Chapter Fourteen
Erik
Every cliché about meeting a girl’s parents ran through my head as I got in the taxi to head to Cassidy’s house. I even imagined her father with a shotgun sitting on the front porch. So, when I arrived and there was no shotgun and Cassidy’s mother greeted me with a friendly smile, I was very much relieved.
“Hello, I’m Erik. Cassidy invited me over.”
“It’s nice to meet you. Bob!” she hollered into the other room. “Cassidy’s friend is here.”
“Does he look like an asshole?” the man asked loudly from the other room.
“Bob, he’s in the house. He can hear you.”
I had to laugh at the way the two of them interacted. Before that moment, I had never really thought about what it would be like to grow old with someone. I hadn’t had an example of that sort of relationship in my house, so it had been difficult to imagine.
Sure, I had seen cute old couples at the mall or out at restaurants, but I never imagined that I might have something like that one day. But Cassidy fired those feelings up inside of me. We were obviously just friends, but she was an all-around great girl who I could see getting to know more. Even if I didn’t end up with Cassidy, I did have the feeling I’d settle down someday, which hadn’t really crossed my mind much before I had gone to treatment.
“Hello, young man. Are you a drunk, too?” Cassidy’s father asked boldly.
“I’m not currently,” I said as I reached my hand out to shake his.
He seemed to value the honesty in my statement and shook my hand firmly before going to the stairs to holler up. But before he had the chance to yell up the stairs, Cassidy had started to descend from the top floor.
It took me a moment to fully realize it was her, though. Cassidy had curled her hair and put some makeup on. Although she clearly didn’t need to do such things because she was beautiful without them – that was the truth.
Cassidy also had on a short, green dress that could be best described as a “fuck me” dress, or so my friends and I use to call them. It was a short dress, with enough movement to slide it up over a girl’s hips while you bent them over and had your way with them. Many of the women who threw themselves at me liked to wear dresses like that.
Of course, Cassidy didn’t look like that was the thoughts she wanted to evoke. The dress she had on wasn’t a body-hugging dress; it was loose around her body and skimmed her curves. But I could only think about how easy it would be to get that damn dress off of her. I stared up at her and watched every inch of her body as she moved slowly down the stairs.
“Oh, you look nice, honey,” her mother said.
“Yes, very festive,” I added as I tried not to sound like a total pervert.
“Are we eating?” Cassidy’s father asked flatly.
“Not yet, Bob.”
“Mom, Dad, this is my friend Erik from AA,” Cassidy said as she started to introduce the group. “Erik, this is my mother Katherine and my father Bob.”
“It’s good to meet you,” I said.
Meeting parents had never really been my thing, especially fathers, not that I had met that many. But in high school, my girlfriend had brought me home to meet her parents and I fumbled the whole thing. I tried to tell jokes, which weren’t received well. Then I tried to sit quietly, but when her father asked me a question, I basically yelled at him. It was fair to say that fathers and I didn’t mix very well.
“Let’s go out back for a little bit and sit on the covered porch; it’s fun to watch the skiers wipe out.” Cassidy laughed.
To get away from the anxiety of worrying about everything I said to her parents, I would have done just about anything. I followed her out back to regroup for a little bit before dinner. It was exhausting meeting someone’s parents. I felt ready to take a nap and would have if I had been given a room to sleep in.
“Thanks, I felt like I was failing out there.”
“They aren’t an audience. You don’t have to worry if they like you or not. You’re only visiting for the night.”
“About that…” I started to say and then couldn’t keep my laugh in as Cassidy looked at me with a serious face.
“What did you do?” she replied.
Cassidy was really cute when she was angry. She wrinkled her nose up and had her hands on her hips like she was about to scold me. She wasn’t actually angry with me; I could tell that much. It was hard not to laugh at her as she tried to be stern with me and get me to answer the question about what I did.
“I sort of told them that I was going to be gone for two nights.”
“Two nights!” she exclaimed. “I only told my parents you’d be here for one night.”
“Sorry, I got flustered. You can just send me back when you’re done with me,” I teased her.
“It’s all right. We’ll figure it out. By the way, I told them you were in town visiting a cousin and you were from New York.”
“Why didn’t you just say I was from San Francisco?”
“I don’t know. I got flustered.” She laughed. “I’m not all that great at lying.
The funny thing was that Cassidy didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who could lie very well. Maybe she had done it well while she was drinking, but now I saw every emotion on her face. She couldn’t even hide the desire she felt for me, and I knew she was trying really hard to do that. Not that lying was a particularly good skill to have – I was much happier that she sucked at telling lies.
It had been a long time since I had actually felt an interest in a girl like I felt toward Cassidy. I wasn’t even sure what it was that I was feeling. All I knew was that I wanted something more than to just sleep with her, and that was totally new territory for me. I wanted to have her in my life long after treatment was done and if that was going to happen, I really needed to behave myself.
Relationships didn’t last in my world, but I might be able to make a friendship last. Especially since Cassidy would know what I was going through after treatment. I really liked that she had been in treatment before and that she was clean and sober. It dawned on me that when I returned home, I wouldn’t know a single person who was openly clean and sober. Maybe there were people in my life who didn’t do drugs or drink, but I didn’t know who they were.
It was a sad realization that all of my friends and acquaintances were drinkers and drug takers. Even my friend Spencer enjoyed a few too many drinks sometimes. But the difference between Spencer and I was that he had never almost killed himself because of his alcohol use. I had rationalized that all my friends drank alcohol so it was okay if I did, but it had taken me this long at treatment to realize they weren’t me. My friends might all drink, but none of them had consequences like I had.
Jarrod had helped me also realize that I couldn’t control other people in my life. I couldn’t control how Cassidy viewed me. I couldn’t control how my family wanted to treat me. The only thing in life I could control was myself, and even that was going to take a lot of work to get it right.
“Thank you for inviting me. I really hope you won’t get in trouble for this.”
“I don’t think I will. Mr. March loves me. The worst that will happen will be that he tells me not to do it again. Anyways, I’m not planning on working there much longer. I applied to nursing schools.”
“Oh, God. You’re going to be a nurse?” I said as I tried to hide the wide grin that made its way across my face.
“Why does it sound like you’re already thinking of something dirty?”
“Because you in a tight, little white nurse’s dress sounds amazing.”
“Since when have you ever seen a real nurse in a tight, white dress?” She laughed at me. “The nurses at Paradise Peak wear baggy and comfortable scrubs.”
“Cassidy, just give a guy his fantasies, please,” I said.
“I’m sure you have plenty of fantasies already and don’t really need me to add to them.”
It was probably time that we changed the subject, since I felt my body as it started to get hard thinking about Cassidy in a nurse’s uniform. I didn’t care if the nurses now didn’t wear those outfits anymore; I was going to keep the fantasy in my head and come back to it later that evening when I was alone in my bed.
“Dinner time, kids,” Cassidy’s mother said as she opened the sliding door.
“What was your mom’s name again?” I asked.
“Katherine, and my dad goes by Bob, but it’s really Robert.”
“Okay, I’ll try to remember,” I murmured as we walked into the house.
It smelled delicious, and I was hungrier than I could remember being in a long time. I had always eaten well in my life, but there wasn’t anything greater than a home-cooked meal. Especially a mother’s home-cooked meal.
Katherine at pulled a beautiful turkey out of the oven, and she already had about six side dishes on the table. There was no way the four of us would come close to eating all the food that she had prepared, but I sure as hell was going to give it a try.
“Katherine, this dinner smells amazing. Is there anything I can help with?”
“You can cut the turkey if you’d like. Bob hates doing it, but I make him do it every year.”
I didn’t know how to cut a turkey, but I certainly didn’t want to look like a rich, spoiled kid in front of Cassidy. Every grown man should at least know how to cut a turkey, or so I thought to myself as I grabbed the giant knife that Katherine handed me.
Cassidy stayed with me in the kitchen while her mother made her way to the other room to wait for us to serve the cut up turkey. Slowly, I let the knife saw into the side of the turkey and it returned me a large chunk of white meat. This didn’t seem all that hard after all. I just needed to saw down each side of the cooked bird and put the pieces of turkey onto the platter that was set out.
Cassidy seemed amused as she watched me cut through the first few pieces of meat. Her smile was brilliantly white and her giggles just as distracting to me as I tried to look professional in my turkey-cutting skills.
Even though I was technically a vegan, I didn’t have moral obligations that kept me from eating meat, or cutting it up for that matter. I really just couldn’t do it because I hadn’t ever seen someone cut a turkey before, and I had no frame of reference for where to start with the process.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” she finally asked me.
“I know what I’m doing. Just slice the meat off of the bone.”
“There’s a little more to it than that. You’ve got to make the pieces small enough that people can actually eat them. If you leave just large pieces, we will likely need to turn into barbarians and eat that meat with our hands.”
“I’m good with my hands.” I laughed as I held up a disproportionally sized slice of turkey.
“You can show me sometime,” she teased me.
I really couldn’t tell if she was serious or totally joking, but I was hard at just the possibility. Somewhere down the road could be after I got out of treatment. That would work great and made the most sense. But I suspected after treatment, Cassidy wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. She probably had guys hitting on her every round of patients that came through the doors.
By the time I reached the middle of the bird, I was basically just pulling off pieces of the meat and putting it on the place. So, basically there were giant, thick slices of turkey and shredded pieces of turkey. Neither of them looked all that appealing. There was certainly a skill to cutting a turkey that I hadn’t perfected yet.
As dinner got started, each of us sat on one side of the table. Cassidy was directly across from me, Katherine to my right, and Bob to my left. The night seemed to be shaping up to be really amazing. I felt like they actually liked me and couldn’t wait to learn more about them.
“So, young man, what are your intentions with my daughter?” Bob asked me before we had even said grace.
“Bob, give the man a break. He’s just a friend,” Katherine spoke up.
“Daddy, he’s really just a friend.”
“Okay, okay, but there will be no hanky-panky going on in my house. Are you two clear on that?”
Bob looked directly at me as he asked the question, but Cassidy was the one who actually ended up answering him. It was a good thing she was prepared to answer him because I could hardly move. I tried to think of something appropriate to respond with, and all that kept running through my head were sarcastic remarks.
“Dad, we aren’t friends in that way!” Cassidy said with enthusiasm.
“Bob, let’s just have a nice Christmas dinner, please,” Katherine added.
So far, I was pretty sure that Katherine liked me and Bob hated my guts. One of two didn’t seem like that bad of a job considering I was new at the whole meeting the parents thing.
We made it through grace and I took to eating and letting the family talk. I really enjoyed just sitting and listening to their conversation. It was like being a member of their family, without actually being a member.
I didn’t want to refuse the meal that had taken so much time and effort, so for that one night I gave up my vegan eating ways and just enjoyed dinner with Cassidy and her family. It wasn’t going to kill me to have a little meat.
Cassidy was respectful and funny with her parents. She was at ease around them, and that was weird for me to see. I couldn’t remember feeling at ease around my own father. Yet, I very clearly remembered how comfortable my mother had made me. Perhaps since Cassidy had both her mother and her father, things were just better between everyone.
The more I watched and listened, though, the more I started to feel like Bob was just a nicer version of my own father. He was still really cranky and wanted to do things his own way, but he listened to his wife and daughter, who always seemed to have something to tell him. He was a rough man, but gentle with the women in his life. I imagine my father would have been a lot like Bob if my mother had lived.
From what I remembered of my mother and father’s relationship, my mother had guided most of the decisions in the house. Even up until the day she died, my mother had been in charge.
It was my mother who taught us boys how to be nice, although we seemed to have forgotten that lesson after she passed away. It was my mother who had shown me leniency when I was a naughty child; she had given me love when I didn’t think I needed it. My mother had been the one true thing in my life, and as I sat there watching Cassidy’s family interact, I felt myself getting misty eyed.
If my mother hadn’t died, I could have had a family Christmas similar to the one I was at. If my mother hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have run to drugs and alcohol to numb my life away.
“Where’s the restroom?” I asked as I pushed my chair out and stood up quickly.
“Don’t the hall, first door on the right,” Katherine said.
I couldn’t even reply with a thank you, as I hurried off and out of the room before they all saw the tears in my eyes. Crying wasn’t my thing. I didn’t like to cry. Most of my life, I hadn’t really understood the reason so many people cried. But as I slammed the bathroom door behind me, I felt tears as they rolled down my face. I was definitely crying.
My hand grabbed onto my chest as it tightened and I tried to pull in a deep breath. I wanted a deep breath. My body needed to calm down, and Jarrod wasn’t anywhere to be seen. My whole life, I had longed to have a loving family like Cassidy had, and there I was, sitting right in the middle of the most perfect Christmas dinner ever.
The tricky thing about anxiety is that the more you want a panic attack to stop, the more it will tighten in your chest. I had just recently started to have panic attacks and barely knew what they were, let alone how to stop them. I desperately wished Jarrod was there so he could calm me down.
But this was part of being on leave. I looked at myself in the mirror and watched my lungs expand as I took a deep breath. The mirror was actually very helpful because it counteracted my brain that was telling me I couldn’t breathe. As I watched my body take in a deep breath and let it out again, I felt myself calming.
Again and again, I took in as much air as I could in an effort to push past the panic that was in my mind and prove that my body really had control.
“You know what to do,” I told myself in the mirror. “Deep breaths. Don’t think about anything else. Just breathe.”
I replayed the words that Jarrod had said to me as he calmed me down. I knew what to do. I hadn’t done it on my own before, but I really did know what to do. As I finally regained control over my breathing, I looked at myself and felt pride in what I had accomplished. I had actually taken back control over my fears, and even in the midst of a very emotional moment, I was all right.
There was a knock on the door.
“Everything okay?” I heard Cassidy whisper at the door.
“I’m okay. Just give me a minute.”
“Did you have a panic attack?”
I flung the door opened and pulled her into the bathroom. She couldn’t have just guessed that I had a panic attack. How did she know?
“Was I loud? Did your family hear?”
“No, I just remembered you had one at work. Is there anything I can get you?”
“Just give me a minute, and I’ll come back out. I’m really sorry for ruining the night. I was just so overwhelmed by your perfect family.”
Cassidy started to laugh. God, I loved to watch her laugh. Her whole face lit up with joy and I honestly felt like the room got brighter when the joy exploded from her like that. I knew her family wasn’t perfect; no family really is perfect. But her family was much better than mine and seemed perfect enough to me.
“Perfect? My father just left the table to go watch sports and my mom is grumbling under her breath while she does the dishes. No one’s family is perfect, Erik.”
“Thanks,” I said as I gave her a hug.
She hugged me back and then slipped out of the bathroom to give me a few moments to pull myself back together. It was funny how I had hugged her and hadn’t actually thought about anything else except what a nice person she was.
Cassidy was a nice person, and I had taken advantage of that by flirting with her and kissing her. She didn’t deserve to have some patient all up on her like that. I felt badly for how I had behaved; it was my addict personality. I always wanted more. If someone gave me one minute of their time, I wanted five. If I had one piece of candy, I wanted ten. If a beautiful woman who worked at my treatment facility was nice to me, I wanted to sleep with her. It was a rotten way of thinking and something I had to work on.