CHAPTER ONE
“What do you expect me to do with this?”
I laugh a little at Dad’s reaction to the iPad he just unwrapped. For a man who spent thirty years running a steel mill shop, you think he’d have a little more appreciation for technology.
“Anything you can do on a computer, you can do on this,” I state, clearing the red-and-silver wrapping paper off the bed. “It basically is a computer. And you don’t have to get out of bed to use it.”
“Well, considering I can’t get out of bed….”
I immediately wish I’d chosen my words better. For his entire life, until this all started, Dad had been the fittest, most active man I’d ever known. I remember the power of his hands when he’d pick me up for a game of airplane, twirling me through the air as easily as a rag doll. I still blush a bit when I remember how my high school friends would gaze at him, stripped to the waist, doing yard work on a humid August day.
“Is there such a thing as a FILF?” Trina Willis used to say. “Because if there is, Sarah, your dad’s one, for sure.”
It didn’t even slow him down when my mom told him that after twenty-eight years of marriage, she was tired of waking up every day feeling unfulfilled. She was off on a European tour before the ink was dry on the divorce papers, “finding her bliss” or whatever she claimed she was doing. I’d stopped listening whenever she called.
And as for Dad? He signed on the dotted line, sent her thirty percent of everything he made per their divorce settlement, and went on with his life. The machine shop, the yard work, the exercise bike every morning, and the every-other-Sunday golf game with his buddies at Rancho Park. Part of me just couldn’t believe he was taking it so well, but when I asked him about it, he just gave me that soft smile of his. “Sarahbelle,” he said, using his favorite pet name for me, “just because your mom doesn’t know who she is anymore, doesn’t mean I don’t either.”
So when Ralph’s leg seized up on him on the golf course one Sunday, we all just figured it was an unusually bad charley horse. But that’s the thing about bone cancer. It doesn’t care how much you work out or how many teenage girls lust after you from afar. It’ll take what it wants regardless. And in my Ralph’s case, it seemed like it wanted every last breath.
Granted, he’s putting up a good fight. But he had to take a buyout on his pension and cash from his life insurance to do it. And that was before his legs really started to go. There’s an experimental marrow-transplant treatment they offer at the hospital, but it’s got a pretty high price tag, and they’re not taking volunteers, at least not one whose cancer is as far along as Dad’s. And it’s definitely not anything I could pay for on a waitress’s salary. So we struggle along, doing our best. I get home late most nights and rush to his room to make sure he’s okay.
Tonight is no different. It was a long day at the diner, and I still feel greasy all over. There’s so much oil it’s like my eyeballs are coated, making it hard to see clearly. I glance around the room, seeing the bedpan and the cane. It makes me sad that Dad’s been reduced to this.
At least I was able to get him this iPad, even if it was just a used one. If I was Ralph, and had to spend all day looking around the room at these emblems of illness, I would go out of my mind.
I’m snapped out of my drifting thoughts by a familiar keyboard melody. It’s the theme music from an episode of The Rockford Files someone uploaded to YouTube.
“Oh, nice,” Dad murmurs, interrupting my thoughts. “I can get Rockford on here.”
“Like I said, if you can do it on the computer, you can do it on the iPad.”
He perks up on his pillow. “Solitaire?”
I smile. “Of course it has solitaire, Dad. Every computer they’ve made since like 1990 has solitaire.”
Ralph grins, minimizes the browser window to see what else this gizmo has to offer. He points at one of the icons on the screen. “Hey, what’s this little heart thingie?”
I glance at the screen and see the familiar bursting heart logo. “Oh, yeah. That’s OkEros. It’s for dating.” I reach for the gadget. “The person who owned this before must have had a profile. I can delete that for -”
Dad pulls the iPad away from me. “Dating, huh? You mean like online personals?”
My cheeks tinge red. It’s so weird to talk about this with your father! But there’s no sense in shying away.
“Well, nobody calls them personals anymore, but yeah, basically.”
“Uh huh.” He gives me that up-and-down look that always lets me know a lecture’s coming on. “And have you tried anything like that?”
I sigh. “Dad…”
“I’m just asking. I mean, the last guy you went out with, what was his name, Chad?”
“Chase,” I mumble.
“I knew it was something prep school like that. Yeah, I liked him. But what’s it been since then, like a year?”
A year and seven months, to be accurate. Back before Dad started to really decline. Nineteen months since I’d last been on any kind of date. Five hundred and seventy-seven days since I’d last felt Chase’s spindly hands around my waist, squeezing my backside, slipping up to pinch and twist my nipples. 13,848 hours since I felt the blood coursing through the pulsating veins of his cock as he thrust in and out of me. 830,880 minutes since the last of those encounters. 49,852,800 seconds.
But who’s counting?
“Anyway,” Dad rumbles, “you should get yourself set up with one of these ads. I bet you’d have lots of guys wanting to date you.”
I have a hard time meeting his eye, just like I always do when we get on this subject. “I don’t know, Dad. There are a lot of creeps on those sites. And I mean, just with work, and, and -”
“Don’t.” Ralph’s voice, diminished by his illness and the pain meds, suddenly finds its core of steel again. When he sounds like this, I can’t not look him in the eye. “Sarah, you do not get to use me as an excuse to drop out of the world. Your mom left me after near thirty years, and I kept going till my legs gave out. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna watch you stop living your life just because I’m losing mine. You are gonna get on one of these dating things, or I’m gonna get on one for you. You understand me?”
No matter the pain, no matter the amount of weight he’s lost, Ralph Endicott can lay down the fatherly law with the best of them. “Okay, Dad. Okay.” I check my watch. “Ooh. But it’s gonna have to wait. We’re fully booked tonight, obviously, so Derek wants us in early.”
“All right then.” Dad flops back onto his well-worn pillow. It’s clear even raising his voice has taken a toll on him. “Can you, uh…” He waves his fingers at the iPad he’s let slip off his lap onto the bedclothes. “Can you put Rockford back up?”
I pick up the iPad, maximize YouTube, and nestle it back in his weakened grasp.
“Thanks, Sarahbelle.”
“You’re welcome, Dad.” I take his hand, giving the fingers the lightest little squeeze. “You call me if there’s anything you need. I’ll be home right after my shift.”
This gets a smile, but a sad one. He clearly doesn’t love the fact that my life is now a perpetual loop between work and his bedroom. “Okay, then.”
“Okay. Happy Valentine’s Day, Dad. I love you.”
“Love you, too, sweetie.”
I head for the door.
“Hey, do you have any other work clothes?”
I look at my white button-down shirt and loose-fitting black canvas pants, which is what pretty much every waitress in America who doesn’t have to sport a uniform seems to wear these days.
“I know you dress like a tomboy at work because it’s comfortable, but I don’t know,” Ralph frowns, staring at me. “Guys like when a woman shows off her figure. And you’ve got a nice shape.” A faraway gaze drifts over his field of vision. “Just like your mother had.”
Oh God, what do I say? Another awkward conversation, but this one actually makes me feel sad. I could be sporting two heads, and Dad would still think I was the most beautiful princess in the world. But he sees me through a father’s eyes. When most people look at me, all they see is a girl with thirty extra pounds on her frame. And that includes Chase, a.k.a. Mr. “You Could Stand to Lose a Few.” At least that’s how he felt after a while.
“Okay, Dad, I get it,” I say wryly. “I’ll think about dressing a little more ladylike for work, and about joining one of those dating sites. Now you behave yourself. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Well, if you don’t watch Rockford, I can’t promise anything.”
I laugh a little and head out of the room, not realizing the next time I see Ralph, both of us are going to be on a very unexpected road indeed.