Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“Never tossed a baseball? No family vacations?”

“Do you know what my family did for vacation? We’d rent a house at Rehoboth Beach, and he’d pack the backseat of the car with exciting reading material like the conference report on the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Act of ninenteen-seventy-whatever. While I swam by myself, my mother slept off the drinks from the night before and my father waded out into the ocean up to his knees and read stuff for work. Some kids could tell you who played right field for the Orioles. I could tell you the names of all the minority counsels for the House Judiciary Committee.”

“That’s not really a marketable job skill for a ten-year-old,” Cadence said.

“I was never ten. Anything normal kids did, I missed. I grew up in the city, and all my friends and their parents disappeared to the suburbs, poster children for white flight. I missed out on all of it, lightning bugs in a jar and setting ants on fire with a magnifying glass, soft-serve ice cream, dogs named Clyde, candy cigarettes, going to the beach on the spur of a moment with a $1.49 Styrofoam cooler. I missed it all.”

Cadence’s face brightened with a wide smile, the kind that came with a specific memory. “We did that. Before my mom died. Styrofoam cooler and two bags of ice and about twenty different sandwiches, potato chips. We’d go to Wildwood for the day, and at sunset, we’d all ride the roller coaster. One of those old rickety wooden ones that tilted side to side in the wind.” Somewhere during her story, she stopped rubbing his shoulders. Richard fell back into the bed, and she snuggled up beside him.

He said, “If we went to an amusement park, it would just be me and my dad, and he’d find a pay phone somewhere and an excuse to call the office about something, and I’d end up riding the roller coaster next to a stranger.”

“You got to go, at least. That has to be worth something,” Cadence said. “There has to be one pleasant memory in there.”

“Oh, sure. Skee-Ball. Afternoons at the beach when it rained. Lew would hand over a roll of dimes. That’s how long ago this was—each game cost a dime. I’d play hours of Skee-Ball, and Dad would sit under the awning on the boardwalk and smoke a Hav-a-Tampa. At the end of the week, I’d have a million tickets, and Dad would find some downtrodden-looking kid at the arcade and make me give them to him.” Richard was aware that he sounded greedy, petulant, so he smiled his way through the last half of it.

“It doesn’t exactly sound traumatic. How good were the prizes, anyway?”

“Like a pot of gold. Squirt guns. Itching powder. Baseball cards. Invisible-ink pens. Those snap-pop things that blew up when you threw them on the ground. Toy handcuffs. The Chinese finger torture. Plastic sharks and plastic army men. A yardstick made entirely out of bubble gum.”

The only light in the room, the pale blue wash of the television, flickered to black at the end of a commercial. When the news resumed, Richard looked up long enough to recognize the footage of the crash, its broadcast loop starting again. He shook his head, turned away from the TV. “I don’t even know what kids do these days.”

“They do what kids have always done. Tell me, counselor. What kind of father will you be?” she asked.

Richard was proud for having anticipated the question, the way a good lawyer should. What Cadence really wanted to know was, Can you be reliable? Can you get out of bed at four in the morning to fetch Gabriel a glass of water in a spill-proof plastic cup imprinted with scenes of superheroes and cartoonish reptiles? Can you take his temperature? Can you provide three meals a day, complete with fresh fruit and vegetables? Can you make time for father-son picnics, after-school conferences, emergency room visits, movies on Saturday afternoon, carpools to and from everything? Can you remember the orange slices for soccer practice and the cookies for the Christmas party and the dozen miniature cards and tiny candy hearts for the girls in his class on Valentine’s Day?

Richard wanted to give the kid a normal childhood, and he wanted Gabriel to know he would always stick up for him in a spat with his fifth-grade teacher. He wanted Gabriel to have what he hadn’t, tennis lessons and sleepaway camp and lake swimming. He could coach Gabriel’s Little League team. That all sounded normal. Normal meant skinned knees and minor accidents that resulted in stitches, bee stings and chigger bites, seventh-grade make-out parties and car dates and getting so drunk you get sick the first weekend away at college. That was what Cadence had done, only she often claimed not to remember it. Her childhood was a secret buried out in the backyard, and she hated to dig it up, portioned it out in rations. He knew she was making an effort here for his sake.

Richard wanted to tell her that he loved her, past and present tense, that she belonged where she was. Her left hand fell in the center of his chest and absently played with his chest hair, and though he had always been vaguely ashamed at the amount of fur there, she pulled it through her fingers and stroked it against the grain and smoothed it back down enough for him to know that it was not a nervous tic but a gesture of affection. What more could he ask than that, he thought, the eye or the hand that saw his imperfections and decided for whatever reasons—expediency or closeness, passion or the simple fear of being alone—to love him anyway.

She tapped him twice on the chest, a sign that she actually expected an answer to her question.

“What kind of father do I want to be? One that tries. Hard.”

Cadence lingered in the bathroom, dawdling in front of the mirror. She wanted to tend to her upkeep, to floss her teeth and use the makeup mirror to direct a surgical strike on blackheads, her eyebrows. She wondered how long she could stay in the bathroom, how long she could avoid opening the door to Richard’s sadness. Too much of her adult life had taught her what sadness looked like: it looked like her father’s prescription bottles filling the top shelf of a medicine cabinet, his weekly pill trays whose plastic compartments overflowed with a cornucopia of meds—drugs for hypertension and high cholesterol, diuretics, blood thinners, Proscar, B-complex pills, and vitamin-E capsules, gelatinous and golden—that smelled to Cadence of hospital beds and urine.

She’d been waiting for the thunderclap, some grand announcement that she was on the right path instead of just committing herself to one option or another. Work meant a hotel and a minibar and a series of allegedly guiltless assignations with someone whose loneliness was as tangible as hers. Her judgment, which she had once thought unassailable, had led her in what she saw now as a big fucking circle, and now she stood in her own bathroom washing off the semen of a man she’d never thought she’d sleep with again.

He was a fixture, as prominent as a piece of furniture. He belonged.

And it was time to say something, time to admit it. She returned to the bedroom, and there he was, riveted to the screen again, because he wanted answers too. He had a natural inclination. He looked at the television and then at her and then back at the television, and if for no other reason than that she was afraid she might be in love, Cadence said, “I need you to do something for me.” He raised an eyebrow in response, and she snapped the overhead light on. “We are not watching that again. Absolutely not,” she said, and Richard knew her well enough to wait for the alternative she undoubtedly was about to propose.

She started rummaging in her bedroom closet; when she moved in, she had removed the closet door and replaced it with a beaded curtain, which at the time had seemed charming, a little personal stamp on an otherwise generic condo. Now, in the late night, it looked childish, and the clacking plastic beads were nothing but an irritant. She turned the closet light out and told Richard, “Turn around.”