LUCINDA TRIED TO force me to ride home with her in her Navigator, but I called an Uber instead. No way was I accepting help from her.
Or letting her see my apartment, either.
Though “apartment” was too generous a term. More of an “efficiency.” Or more accurately, a “shack”—built as the caretaker’s quarters in the 1910s when the building was constructed as a warehouse.
Sue’s dad, Mr. Kim, had renovated the building, turning it into hipster industrial condos. But the rooftop shack was last on his list—and in his words, was still “not fit for human habitation.” Sue had talked him into leasing it to me as a studio space—promising him I’d use it “almost like a storage room.”
That was before I left my ex, Ezra—after he fully forgot my birthday, and, while I was getting stood up in the restaurant, I wound up reading a clickbait article on my phone about narcissists … realizing in a sudden flourish that I was dating one. Two long years of clues I ignored, then one very enlightening article—and then suddenly I was done.
Leaving was just a relief.
Finding a place to live on the income from my Etsy shop was going to be a challenge at best, and I’d drained almost all the cash I got from selling my car—a radical choice in Houston, which is not exactly a walking city. My hovel was fine for now. For $475 a month, I didn’t need a showplace.
But my living situation now was more like “a little princess banished to the servants’ quarters” scenario than a “living the high life in a luxury penthouse” one.
I had promised Mr. Kim I wasn’t actually living there, and he was compassionately turning a blind eye. Which is to say, one person’s “not fit
for human habitation” is another person’s perfectly acceptable hovel.
The light alone was incredible.
Not to mention the views of downtown. And the bayou.
Sue thought my moving into my studio was a genius gaming-the- system move. Not a normal living situation, but cooler. She’d been pushing for a shack-warming party from the start. But as much as I wanted to embrace the spin that I was too fantastic to live like normal people, the truth was that I was just too broke.
Back home after that night in the hospital, nothing about my shack, or my life, or myself had ever felt less fantastic. It’s a disorienting thing to know there’s something wrong with you. It made everything about my life seem different. Worse. False. Like I’d been misunderstanding everything all along.
 |
I HAD SOME portraits queued up to finish—a little girl with her cocker spaniel, a young man’s graduation photo, a sweet grandmother in an eightieth birthday party hat—and I couldn’t bill for them until I shipped them. They were a hundred bucks a pop, so that’s what I should have been doing all day after I got back from the hospital: covering this month’s rent.
But, instead, I found myself googling cavernomas.
Lots of grainy gray brain-scan images, lots of illustrations of people holding their heads like they were having the worst migraines in history, and lots of cartoon illustrations of veins with plump raspberry-shaped malformations.
Which were cuter than I would’ve expected.
I tried to picture the inside of my head. Had there really been a tiny little blood raspberry in there this whole time?
I also googled Dr. Sylvan Estrera. Who apparently did some amateur swing dancing as a hobby. When he wasn’t, ya know, doing brain surgery.
When my eyes were dry from scrolling, I clamshelled my laptop and went to go sit next to my dog, soulmate, and only real family, Peanut, who was fast asleep on the sofa with his legs splayed out and his belly facing the ceiling as if nothing crazy had ever happened in the world.
I appreciated his attitude. It was nice that at least one person in my life wasn’t freaked out.
He’d been a birthday present from my mom the year I turned fourteen. A rescue, but still a puppy, and he’d peed on every surface in the house until we got him trained. My dad would probably have decided not to like Peanut for that reason—if Peanut hadn’t disliked my dad first. He shunned my dad from the get-go—barking and glaring at him whenever he came into the room. Later, we found out that Peanut hated all men, and we wondered if something bad had happened to him that had left some PTSD.
But my mom adored him, no matter what. He was eighteen pounds of solid cuteness—some kind of Maltese/Havanese/poodle/shih tzu/Yorkie mix. When people stopped us to ask his breed, which they did often because he was literally the cutest dog in the world, we’d just say, “Texas fluffball.” Like that was an AKC-recognized thing.
My mom had loved to put him in Fair Isle sweaters and doggie bomber jackets. When my dad grumbled about how it was “humiliating” for a dog to wear human clothes, she’d snuggle Peanut close and say, “You’re just jealous.”
My mom died later that same year, and I don’t think my dad ever even looked at Peanut again after that. Peanut stayed in my room and came with me everywhere. I got an after-school job at a pet store and spent much of my paycheck on toys and treats for him. We were totally inseparable from then on.
Except for the two-year period when I was sent away. But Peanut and I didn’t talk about that.
Sitting next to Peanut today—as my brain spun and tried to take in this new reality—for the first time in a while, I felt the bitter longing that always seeped through me whenever I really missed my mom. It stood off to the side of all other feelings, damp and cold—as if my soul had been rained on and couldn’t seem to dry out.
Most of the time, I tried to just feel grateful for the time I’d had with
her.
I knew I’d been so lucky.
Every Sunday, she bought a bouquet of flowers at the grocery store.
Then every morning, she’d snip one of the flowers out of the bouquet and
wear it behind her ear. I don’t have a memory of my mom without a flower behind her ear.
Even on the day we buried her.
Back at my hovel, sitting on my little love-seat sofa, I felt a longing for my mom so intense, it felt like it was filling up my lungs. If she’d been here, I would’ve rested my head on her shoulder and she’d have stroked my hair. I would’ve pressed my ear against her chest, shushed by the rhythm of her breathing. And then she’d have tightened her arms around me so I’d know for sure I wasn’t alone.
Because that was the most essential thing about my mom. She couldn’t always fix things for me, but she was always there.
Until the day she wasn’t.
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I WAS JUST wondering if this was the most alone I’d ever felt in my life when I got a text from my father.
I never got texts from my father.
I didn’t even know he had my contact info.
But the phone pinged, and there it was on the screen: This is Dad. I’m at your building. Which apartment are you? I’m coming up.
Wait—at my building? Coming up? Wasn’t he in Singapore?
You’re not in Singapore? I texted.
I’m back.
Oh, no. He wasn’t coming up. I’d been pretending to be successful in front of him for years. No way was I letting him see the truth of my life.
I’ll come down, I texted.
I need to talk to you. Privately. Wait right there.
Before he could argue, I leapt into action. He was not coming up here.
I was already ready for bed. It had been that kind of a day. But I swung on my favorite batik-print cotton robe—once my mom’s—kicked on some fuzzy slippers, and then headed toward the top-floor hallway looking, shall we say, not exactly ready for prime time.
I slipped into the elevator just before the doors closed and only noticed when I turned around that there was someone else in there with me.
I could see nothing but his back and the back of his baseball cap, but that was enough.
He slouched against the front corner, facing away, leaning hard into that corner, like it was the only thing holding him up. He was wearing a vintage 1950s-style bowling jacket like hipsters love to find when they’re thrifting. But he didn’t seem like a hipster. And the jacket didn’t seem all that vintage, either. More like a new version of an old jacket?
Who did that?
I was about to ask him to press Lobby for me when I realized that one,
he’d already pressed it, and two, he was busy talking on the phone.
“Oh, my god, she’s so fat,” he said then to his phone, with a definite vibe like he had no idea I was there. “I thought she had to be pregnant, but no. She’s just unbelievably obese.”
I felt my face make an Umm—what? frown.
“Seriously,” he went on, “her whole side of the bed was sagging. Fifty- fifty she broke the springs. Belly fat for the Guinness book, I swear. And she does that thing where she breathes like she’s choking. It’s hilarious.”
Hilarious? What the hell kind of conversation was this?
He went on. “Another one-night stand. Big mistake. Huge mistake. She shredded the sheets. Those nails. Not even kidding—I might really need stitches. But what was I supposed to do? She threw up in my entryway.”
Okay. Now he really had my attention.
“I know,” he went on, voice still at full volume. “But then five minutes later, she’s dry-humping me again—just like in the parking garage. I think I pulled a hamstring.” He tapped his head against the elevator wall. “I tried to kick her out of bed,” he said next, “but she just kept coming back. And oh god, she’s a moaner.”
This must be the worst conversation I’d ever overheard. Who talked like this? I hate admitting to being this naive, but it had never even occurred to me that conversations this awful even happened.
Who was this guy? What a weasel.
I looked him up and down for identifying details. But there wasn’t much to go on with him facing away, slumped in the corner like that. His hair was brownish. His height was tallish. The only distinctive thing about him was that bowling jacket. Red and white with cursive stitching.
He was still talking. “Yeah, I got home from work and she’s still in the bed. So now it’s a two-night stand. And last night, she did that thing where she planted her fat ass right in the middle of the mattress and then she rolled on top of my face. I almost suffocated, I swear—under a mountain of blubber.”
“A mountain of blubber”???
Did I really just hear that?
I was baldly, openly staring at the back of this guy’s weaselly, nondescript baseball cap now.
What the hell? Who even thought those things about a person they’d just spent the night with, much less said them out loud?
As we approached the first floor, just as I was thinking this conversation couldn’t possibly get any more appalling, the Weasel added, “I got some pictures while she was sleeping. I’ll text them to you. Oh, and there’s a video. Sound up for that one. You’ve never heard snoring like that in your life. Go ahead and post them all.”
With that, the doors slid open and he slid out, still talking, without ever noticing I was behind him.
Holy shit.
I stepped out, too, but I slowed to an astonished stop just outside the doors.
This right here was why I hadn’t dated anyone since Ezra. This was why I spent Saturday nights at home with Peanut. Just the fact that men like this existed.
What had I just overheard? Was that unbelievable douchebag texting pictures of some poor unconscious lady to his friends? “Post them”?! What did “go ahead and post them” mean? Did he have some kind of website where he lured women back to his apartment and filmed them? Wasn’t that illegal? Should I call the police and report a—A…? A morally repugnant person in the vicinity?
Or should I go find this guy’s apartment, bang on his door, rescue this woman—who had clearly just made the worst one-night-stand decision of her life—and lend her a fuzzy sweater, make her some tea, and give her a little TED Talk on Bad Men and How to Spot Them?
I was still undecided when—speaking of men who made you lose your faith in men—I felt something clamp my elbow and turned to see my dad.
But not so much his face as the back of his head, because he was already dragging me off toward—where? The street, maybe?
“Hey!” I said in protest, like he’d forgotten his manners.
“We need to talk,” my dad called back—not slowing or turning.
How long had it been since I’d seen him? A year? Two, maybe? Our last communication was Lucinda’s three-page computer-printed holiday letter—which I hadn’t read—and now not even a “Hi! How ya doing?” from this guy? He was just going to grab my elbow and steer me through my own lobby?
I tugged back to resist, like, This is not how you do this.
At that, my dad slowed and turned.
He took in the robe. And the slippers. Then he said, “I got the whole story from Lucinda.”
“I’m sure you did,” I said.
“You’re going to need to get the surgery, Sadie,” he said next.
I looked around to see if someone heard. That felt like an awfully private thing to just say at full volume in a public place.
I guess this was what the whole elbow-grabbing thing had been about. “I will,” I said, stepping closer and leading by example by lowering my
voice. “I’m just … processing for a minute.”
“You don’t need to process,” my dad said. “Just get it done.” “It’s complicated,” I said.
“No,” my dad said. “It’s simple.”
My quiet voice hadn’t worked. Instead, my dad went the other way and used his doctor voice—which is even louder than his usual one—on me: “Do the surgery right away. As soon as possible.”
The ground floor of my building had a really great coffee shop called Bean Street that fronted to the street but also connected to our lobby. “Can I…” It felt so weird to say this: “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
My dad shoved his hand in his hair and looked evaluatively over toward the Bean Street logo—hand-painted on the glass doors by a hipster sign painter.
Then he said, “Okay,” and walked over without waiting for me.
The place was almost empty. We sat facing each other in a booth, and I shifted gears, now trying to counter his doctor voice with an improvised
unflappable-professional voice of my own. “I already told the surgeon that I preferred to wait,” I said. “I have a project that can’t be postponed.”
“Lucinda told me. Your big break.”
Of course she’d told him. What else did she have to talk about? “One of them,” I said. “One of many. I get big breaks all the time.” Then maybe one sentence too far: “My whole life is big breaks.”
He flared his nostrils. “The point is, you can’t wait.”
I tilted my head. “This is uncharacteristically bossy of you, Richard.” “Don’t call me Richard. Dad will do.”
“What’s the rush, exactly? The doctor said it wasn’t urgent.” “You need to get it taken care of.”
As I looked closer at my dad, he seemed atypically rumpled. Tie askew. Wrinkles in his Oxford cloth. He always traveled in a business suit. Formal guy. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Singapore?”
“I came home early from my conference.”
“For this?” I asked. It had to be for something else.
“This couldn’t wait,” he said. That sounded like a yes.
Was this all it took to get his attention? “Wow. I should have gotten a cavernoma years ago.”
“You’ve always had it. It’s congenital.” “I was joking.”
But he was in no mood to joke. He actually looked … worried. Huh. Worried about his daughter. Was this a first?
“It’s fine,” I said next. “I’ll handle it.”
But he shook his head. “It’s done. I’ve already scheduled you for Wednesday.”
At that, I just frowned. “This Wednesday?” He nodded, like, Affirmative.
I tried to think if my dad had ever scheduled anything for me—even an orthodontist appointment. “Why would you schedule my surgery?”
He looked at me, like, Duh. “I’ve got some connections.” “No kidding.”
“Otherwise, it was a three-week wait.” “Fine with me.”
“But you need to get it done—”
“Right now,” I finished for him. “Yeah. You said.”
His latte sat untouched.
I stirred my own, then watched the bubbles circle around in the cup. Then I said, “Look, I’ll be honest. This seems like a whole lot of interest all of a sudden for a guy who has literally not asked me one question about myself in the last decade.”
“I understand.”
“So what’s going on?”
He nodded, like he’d been waiting for this question. “Your mom,” he said then, looking down at the distressed wood tabletop.
My mom. He absolutely never brought up the topic of my mom.
He had my attention now. But then he paused so long I finally had to ask: “My mom. Okay. What about her?”
“Your mom,” he said again. “She…”
Another pause. I tapped the table in his line of vision. “She what?” He looked up and met my eyes. “She died of a cavernoma.”
I sat back.
Heck of an adrenaline jolt there.
“I thought she died of a stroke,” I said.
“She did. A stroke from a burst cavernoma.”
“That seems like something I should have known sooner.”
“Maybe if you’d gone to medical school you’d have learned all about
it.”
“Are you giving me shit about medical school right now?”
He pursed his lips together at the curse word—which seemed like the
least of our problems. Next he tilted his head forward like he was forcing himself to take a calming moment. Then he said, “I’m telling you, you can’t wait. You have to do this right now.”
“I can’t do it right now. I don’t have time.”
He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “That’s exactly what your mother said.”
Oof.
Then, before I’d absorbed that, he added, “And she might even have been wearing that very same robe when she said it.”
I looked down and took a breath. Time to stop arguing. “So you’re saying … she had this same exact thing?”
“Yes. It’s inherited.”
“And she knew she had it?” “Yes.”
“And she was advised to have it fixed?” “Yes.”
“But she didn’t? And then she died?” He nodded. “Precisely.”
“Why didn’t she have it fixed?”
My dad looked away. “I don’t think we need to get into that.” “What else could there possibly be to get into?”
“I don’t want to dredge up the past.”
I lifted my hands, like, What the hell? “Too late. It’s dredged.” “The point is—just get it done.”
To be honest, I wasn’t going to fight him. My dad might be a complicated, difficult, overly formal, pathologically reserved, not- particularly-fond-of-me person … but he wasn’t stupid. He was, as Lucinda could verify, a “very prominent cardiothoracic surgeon.” He knew his shit. He understood—if nothing else—the workings of the human body.
The point is: When Dr. Richard Montgomery, MD, FACS, FAHA, and chief of cardiothoracic surgery for UTMB, drags you down to a coffee shop in your mother’s bathrobe and tells you to go have brain surgery, you don’t argue.
You just go have brain surgery.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do the surgery. After you tell me why Mom didn’t have hers.”
“And I’ll tell you about Mom,” my dad shot back, “after you do the surgery.”
