2017
Two days before, I’d bought flowers for someone who wasn’t my wife. Since the purchase, I hadn’t left my office. Papers were scattered all around—notecards, Post-It notes, crumpled pieces of paper with pointless scribbles and words crossed out. On my desk sat five bottles of whisky and an unopened box of cigars.
My eyes burned from exhaustion, but I couldn’t shut them as I stared blankly in front of me at my computer screen, typing words I’d later delete.
I never bought my wife flowers.
I never gave her chocolates on Valentine’s, I found stuffed animals ridiculous, and I didn’t have a clue what her favorite color was.
She didn’t have a clue what mine was either, but I knew her favorite politician. I knew her views on global warming, she knew my views on religion, and we both knew our views on children: we never wanted them.
Those things were what we agreed mattered the most; those things were our glue. We were both driven by career and had little time for one another, let alone family.
I wasn’t romantic, and Jane didn’t mind because she wasn’t either. We weren’t often seen holding hands or exchanging kisses in public. We weren’t into snuggling or social media expressions of love, but that didn’t mean our love wasn’t real. We cared in our own way. We were a logical couple who understood what it meant to be in love, to be committed to one another, yet we never truly dived into the romantic aspects of a relationship.
Our love was driven by a mutual respect, by structure. Each big decision we made was always thoroughly thought out and often involved diagrams and charts. The day I asked her to by my wife, we made fifteen pie and flow charts to make sure we were making the right decision.
Romantic?
Maybe not.
Logical?
Absolutely.
Which was why her current invasion of my deadline was concerning. She never interrupted me while I was working, and for her to barge in while I was on a deadline was beyond bizarre.
I had ninety-five thousand more to go.
Ninety-five thousand words to go before the manuscript went to the editor in two weeks. Ninety-five thousand words equated to an average of six thousand seven hundred eighty-six words a day. That meant the next two weeks of my life would be spent in front of my computer, hardly pulling myself away for a breath of fresh air.
My fingers were on speed, typing and typing as fast as they could. The purplish bags under my eyes displayed my exhaustion, and my back ached from not leaving my chair for hours. Yet, when I sat in front of my computer with my drugged-up fingers and zombie eyes, I felt more like myself than any other time in my life.
“Graham,” Jane said, breaking me from my world of horror and bringing me into hers. “We should get going.”
She stood in the doorway of my office. Her hair was curly, which was bizarre seeing as how her hair was always straight. Each day she awoke hours before me to tame the curly blond mop upon her head. I could count on my right hand the number of times I’d seen her with her natural curls. Along with the wild hair, her makeup was smudged, left on from the night before.
I’d only seen my wife cry two times since we’d been together: one time when she’d learned she was pregnant seven months ago, and another when some bad news came in four days ago.
“Shouldn’t you straighten your hair?” I asked.
“I’m not straightening my hair today.”
“You always straighten your hair.”
“I haven’t straightened my hair in four days.” She frowned, but I didn’t make a comment about her disappointment. I didn’t want to deal with her emotions that afternoon. For the past four days, she’d been a wreck, the opposite of the woman I married, and I wasn’t one to deal with people’s emotions.
What Jane needed to do was pull herself together.
I went back to staring at my computer screen, and my fingers started moving quickly once more.
“Graham,” she grumbled, waddling over to me with her very pregnant stomach. “We have to get going.”
“I have to finish my manuscript.”
“You haven’t stopped writing for the past four days. You hardly make it to bed before three in the morning, and then you’re up by six. You need a break. Plus, we can’t be late.”
I cleared my throat and kept typing. “I decided I’m going to have to miss out on this silly engagement. Sorry, Jane.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her jaw slacken. “Silly engagement? Graham…it’s your father’s funeral.”
“You say that as if it should mean something to me.”
“It does mean something to you.”
“Don’t tell me what does and doesn’t mean something to me. It’s belittling.”
“You’re tired,” she said.
There you go again, telling me about myself. “I’ll sleep when I’m eighty, or when I’m my father. I’m sure he’s sleeping well tonight.”
She cringed. I didn’t care.
“You’ve been drinking?” she asked, concerned.
“In all the years of us being together, when have you ever known me to drink?”
She studied the bottles of alcohol surrounding me and let out a small breath. “I know, sorry. It’s just…you added more bottles to your desk.”
“It’s a tribute to my dear father. May he rot in hell.”
“Don’t speak so ill of the dead,” Jane said before hiccupping and placing her hands on her stomach. “God, I hate that feeling.” She took my hands away from my keyboard and placed them on her stomach. “It’s like she’s kicking me in every internal organ I have. I cannot stand it.”
“How motherly of you,” I mocked, my hands still on her.
“I never wanted children.” She breathed out, hiccupping once more. “Ever.”
“And yet, here we are,” I replied. I wasn’t certain Jane had fully come to terms with the fact that in two short months, she’d be giving birth to an actual human being who would need her love and attention twenty-four hours a day.
If there was anyone who gave love less than I did, it was my wife.
“God,” she murmured, closing her eyes. “It just feels weird today.”
“Maybe we should go to the hospital,” I offered.
“Nice try. You’re going to your father’s funeral.”
Damn.
“We still need to find a nanny,” she said. “The firm gave me a few weeks off for maternity leave, but I won’t need all of the time if we find a decent nanny. I’d love a little old Mexican lady, preferably one with a green card.”
My eyebrows furrowed, disturbed. “You do know saying that is not only disgusting and racist, but also saying it to your half-Mexican husband is pretty distasteful, right?”
“You’re hardly Mexican, Graham. You don’t even speak a lick of Spanish.”
“Which makes me non-Mexican—duly noted, thank you,” I said coldly. At times my wife was the person I hated the most. While we agreed on many things, sometimes the words that left her mouth made me rethink every flow chart we’d ever made.
How could someone so beautiful be so ugly at times?
Kick.
Kick.
My chest tightened, my hands still resting around Jane’s stomach.
Those kicks terrified me. If there was anything I knew for certain, it was that I was not father material. My family history led me to believe anything that came from my line of ancestry couldn’t be good.
I just prayed to God that the baby wouldn’t inherit any of my traits—or worse, my father’s.
Jane leaned against my desk, shifting my perfectly neat paperwork as my fingers lay still against her stomach. “It’s time to hop in the shower and get dressed. I hung your suit in the bathroom.”
“I told you, I cannot make this engagement. I have a deadline to meet.”
“While you have a deadline to meet, your father has already met his deadline, and now it’s time to send off his manuscript.”
“His manuscript being his casket?”
Jane’s brows furrowed. “No. Don’t be silly. His body is the manuscript; his casket is the book cover.”
“A freaking expensive book cover, too. I can’t believe he picked one that is lined with gold.” I paused and bit my lip. “On second thought, I easily believe that. You know my father.”
“So many people will be there today. His readers, his colleagues.”
Hundreds would show up to celebrate the life of Kent Russell. “It’s going to be a circus,” I groaned. “They’ll mourn for him, in complete and utter sadness, and they’ll sit in disbelief. They’ll start pouring in with their stories, with their pain. ‘Not Kent, it can’t be. He’s the reason I even gave this writing thing a chance. Five years sober because of that man. I cannot believe he’s gone. Kent Theodore Russell, a man, a father, a hero. Nobel Prize winner. Dead.’ The world will mourn.”
“And you?” Jane asked. “What will you do?”
“Me?” I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms. “I’ll finish my manuscript.”
“Are you sad he’s gone?” Jane asked, rubbing her stomach.
Her question swam in my mind for a beat before I answered. “No.”
I wanted to miss him.
I wanted to love him.
I wanted to hate him.
I wanted to forget him.
But instead, I felt nothing. It had taken me years to teach myself to feel nothing toward my father, to erase all the pain he’d inflicted on me, on the ones I loved the most. The only way I knew how to shut off the hurt was to lock it away and forget everything he’d ever done to me, to forget everything I’d ever wished him to be.
Once I locked the hurt away, I almost forgot how to feel completely.
Jane didn’t mind my locked-away soul, because she too didn’t feel much either.
“You answered too quickly,” she told me.
“The fastest answer is always the truest.”
“I miss him,” she said, her voice lowering, communicating her pain over the loss of my father. In many ways, Kent Russell was a best friend to millions through his storybooks, his inspirational speeches, and the persona and brand he sold to the world. I would’ve missed him too if I didn’t know the man he truly was in the privacy of his home.
“You miss him because you never actually knew him. Stop moping over a man who’s not worth your time.”
“No,” she said sharply, her voice heightened with pain. Her eyes started to water over as they’d been doing for the past few days. “You don’t get to do that, Graham. You don’t get to undermine my hurt. Your father was a good man to me. He was good to me when you were cold, and he stood up for you every time I wanted to leave, so you don’t get to tell me to stop moping. You don’t get to define the kind of sadness I feel,” she said, full-blown emotion taking over her body as she shook with a flood of tears falling from her eyes.
I tilted my head toward her, confused by her sudden outburst, but then my eyes fell to her stomach.
Hormonal mess.
“Whoa,” I muttered, a bit stunned.
She sat up straight. “What was that?” she asked, a bit frightened.
“I think you just had an emotional breakdown over the death of my father.”
She took a breath and groaned. “Oh my God, what’s wrong with me? These hormones are making me a mess. I hate everything about being pregnant. I swear I’m getting my tubes tied after this.” She stood up, trying to pull herself together, and wiped away her tears as she took more deep breaths. “Can you at least do me one favor today?”
“What’s that?”
“Can you pretend you’re sad at the funeral? People will talk if they see you smiling.”
I gave her a tight fake frown.
She rolled her eyes. “Good, now repeat after me: my father was truly loved, and he will be missed dearly.”
“My father was truly a dick, and he won’t be missed at all.”
She patted my chest. “Close enough. Now go get dressed.”
Standing up, I grumbled the whole way.
“Oh! Did you order the flowers for the service?” Jane hollered my way as I slid my white T-shirt over my head and tossed it onto the bathroom floor.
“All five thousand dollars’ worth of useless plants for a funeral that will be over in a few hours.”
“People will love them,” she told me.
“People are stupid,” I replied, stepping into the burning water falling from the showerhead. In the water, I tried my best to think of what type of eulogy I’d deliver for the man who was a hero to many but a devil to myself. I tried to dig up memories of love, moments of care, seconds of pride he’d delivered me, but I came up blank. Nothing. No real feelings could be found.
The heart inside my chest—the one he’d helped harden—remained completely numb.