Molly: Hey babe—dezzie is going to call you at work. Make sure to pick up. It’s important
I wait two minutes. He doesn’t reply.
He always replies.
Intellectually, I know he must be in a meeting or already on the phone with Dezzie, but it rattles me. I attempt to return to cleaning, but I can’t focus. Trying to prepare your home for a romantic visit from your boyfriend seems really fucking tasteless in the midst of your best friend’s life unraveling.
And I keep getting lost in my own memories of the day my dad left.
He’d taken me out for breakfast, to Denny’s, which was our special place. He ordered chicken fingers for breakfast—a childish habit of his I’d always found hilarious. My pancakes came and he took a sip of coffee and told me, casually, that he’d be moving out that day. “Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”
At first, I thought he was kidding. My dad liked to be funny, and my mom was often the butt of his jokes. In retrospect that’s a telling detail, but at the time I was a daddy’s girl and thought it was charming when he mocked my mother to amuse me. Our shared sarcastic sensibility was our special bond. My mother’s sincerity and warmth and easily hurt feelings weren’t on our level.
But that morning, there was no punch line—unless you consider him telling me he was moving into a beach condo with Coral Lupenski, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of my dentist, funny.
I began to suspect I’d been on the wrong side of history.
It was confirmed when we got home and Mom was locked in her bedroom, sobbing like she might die, and his only response to this was to roll his eyes and tell me she was “being hysterical” and that he’d left money for pizza in case she stayed “a basket case all day.” Which is when the true panic set in.
When I realized he was leaving me too.
I started yelling. I said this was pathetic, that you can’t just leave your wife for some bimbo because you’d gotten famous.
He said—because he is a bad writer who traffics in stale clichés—“All good things must come to an end, toots.” Then he grabbed his keys and walked out the front door.
I couldn’t not follow him.
I begged him to take me with him and, when he didn’t even respond, collapsed bare-legged in my cutoffs on the sharp crushed shells of our driveway as he drove away.
And the worst part was that in the aftermath, during the deepest, scariest part of my mother’s depression, when she stopped making meals and barely showered and refused to see anyone except my grandparents, I kept wanting him to fix it.
I wanted my father.
He and I had been so close. I would get waves of despair so intense I’d almost pass out from them, and I wanted to call him and tell him I felt like I was dying, that I needed him to rub my back and tell me it was going to be okay—but he was the reason for the despair in the first place. He was the reason it would never be okay again. At least not for a very long time.
And I know that this—this ache for someone who has irrevocably destroyed their ability to comfort you—is how Dezzie is feeling. The person whose love she most craves isn’t there for her because he’s the one who is causing her the pain.
I want to take her in my arms and hold her. I want to give her everything that Rob gave up.
My phone rings, and it’s her.
“Dez?” I ask. “Did you get a hold of Seth?”
“Yes.” She sniffles. “He can’t help me.”
“What?”
Seth is one of Chicago’s premier divorce attorneys. Of course he can help her.
“Babe, back up,” I say. “What do you mean?”
“He said he can’t represent me because Rob already came to him this morning and tried to hire him. He says he’s ‘conflicted out,’ even though he didn’t accept the case.”
“Wait. Rob told him about this and Seth didn’t fucking tell you?”
“I don’t think he can? Legally? I don’t know. He gave me the numbers of a couple other attorneys he said are good.”
“Jesus.” I am flooded with a sudden, all-consuming feeling of betrayal. “I’m going to call him right now and talk to him. I’ll get him to do it. There must be a way.”
I hang up before she can say anything, and speed-dial Seth.
He picks up immediately.
“Hey,” he says in a somber tone.
“Please tell me it isn’t true that you refused to help Dezzie.”
“Whoa,” he drawls out. “Refused to—I told her—wait. What’s going on? Are you upset with me?”
“Yes,” I hiss. “I am extremely upset with you.”
I drum my gel nails aggressively on the table, glad they are long and spiky for the satisfying clack they make.
“I didn’t refuse to help her,” he says. “I can’t really say anything beyond that—conversations regarding legal matters are confidential—”
“Oh, please,” I interrupt. “You can’t invoke attorney-client privilege if you won’t take her as a client. And I can’t believe you didn’t tell her right away when fucking Rob showed up at your fucking office.”
He sighs.
