Alex

After pouring a cup of coffee for my dad, I grab a bottled water for myself from the fridge and head back into the living room. He’s sitting on the couch, his chin resting in his hand, and he’s staring pensively into the fire I started earlier as a romantic gesture for Sutton. Now all it seems to do is make my apartment feel sweltering.

“Here you go,” I tell my dad as I hand the cup to him. He looks up at me with a smile as he accepts it.

I head toward my loveseat that sits perpendicular to the couch, mainly for distance and so I can easily face him as we talk. “So, you don’t think you need rehab anymore?”

“Not really,” he says. “I need to get into AA as soon as possible, but I’m not sure what more I can learn there.”

“Why are you here?” I ask bluntly, because my dad and I are long past the point in our relationship where we have to tiptoe around each other.

After taking a sip of coffee, Dad sets the cup down on my end table and looks back to me. His eyes are limpid and soft, and he’s giving me a look such as I’ve never seen before. It’s almost caring—tender—and it makes my belly tighten because it is awkward.

“I, um…I needed to come see you. Face-to-face. I needed to apologize to you—”

I cut my dad off by holding a hand up. “No, you don’t,” I say quickly, because hearing my dad sound so considerate is sort of freaking me out. It’s evoking emotion inside of me that I had been conditioned by this very man to ignore, and I feel like this could be a trap. Maybe he’s doing this to see if I will prove to be the weak and delicate man he always accused me of being.

“Yes, I do,” my dad says firmly and with a tone that tells me not to interrupt again. “This is hard on me…to admit this to you, but it needs to be done. I was wrong in many things I did to you growing up. I’m an alcoholic, and my drinking led me to do things that I am so very ashamed of.”

“Dad—” I try to interrupt.

But he talks right over me. “I’m even more ashamed that some of the things I did to you…I’d probably still have done even without the alcohol lowering my inhibitions…so desperate was I to make you into a star. That is probably my greatest shame.”

I stand up abruptly from the loveseat and start pacing. This conversation is extremely uncomfortable and I want to flee.

Straight to Sutton, so she can tell me how to handle this.

My dad looks at me, his eyes slightly shining with moisture. “Alex…I need to make amends. I need you to forgive me.”

“Why?” I ask, somewhat demandingly.

“Because I don’t know if I’ll stay sober or not. It’s going to be a hard battle…so they tell me. But if I don’t…if I can’t and something happens to me, I need my conscience clean.”

My dad doesn’t wear vulnerable well, but he’s talking straight from the heart, I can tell. Part of me wants to punch him but part of me wants to hug him—for what would be the first time in my life.

Neither one seems right to me, so I say the words he wants to hear. “I forgive you, Dad.”

***

My dad and I eventually struggled through an awkward hug. We talked about him leaving rehab before completing, and the concerns I had. While he understood them, he wasn’t willing to go back. He felt he was equipped to handle his addiction, and had grand plans to join AA as soon as he got back home. Didn’t stop me, though, from hiding the alcohol when he went to take a shower.

His plans are to leave in the morning for home, because I’m leaving for my game road trip. So we have tonight to start to forge some type of new relationship before we head our separate ways.

I slapped a frozen pizza in the oven and I’m cutting it now as he walks into the kitchen, his hair still damp. He doesn’t waste any time, cutting through to the other elephant in the room.

“So what’s going on with your game?” he asks as he sits down at the kitchen table.

His apology, while heartfelt and accepted, does nothing to erase the years he dictated to me how I should model my behavior, so my hackles rise up. “What? You mean you’re not going to tell me what my problem is? Not going to tell me how to correct it?”

My dad swallows hard. “I’ll give you advice if you want it. If you want to tell me what you think the problem is.”

I put a couple of slices of pizza on two plates and bring them to the table, setting his down in front of him. After I take my chair, I look at him while picking at a pepperoni. “I’m not focused,” I admit.

“Can’t focus your brain on something, maybe it’s focused somewhere else,” he offers, and I know this is a direct slap at Sutton.

“You mean my girlfriend,” I accuse.

“What else is there?” he counters.

“Well, let’s see,” I say sarcastically. “Maybe because my dad is a drunk and is killing himself. Maybe because my dad has been in rehab and I’m dealing with all that shit.”

At least my dad has the grace to blush at my words, but his tone is censuring, “You can’t blame me for all the wrongs in your life.”

“Can’t I?” I throw at him.

Pushing his plate away, my dad rests his hands on the table. “Look, Alex…I know you’re angry at me and you have every right to be. I did wrong by you. But I also did right. You are a superstar. You have an amazing career and more money than you know what to do with. There are a few things that you could thank me for, perhaps.”