If You Only Knew

On the night of July 11, Dad decided he had to have a Green Watermelon Brain Freeze, his favorite flavor. The video surveillance showed him at the self-serve slushie counter, filling a barrel-sized foam cup. At the same time he was thus engrossed, two boys came in, nylon stockings over their faces. Jittery, nervous, druggies...the worst kind of criminal. They pointed a gun at the clerk and ordered him to open the safe.

My father capped his drink, still oblivious, and reached for his wallet, his last act on this earth, because that was when the clerk reached for his own shotgun, the kids fired, the clerk fired, and Dad, who stood there with his hands up, was dead.

The whole thing took less than fifteen seconds. I know, because when I turned eighteen, I got the video from the police. It wasn’t gruesome; Dad just fell back, out of the screen except for his shoes. I don’t know what I was hoping the video would show me, but I felt compelled to see everything that happened.

Until three months before that horrible day, my life had been charmed.

My parents were wonderfully safe and normal. Dad loved being a dentist, and Mom taught art therapy at a nursing home. Part-time work for Mom, the perfect kind of job for her, a little artsy, a little holy, with just enough hours that she could do something unrelated to us girls while still going all-out for the title of mother of the year. She came to every recital, every concert, every horse show. She baked cookies, came up with themes for our birthday parties, gave out the best candy at Halloween—as well as a toothbrush, of course. Mom French-braided our hair, baked chocolate chip cookies from scratch and put in the requisite hours volunteering in our schools.

Every once in a while, she’d give us a little flash of adventure—careening too fast into the driveway, making us scream with fear and delight, or, if Dad was at a dentists’ convention, letting us have ice-cream sundaes for dinner and telling us we didn’t even have to brush afterward (though Rachel did, for the record).

We assumed all families were like ours. Our parents were happily—very happily—married, our house was big but not fancy, Dad made enough that we were quite comfortable, though not rich. We didn’t own a horse, but we took riding lessons. There was a new car every five years or so. We took vacations each summer, renting a house on a lake in New Hampshire or visiting the Grand Canyon. We went to the movies together and played board games—bored games, I used to call them, quite delighted with my sophisticated wit.

Mom and Dad made adult life look incredibly desirable, and both Rachel and I couldn’t wait to grow up. On date nights, which happened every weekend, Mom wore a dress and panty hose, heels and perfume. They went to benefit balls and country-club dances and dinner parties at their friends’ homes, and when it was their turn to host, Rachel and I would take coats and serve hors d’oeuvres and spy from the stairs landing before going upstairs to watch TV.

Mom was great.

But Dad was better.

He was, I realize now, incredibly good-looking. But dads are dads; of course we thought he was handsome. As I got older, I noticed women talking to him, laughing, laying a hand on his arm or chatting to him for too long after he’d cleaned their teeth. Kids skipped into his office and ran up to him at school events to show him a loose tooth or just to say hi. He played golf with his buddies once in a while, went to a Yankees game once a year with his brother, but really, he was all about Mom and Rachel and me. His girls. He adored us.

Mom was a really good mother. Dad was perfect.

Sometimes, Rachel or I would walk in on our parents kissing in the kitchen, a sight that Rachel adored and I pretended to find disgusting. It seemed to me that Mom was lucky to be married to the great man, the guy who made people love going to the dentist, the best father, the nicest person in the world. It was never the other way around.

Weekends were spent taking hikes along the Hudson, Sunday-night pizza at Louie’s. At bedtime, Dad would sit in the chair between Rachel’s and my beds and tell us long, absurd stories about renegade cats, or child armies defeating evil giants through cunning and homemade weapons. On Sunday mornings, he’d make chocolate chip pancakes, so long as we brushed extra long afterward.

Sometimes, I’d go to his office after school, skipping down the hall, the sound of drilling not at all disturbing to me. His staff was all women, and they seemed to swell with love, seeing Dad scoop up his daughters and introduce us to his patients. Dad would always have time to examine our teeth and give us the grave news: “It seems like I’ll have to pull all your teeth, little girl. Every single one is black and rotten. Don’t your parents make you brush?” He let Rachel and me pick out the posters that he tacked to the ceiling above the exam chairs—a kitten dangling from a branch with the caption Hang In There! or the unicorn standing under a rainbow and the words Don’t Stop Believing! There was a treasure chest filled with little toys for kids once they’d endured their checkup, and Rachel and I got to pick out the loot.

Down the hall from Dad’s office suite was a storage room, not much bigger than a closet, filled with dental supplies—boxes and boxes of toothpaste, floss and toothbrushes, canisters of nitrous oxide, extra scrubs and boxes of masks and latex gloves, syringe tips and bib clips, plastic chair covers and Dixie cups. Rachel and I loved to play in there, tucking notes for Daddy in between boxes of his supplies, or just hiding.

Lena, his younger hygienist, got engaged right there in the office, and Dad was in on the whole thing. Lena’s father had died years before, and she asked Dad to walk her down the aisle. Rachel and I got to go to the wedding, and it filled us with pride, Dad being acknowledged like this. “I can’t wait to get married,” Rachel whispered to me, even though she was only fourteen at the time. “I want it to be just like Mommy and Daddy.” I didn’t share the same sentiment, not yet—I was eleven and still in love with horses. But I knew what she meant, even if at that time, my vision of adult life entailed living next door to my parents and owning a lot of cats.