He deflates, his arm sweeping out in a gesture that makes it clear he’s not pointing to Louie’s Stiff One.
“But this? I can’t give you this. I can’t give anyone this. When you kids were little we wanted Marie home with you. A vacation? Hell, no. That meant I wouldn’t get paid for the time I took off. Stay in a hotel? I think the first time any of you girls got that was when you went on a school trip. We could finally manage weekends camping if I stacked my days off just right.” He looks at me. “About when you hit high school. Carol was out of the house by then.”
“Daddy, none of that makes you a failure,” I choke out.
I hear a sound of agony behind me, a sob being smothered. Mom’s wet eyes meet mine and I am helpless, caught between two parents filled with an aching pain I can’t fix.
“I know that,” Dad says, clearing his throat with a rumbling sound like rocks in a clothes dryer. “And when I’m back home, puttering in the garage, mowing the lawn, going to work, or babysitting Jeffrey and Tyler, none of this—he gestures again—“is real. Coming here makes it real. Your wedding made it real. Seeing all these people with more money than me, giving all these luxuries I could never provide for my woman and my girls, well, Shannon, it eats a man up.”
Mom catches my eye and puts a long, manicured finger to her lips. Mascara lines, wet with tears, run down her lower lids. She looks like a sad clown.
“Daddy—”
He drinks the rest of his beer and looks around the table. His new friends are looking at their own beers with sad-sack faces. James is holding a plastic cup with ice cubes and a thin drizzle of amber-colored liquid in the bottom, staring off into space. Declan is a stone wall, his face showing nothing about the tornado of emotions that I know is whirling inside him.
Meanwhile, my mother is falling apart behind me, little pieces of her littering the dirty carpet like heart confetti.
“No.” James’ voice cuts through the melancholy. His soft eyes fall on my father, who rears back slightly at the baritone timbre of his nemesis’s voice. “No, Jason. You are anything but a failure.”
Mom pinches off a sound of shock, her chest rising and falling rapidly, hand over her mouth now, as if she’s physically holding back her impulse to speak. Dad’s face lifts, like the sun rising over the ocean, slow and deliberate until he’s looking straight at James.
“Says the billionaire,” he replies, an unrecognizably bitter tone in his voice, making me recoil. That’s not my dad.
His words ring out in the now-somber cluster of tables around us, people watching with a bemused curiosity, a cocktail waitress delivering a fresh round of American beer to a group of slot machine players behind us. A gust of wind from people coming in through the main doors blows a billowing cloud of cigarette smoke our way, the taste in my mouth making me cringe.
The cacophony of hope is the soundtrack to this face-off, the electronic dings a kind of reinforcement as players feed money into a slot, push a hope button and watch a disappointment display, convinced that they can beat those random odds if they just get luck on their side.
A decidedly pissed-off female voice declares, “Says a man who is lucky, ambitious, a financial success—and a failure in his own way, too, Jason.”
James’s eyes narrow as he searches for my mother.
At that, Mom steps out of the shadows, Daddy’s sad eyes widening slightly then rolling down with a humiliated tightness. He clearly wishes she hadn’t heard what he just said, and the defeated sigh that comes from his dropping shoulders makes me convert my touch on his arm into a desperate hug.
As I pull away, Mom steps forward, a few feet from Daddy, looking down. Tears openly pour down her face. She doesn’t make the effort to wipe them away. Shaking, she opens her mouth, her voice tremoring like buckling asphalt.
“If I didn’t love you so much, Jason, I would slap you right now.” Her fingers twitch, and her right hand curls into a ball. “Might even punch you.”
Her voice is trembling from fury.
“How dare you,” she says. “How dare you call yourself a failure?”
“I—”
She shakes her head slowly, not even bothering to make him talk to the hand. “I won’t hear it. You are shredding me, Jason, with this failure nonsense. I’ve been your wife for more than thirty years. I have borne you three wonderful children. We’ve suffered through two miscarriages together. I’ve searched for change in the couch to buy another jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread to stretch through to the next paycheck, and I sat next to you at a conference table at the credit union when we signed the paperwork to buy our house, with eleven dollars left to make it through half the month.”
The table goes to a hush.
“You worked two, sometimes three jobs while the girls were young so I could stay at home. I watched you make broken cars work with nothing but your hands, your wonderful brain, some duct tape and magic. I’ve seen you fall asleep at dance recitals from being awake for twenty hours straight, and I’ve watched you sit patiently through your third nail polish color at a princess tea party surrounded by Carol, Shannon and Amy.”
Dad’s mouth hardens. Mom’s trembles.
“I’ve been able to whisper my darkest fears to you in the inky night when I think you’re asleep and it’s safe to be scared, and your warm hand always reaches out to grab mine.”
I am openly crying. I think James has something caught in his eye, because he’s rubbing it pretty hard. Declan grabs my hand and squeezes it, tight.