“When is Daddy coming home?” Milly asks when I pick her up from school, sounding like me for the first ten, or twenty, years of my life.
“Around dinnertime.” I reach over to put on her seat belt but she shakes me off. She’s got it.
“That’s so long from now,” she whines.
I’ve done a fine job these last two days, but the kids miss John all the same. Even if he sometimes seems lost or out of place, more like a stepfather than a father, the kids want him more than anyone. I guess that’s the thing about parents.
“How do you like my new hair? I dyed it.”
“Your hair died?” Martin asks.
“No, I colored it. I made it red with a dye, like tie-dyed shirts.”
“It doesn’t look red,” Milly says, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. She’s right. It doesn’t look anything like the plastic hair in the supermarket. Some things you can’t change.
As we pull out, I turn on the radio. “Okay, guys. This is Tom Petty.” I jack up the volume. “Listen. Hear that organ?” I raise my finger and tap it in the air. “ ‘… Said a woman had hurt his pride …’ ” I turn it up louder, maybe louder than this radio has ever been played. “ ‘Don’t do me like that …’ ”
“Do me like what?” Milly asks.
“And what means pride? How does it hurt?” Martin wants to know, challenging me to rephrase the line using only the words a child will understand.
“It just means you feel dumb, someone made you feel stupid.”
“By hurting you?”
“Sorta. Just listen to the song.” I sing a little louder.
There’s so much to define and differentiate. As I stutter through a definition of terms, I wonder if John and Ellen used all the big hard words, like tumor, neurosurgery, chemotherapy, or just kept it simple. Boo-boo. Owwie. Yucky medicine.
“Stop!” Milly shouts from the back.
“Stop!” Martin calls. “Keely!”
“Aw, come on, this is a great song!” I call back over my shoulder, belting out the refrain.
“No!” Milly barks.
“Dammit! I just went the wrong way!” I am now on the Pacific Highway, which is dramatic and curvy, like the roads in BMW commercials.
“Move over!” Martin shouts as I accelerate into the turn, leaning forward, hoping for an exit sign.
“No!” Milly screams. “Stop!”
“Hey! Not another word,” I say, verbatim Mary Corrigan. “Not another word!”
“Keely! Keely!” A car beeps.
“Shhh!” Another car beeps.
Two cars are driving straight toward us.
“We’re on the wrong side!”
“Oh God!” I swerve, prickling with adrenaline. “Oh God.” I flip off the radio, turn on my hazards, and pull over to the shoulder, my breath caught in my throat.
“I’m so sorry. Thank you. I thought … Thank you. I’m so sorry.” I put on the emergency brake and wait for the rush to pass, to feel safe and competent and level again. I slipped into autopilot. I forgot I was in a new place, with different rules and people who don’t belong to me.
Eventually, I start a five-point turn, inching myself around, letting many cars pass, waiting for an opening in the traffic that poses no risk whatsoever. We drive home slowly, quietly, like we’re crossing a gorge on a wire.
John is smart not to rely on me. This isn’t some lark. I’m driving around, playing the music too loud, ignoring the signs and shushing the warnings, with a man’s last and best treasure in the backseat. The teetering height of this truth, its shadow with no end, gives me vertigo.
That evening, John returns from his travels. The kids give him a hero’s welcome, and for a moment anyway, the house feels lively. But once we sit down to dinner, the dialog track drops out and we eat to sounds, not words. Martin hums a made-up song as he chews, though not so loudly that we can’t hear Milly’s teeth breaking through her carrots. John cuts his meat all at once, like my mother told me never to do, his knife clicking and squeaking against the plate’s surface. Pop works through his meal methodically, as if it’s a lawn he’s mowing, while Evan stands at the kitchen counter eating what he can in the minutes he has left before work. The five of them are not so much a family as its components, like Evan’s Scirocco broken apart and spread out on the driveway. It’s a complex machine requiring a level of coordination between connection points that not everyone is capable of. Maybe it will run again. Maybe it won’t.