Chapter Thirty-Three

We drive home mostly in silence. I’m full of a terrible burning, a frantic urge to blow something up.

One month. Six months. It’s hard to know. But it will be fast from here.

My father can’t be dying. My father is indestructible. He is the rule. He is the law.

He is all I have.

He dozes with his head against the window. His breath smells old. Something white is crusted to the corner of his lip.

The weather is changing. A bleak covering of clouds is rolling across the sky but the heat is still crackling, electric, and the air churning through the car vents smells like singed rubber.

When my phone rings—Joe again—my father startles awake. I thumb it silent. Then, after a pause, turn it off entirely.

“Who was that?” my father asks me. Catching sight of the name on the screen, he asks, “Joe? Is that your boyfriend?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend, Dad,” I tell him, for the ninetieth time. Since I’ve been home, my father has found creative ways to work my love life into nearly every conversation. Does your boyfriend mind you work so much? Why don’t you ask your boyfriend to help you with that steering issue? I can’t tell whether he’s doing it deliberately, whether he’s making a dig, or whether he really has forgotten, over and over again, that I have no one. Joe is the closest to a functional relationship I have—and he’s gay, and mad at me more than half the time.

“A girl needs a boyfriend,” he mutters, turning back to the window.

I think of what Dr. Chun said, and imagine my father’s tumor like a chunk of hard metal, a residue of chemical waste.

“Did I ever tell you how I met your mother?” My dad speaks the words to the window.

“You did, Dad. A hundred times at least.”

“—Back in 1980. The Reagan years.”

“I know,” I say. Call-and-response. “And she was working the line of drunks at the soup kitchen, and you saw her from across the street.” Amen.

“No. This was the middle of winter. She was in the kitchen, stirring the soup. Her hair was loose and I asked her what if she got some in my food and she laughed and she said we’ve got bigger problems, you and me.”

This is nothing I’ve heard before. I wait for him to correct himself. The way the story goes, my dad saw some chewed-up alcoholic, whose hands were shaking so bad he could barely keep hold of his cup, hitting on my mom at the shelter, complimenting her hair. My dad saw what a saint she was and swooped to her rescue.

But he goes on with this new version. “She must have seen something in me, because she put her hand on mine and told me I was gonna be all right.”

This is backward. It was my father who, moved by a message God sent straight into his heart, crossed the street to her.

Except that all at once I know that this story is the truth. The one I heard my whole life was the inversion. He was the alcoholic. He was the one who needed saving.

“You know I never touched a drink again after she put her hand on me like that? That was God touching me, too. I felt it. It’s like her hand weighed fifty tons but didn’t weigh a feather.”

I cycle through a hundred different questions, trying to land on one that makes sense. I’m sweating and freezing all at the same time, like even my body can’t tell what’s real.

My father is the no-name, gutted drunk of his own stories.

I don’t know what it changes, exactly, and at the same time everything feels different. I feel like I did the first time I found out that every time we played ring-around-the-rosie we were calling up a plague of cholera and miming people drowning in their own blood, chanting for the smell of their ashes. I have feared my father and hated him and, only recently, begun to pity him.

But I have never, before this, felt sympathy for him.

I think he might be sleeping again. His eyes are closed, and his head nods with the rhythm of the car. But then he says, “I’m not afraid to die, you know.”

It reminds me of Kaycee.

“And don’t say I’m not dying,” he adds, before I can. “I heard what the doctor said.”

“There is no death,” I say. “Just God.” It’s a line he often fed me.

He sits there, rocking, eyes closed. Like he’s listening to music I can’t hear.

“Two Septembers ago I found a cat in the old shed. Pregnant to the point of bursting. She was in bad shape. I put a blanket on her, gave her water and some milk. The kittens came—six of them, smallest things I’d ever seen. Some of them could’ve passed for bugs, except for the fur.” He shakes his head. Still squeezing his eyes shut. “I made a little nest for them, just some cardboard and old blankets.”

I expect him to finish but he goes silent. We’re passing into Barrens now. And even from here, from the other side of town, the smoke from Optimal’s chimneys is visible, like fingers splayed into a gesture, but I can’t say what it means.

“What happened to them?” I say finally.

He opens his eyes. “Big storm came through. Overnight the temperature dropped forty degrees. There was no warning, nothing on the reports. Just a change in the wind and a freeze knocked all the leaves from the trees and made it winter overnight.” He brings a hand to the window and presses it to the glass, then pulls away to watch his prints disappear. “They were all dead by morning, every one of them, six tiny kittens and the mother, too.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am, but puzzled, too: out here you get used to things dying. There are farms buzzing with flies, cows and pigs and chickens slaughtered to fill deep freezers. Deer hunted in the winter, cats killed in the road, and birds dropped from the sky.

“I don’t know if there’s a God,” he says. We’re still moving, punching through a great big hanging picture toward nothing. “I used to think it was a plan. And even the bad things that happened, your mom getting sick, a kid getting mowed over, it was all part of the plan. But what kind of plan is there for kittens to freeze like that? They meant nothing to nobody. What kind of God would do that. Why not leave them unborn in the first place?” For a second, anger tightens his face, and he looks like the man I remember. “There’s evil in this world, Abby. You remember that. You look for it. You look so it can’t look for you.”

The world exhales. This sounds like the father I know. Smoke unwinds against the clouds. “I’ll remember.”

He leans back in his seat, satisfied. As we pass the clutter of tire shops and fast food outlets and new restaurants, Optimal lurches out from the distance again, an ugly sprawl between the trees.

“Look at that,” he says. “All that smoke. Chemical spew. Disgusting.” He shakes his head. “They killed her, you know,” he goes on. “Oh, I know everyone says they didn’t. But they did. They killed her with all their filth. Poison and greed, that’s all it is.”

Mom died right before Optimal finished construction. The day we buried her, the first bit of smoke came up from the chimneys, and I remember thinking at first it was a kind of celebration.

“They didn’t kill her, Dad,” I say, though I’m not sure why it matters. “Mom got cancer before.”

“I’m not talking about your mother.” He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes again. “I’m talking about that girl, the one everyone always fussed about. Kaycee Mitchell.”