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Unknown: Is there something wrong with me? That I like dating but not other things?
Me: What other things?
Unknown: you know. Handjobs. Blowjobs. Dicks in vaginas.
Me: Well, since you asked, do you like masturbating?
Unknown: Yeah. Not often, but yeah.
Me: what do you think about when you do?
Unknown: that’s a little personal.
Me: I don’t even know your name. You don’t have to answer. I’m just trying to help.
While my mystery texter takes his time coming up with an answer—or deciding whether he wants to—I start sorting through Dad’s medicine cabinet.
There’s expired bottles, meds that are only half-taken, ones that look to be never opened, and even though I feel the phone vibrate against my hip, I’m too engrossed in the disaster in front of me to stop and check it.
When I spot a bottle off to the side that wasn’t there when I straightened up last month, I curse into the empty room.
“Hey, Dad?” I call out, following the sound of his muttering to his bedroom where he’s sprawled out on the bed flicking through TV channels. “Dad?”
He hits the mute button and grunts his acknowledgement.
“What’s with the antibiotics? And why are they still full? It says you filled them two weeks ago.”
“It was nothing. A little bit of a cough. You know how my doctors are.”
I sigh so hard I swear I feel my chest rattle. “They just want to keep you alive.”
“Well, they’re doing a bang up job.”
The sarcasm reminds me so much of Shiloh, and if I ever told either of them I’d probably be disowned by both.
“Is it pneumonia, Dad?” I ask, a kernel of anxiety popping alive in my gut.
He waves me off with an exaggerated swish of his hand, which is Dad speak for “probably, but I’m too pig-headed to listen”.
Knowing there’s no getting through to him, I head back to the living room. Most of the trash is bagged away, but there’s not much I can do about the cigarette stains and holes in the furniture. There are backwards photos hanging on the wall, and I don’t have to turn them around to know which ones they are.
I’m the one who hung them up in the first place.
One was taken six months before we lost Mom. Shiloh is sitting on her shoulders, all chubby five year old as he wiggles his fingers at the camera. I’m wrapped around her leg, half hiding while she cards her hand through my hair.
I couldn’t tell you anything about the day other than we were happy.
And then the accident took her life, and the three of us were never the same again.
I drop my head back and stare at the yellowing ceiling, gathering my thoughts and composure as the weight of the day settles over me.
Coming here is never any less exhausting, but without me who knows what might happen to Dad. No one deserves to die alone and abandoned, even if they’re a crabby old man with a knife for a tongue.
The phone in my pocket buzzes and pulls me out of my thoughts, and I can’t help but look around at the place I called home for most of my life. No matter how much mold and grime I scrub away, there’s no erasing the years of heartache we all suffered here.
There’s no bringing Mom back.
The Dad I spent the first seven years of my life with died with her.
