot apartment upstairs. I had my own bedroom and he slept on the couch. There was a living room and kitchenette combination and one bathroom. That was it. And every day I expected the building to fall down around us.
“The place is already mortgaged to the hilt,” he said, looking around the room and shaking his head. “The business account is low. The credit is maxed out. We operate week to week. All our savings are gone. There’s nothing I can sell that’s worth anywhere near what I owe.”
He glanced up, but when our eyes met he quickly looked away. I felt a chill creep up my spine. I said, “When you say our savings are gone… What does that mean?”
The answer came when he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He stared down into the coffee cup, which had grown too cold to drink. I asked again, “Dad, what does that mean?”
“It means I already lost our savings,” he said, almost too quiet for me to hear. “It’s gone. Every last cent.”