“Quatsch. You were annoying and clingy and he hated you,” she snapped right back. “You neglected everything else, like making friends, so you could follow him around and be his best little helper. Don’t do that again!”
The conversation ended because I escorted her into the hallway. Working out was something else that Shane and I did together, so I was strong enough to remove her as I explained (fairly calmly and nicely) that she and I were done talking.
That was why it was extremely annoying when, not too much later, she was in the hallway calling my name and pounding on my door.
“What now?” I demanded when I opened it.
“Do you ever look at your phone?”
No, because I had put it in my desk drawer. “Why?”
Our mom had been calling and texting both of us, repeatedly. I saw that when I retrieved my device and I also saw messages from Max asking what the hell was going on. I wasn’t totally sure, except my mom had made one thing clear in her messages.
“Dad’s gone?” I asked. “Where is he?”
The problem was that Morgan didn’t know and neither did I. No one in our family knew. Had he had disappeared on purpose? Had something terrible had happened, or was it something innocuous, like an appointment to get his teeth cleaned that he had forgotten to mention? But the last idea was highly unlikely,first because he never went to the dentist, but more importantly because he was chained to the restaurant just like the rest of us. He never did anything else and his days were always the same. We never got away.
Except for me, because I hadn’t been quite as chained lately. I pushed aside the guilt that accompanied that thought. “Let’s try to think of where he might have gone,” I told my sister. “We’ll make a list and you can start calling people. I’ll drive to the restaurant in case something happened along the way.”
There weren’t many people that he might have contacted, but she started on that job and I got in the car to retrace his possible route. It didn’t take much time because we lived so close to Walter’s, and I didn’t see him or any indication that something bad had happened, like an accident or a collision with an animal. I was in touch with my siblings and my mom the whole way but our group chat filled up with more questions instead of answers. Have you talked to this person? What about this other person? The tires on his car are old, did they finally give up the ghost? When was the last time he got the oil changed? Is his wallet at the door? Privately, I texted Morgan to ask if she was secretly tracking him, too, but she wasn’t.
The thing was, we depended on him. He was the cook, and how were you going to have a restaurant without one of those? We had all done parts of his job but none of us had done all of it, not all at once. He hadn’t wanted us in his space, annoying him, and honestly, we hadn’t wanted to be around him for long stretches, either.
There were no answers and there was no Dad. For the first time that anyone could remember, my mom taped a note on the front door of Walter’s Café: CLOSED FOR LUNCH TODAY. SORRY.
“I’m thinking about the dinner service,” I told my sister when I got home and she looked equally worried.
We should have been. He didn’t show up for the rest of the day and by that point, my mom called the police. The restaurant was also CLOSED FOR DINNER TODAY. SORRY. But the authorities didn’t seem all too concerned, especially when my mom blabbed to them about how much debt we were in, including the fact that she didn’t think she could pay for the next food delivery, and that the restaurant’s roof had started to sag and she was also afraid of an inspection because we might get shut down.
The question on the minds of the officers was probably, “Why would this guy have stuck around?” There wasn’t a good answer, especially since he didn’t like any of us.
“No, he hates us,” my sister corrected me when I voiced that concern. “He definitely hates you and Mom, anyway.”
“Thank you!”
“I mean, it’s worse that he doesn’t even notice that I exist. And it’s probably even worse for Max that he looks at him like his heart is broken with disappointment,” she told me.
That sounded very, very dramatic. “But I think it’s true,” I told Shane the next day. We were talking on the phone after a lot of texting, and it was a relief to hear someone besides my immediate family and the police. I needed an outside opinionon this. “That must be really awful for my brother. Maybe it’s why Max doesn’t seem all too worried about Dad.” As a person, I didn’t like my father much either. But I would have been sorry if something happened to him, and I was very concerned about Walter’s.
“You three know him best. You have no idea where he might have gone?”
“He doesn’t have any friends. We never travel, so he doesn’t have a favorite destination. We owe money but it’s not to the Mafia or other criminals who would make him disappear.”
“Does that really happen?”
I didn’t know the answer to that, either. “I’ve been trying to look at maps and be scientific. I’m sure that his car wouldn’t take him very far because he does literally no upkeep on it.” I heard traffic in the background. “Are you driving right now?” I asked. It was night here in Michigan and it was in Ohio, too. I knew Shane wouldn’t have wanted to be on the road in the dark, especially not while he was distracted by a phone conversation.
“I’m walking back to my hotel,” he answered. “What about your relatives? Didn’t you say that you had an uncle in Chicago?”
We talked for a while, mostly about my father’s disappearance. The police had asked all of us a lot of questions and I went over those again. No, Dad had never done anything like this before. No, he didn’t have any medical issues, no, he didn’t have a girlfriend or a secret family. They had phrased it more politely, but they had been very focused on extramarital stuff. The answerwas still no, because he wouldn’t have had the time. He was always at the restaurant.
“I can understand why he wanted to get away,” I told Shane. “I feel like that, too. Sometimes, I just want to escape and maybe he went ahead and did it.”
“Maybe—good golly!”
A lot of loud noise came through the phone, crashing and banging.
“Shane?” I asked. “Shane!”
