“Yeah,” he answered after a moment. “Yeah, I’m here.” He was breathing kind of hard, almost panting.
“What happened? Did you drop your phone?”
“I fell,” he said. “I’m going to go. Let me know if you hear anything about your dad.”
“Ok, but—ok,” I said. I didn’t want to hang up, though. “Ok, but be careful.”
“Yeah,” he said again and then he was gone. And now, I was worried about two people. Three, actually, because my mom was losing her mind. I didn’t blame her—ourfamilyrestaurant didn’t work without my dad in the kitchen. It didn’t work great with him there either, but it was all we had. She had been in her room, refusing to come out and refusing to turn on the lights.
What were we going to do?
I lay awake that night worrying about my dad, my mom, Shane, and a new addition, my sister. She had told me that she couldhear Max in his room if she left her closet door open, but she wasn’t aware that I could also hear her if I opened mine. That night, I listened to her crying.
Things didn’t get better in the morning. Max even mentioned that he could cook so that we could get Walter’s back open, but no one took him seriously since he had been so useless there in the past. It had been a hardship for him to pick up trays, so what would he do around the hot grill and the deep fryer? He brought his girlfriend over, the one we’d seen in the picture on his laptop (the one where she’d been licking a beer bottle). She seemed ok, nice enough, but her presence wasn’t helpful. What could she have done, anyway? We were clueless and the police seemed to be, too. As far as they knew, my father had voluntarily left and that seemed totally reasonable to them. They were looking but I couldn’t tell how hard they were pressing it.
It was funny to be stuck in this weird stasis—until suddenly, we weren’t. As we uselessly milled around the kitchen, Max, Morgan, and I heard our mom scream.
We knocked into each other as we raced into her room and found her as pale as one of those deep-sea creatures, like my sister had been before. “What’s wrong?” my brother shouted.
She held out her phone to him.
“I’m leaving you,” he read out loud from the screen. “I’m done. Won’t do it anymore. Fuck it.” Then he stared at Mom. “Dad wrote this? He left you?”
“He left us,” Morgan said. “Hurensohn. He left us with hisfamilyhouse that’s falling down and hisfamilyrestaurant that’s sucking our lives away.”
My mom was about to pass out. We got her into a chair and then my sister, who liked to read the old books some relative had left in our garage, started running around and looking for brandy to give to her because “that’s what people do when someone faints!” Max looked shell-shocked and his answer was to flee. I heard his car start in the driveway and it screeched as he pulled away down the street.
I was left with my mom. There was obviously no brandy in the house, so I got her some water and then helped her to bed. I texted Dad from her phone, demanding more information, but he reverted to his previous behavior and didn’t respond at all. I let the police know, though, that they didn’t need to waste more resources searching for him and I let Shane know what was going on, too.
He had a funny response, not amusing by strange: “Are you ok?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I didn’t feel ok at all but I knew that I had better get that way. Someone was going to need to fix this situation. Even if I didn’t have a clue of where to start, I also knew that the “someone” was actually me, Molly.
“No, I don’t think that I am,” I wrote back.
“I just landed.” And an hour later, which was the time it took to drive from the airport to my house, Shane was at our front door. Then I saw that he was also not ok.
“What happened to your arm?” I asked. I reached for it before recalling that it wasn’t a good idea to grab someone’s casted limb that was in a sling. “What happened?”
“I tripped last night when we were on the phone,” he said. “Can I come in?”
Yes, that was a much better idea than making him stand on the porch in the rain, especially since he was injured. “You broke something?” I asked as I took his coat and ushered him toward the couch. I wanted to push on him to make him sit, but we didn’t do touching.
“I broke my wrist, some kind of fracture.” He was careful as he lowered himself to the cushion. “There’s a special name for this break but I can’t remember it.”
He seemed unfazed by it all. “You don’t remember the name of what happened to your actual bone?” I asked incredulously.
“It doesn’t much matter. I’ll have this cast for a while, then a splint, then I’ll do PT. I don’t need surgery and it’s my left arm.” He looked down at his appendage. “It’s not the worst thing but it’s not great. Driving is harder.”
So now, he was operating his car with decreased vision and with only one hand. Perfect! I shook my head.
“Sit down here and tell me about your dad,” he said.
There wasn’t much to say besides what I’d already gone over, but I did sit and I showed him the text that my mom had received. I had screenshotted it and sent that to myself, so he was able tounderstand exactly how awful it had been. He read it over and his eyebrows raised, and then he looked at me.
“That’s a terrible thing to do to your wife of thirty years, and to your children.”
“I think he’s a terrible person.”
