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“Would you like that, Jethy?” At first, his lisp embarrassed me. Then, I grew to like it.
I would nod.
“Then it’s yourth.”
He would actively try to engage with me in conversations every time we sat at the dinner table, and when I brought up the subject of wanting to visit my dad’s grave, and Pam almost fell over, Darren was there to tell her that it was a good idea. He was even there to buy the Kit Kat I wanted to place on Dad’s grave, a token for all the Kit Kats we’d shared at the bus stop every morning while we waited. Me, for the bus to take me to school. Him, for the bus taking him to work.
“Two for you, two for me.”
“But you’re bigger, Daddy.”
“Which means that you are growing. Remember: the journey is always better than the destination.”
I’d been reluctantly happy. How could you not be, when you move from a two-bedroom apartment in Anaheim to a mansion in Todos Santos and get a brand-new wardrobe and built-in dad who tries really, really hard to fill the impossibly large shoes your real one left behind? It wasn’t Darren’s fault that we’d been injected into each other’s life artificially. And it definitely wasn’t his fault that I missed my real dad like an inner organ you couldn’t function without.
Darren only had one vice. Just the one. And we were so accustomed to it from living with Dad for so many years that it blended into our lives like an ugly piece of furniture that’s an heirloom from a dead loved one.
Every now and then, he would come back home from a business trip fuming. Anger issues didn’t begin to cover his mood. But, like Dad, he always spared us his wrath. The first time he’d stormed into the house with face like thunder was scary. Then again, he went straight to his office upstairs and didn’t leave there for two days straight. It was odd, to say the least, but by no means terrible. When he finally came out, he was calm, serene, and polite. “I’m thorry I lost it. I’d found out that I invested a lot of money in a hotel that is not going to be built in the next ten years. It was wrong, and it won’t happen again.” He would smooth his wrinkly tie.
Only it did happen again. And again. And then a-freaking-gain. I’d tried to block it out. It wasn’t like he took it out on Mom or me. I sometimes heard him screaming at people on the phone—lispless, like losing his mind came with gaining his demeanor—but he was always soft-spoken when he talked to us. One time, a man came over to our estate a day after the anger started. A grandpa-looking lawyer in high-belted pants. I watched them from my bedroom window. Darren nearly punched him square in the face.
Darren only ever screwed up once, but that time was enough to tilt my whole world on its axis and rewrite the pages of my history and future. I really loved hanging out in Darren’s office. I knew it was forbidden—it wasn’t for me to enter and use—but I still liked it. He had three laptops, a library consisting of thousands of books, most of them untouched. “They look good, don’t they?” he bragged once. “The interior dethigner really put an effort into buying all the clathics.” It felt like a dark cave where I could be alone with my thoughts, the words. With Pushkin.
It was the time he came back from Honduras. I’d been in his office, lying on the deep green velvet couch, a Jane Austen book draped over my chest. I’d been sleeping. It was well after three in the morning.
Darren stormed in, slamming the door shut after him. I perked up immediately. He had a bottle in his hand. He never had a bottle in his hand. Vodka. I recognized the scent immediately, because it reminded me of my dad. I slid the Jane Austen book back to its place above my head, tucking my hair behind my ear.
He turned around. Noticed me.
“Hello, Jesse.”
He didn’t have a lisp, and that worried me. It told me I was getting a Darren I didn’t know. Darren who didn’t necessarily want to be my dad.
He locked the door.
I blinked, and it felt like my eyelids were a camera, taking a picture of his back, memorizing the moment and cataloging it somewhere in my brain, like a flight recorder.
Remember this picture, Jesse.
I couldn’t swallow the saliva gathering in my mouth.
“I need to leave.” I thought I said it, but I wasn’t really sure. I was frozen with a fear I’d never felt. I couldn’t even explain it. He’d never been anything but nice to me. But everything felt different that night. Like the devil got the pen to write my script till morning.
