The furnace rumbled to life, its low thrum no disguise for the unmistakable groan of the garage door slowly lifting. My father, having stopped at the thermostat, perhaps thought he was being subtle. But the metallic screech still sliced through the pre-dawn quiet, clear as a bell, even when he only raised it a crack to duck under. For months, his 3 AM departures had been a silent question. Tonight, I decided, I would finally know where he was going. I imagined underground gambling rooms, weird swinger sex parties, or maybe he was just heading to a quiet job site. Asking him, however, was useless, he’d perfected non-committal responses: “Oh, you know, just checking on a project,” or “Couldn’t sleep, so I decided to go to the lake.”
I’d just come home as the clock hit 2 AM, wired from Red Bull and Coke. In my room, I lay down, my eyes strained from the phone screen, blinking in time with the ceiling fan’s rattle. I gave him about twenty minutes before he’d think it safe to leave. My lights stayed off so he’d believe I’d turned in for the night. The phone’s glow wouldn’t let my eyes adjust to the words on the screen, so I put on a song at low volume and just waited in the dark. Around 3 AM, I heard his door open as he walked down the hall. I stood in my pitch-black room and waited until I heard the garage door beginning to open. Nervously, I slipped out the back door just as his truck roared to life. I pressed against the rough brick exterior of the house, waiting to hear him pull out of the driveway. The night was sticky, and tendrils of my hair lay plastered to the side of my face. A small breeze rustled through the wooded area in the backyard, bringing with it a faint aroma of honeysuckle. As soon as he’d driven off, I trotted to my Mustang in the driveway and got behind the wheel.
The car was a gift from him, a black 1988 Mustang 5.0 Fox Body, impeccably cared for. The way it growled to life, shifting from first to second gear, always produced a visceral reaction of sensuality. Its immaculate black contours sleekly housed an engine eager to always be in fifth gear. After backing out of the driveway, I kept the headlights off until I reached the highway, just in time to see his truck headed Westbound on Highway 6. The quiet rumble of the 5.0 engine swelled as I gained speed, keeping my distance. The windows were down, and my hair whipped off my cheeks. I felt the distinct shift in temperature as I drove over the embankments of the access roads. The air around our secluded neighborhood was always ten degrees cooler than the tangle of serpentine highways beyond, but once on the main road, the heat from the asphalt seeped upwards, bringing sweat to my forehead and thighs. His blinker flicked on as he approached an exit, but I was too far behind to discern which one; they were all so close together. Taking the most likely route, I downshifted as I came to a red light, my eyes darting around the near-empty intersection. Only a Whataburger, a Denny’s, and a gas station were open – the usual twenty-four-hour businesses closest to home.
The air was stifling once I was outside the car. My pajama shorts suddenly felt too revealing as I stepped out, hyper-aware of the roving eyes at the gas pumps. In the store, I plopped down a Big Red and some Cheez-Its on the counter. The clerk had a cheap radio crackling Coast to Coast AM. On the air, a man described a being he encountered, but the rest of his explanation was squelched by a tsunami of static and high-pitched tones. I wasn’t so sure I had the same courage I’d had when slinking out of the house ten minutes before. My discomfort was palpable, suddenly conscious of my bare legs. The clerk’s gaze flicked over my legs and then back at my face.
“Um, I’m looking to see if maybe my dad comes in here, around this time. He drives a white F150 work truck.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” the clerk responded, his tone suggesting he could be persuaded to say otherwise. “Try Denny’s next door, they always have people coming and going at all hours.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, paying for my snacks. Back in the car, the Mustang faced Denny’s across the lot. I watched people leaving and entering while I sipped on the Big Red. There was no sign of him, not even a truck resembling his.
I teetered back and forth on whether I should just let it be and go home, but a strange fervor ran through me. It felt almost as if revealing this secret, this hidden flaw in our family, would break a spell, finally releasing me into the self-sufficiency I should have had all along. The shift in his attention had been subtle at first. He seemed to pull away as my body changed, softened into the curves of puberty. He was rarely meeting my eyes anymore, as if the familiarity of my face had become painful to behold. The usual comforts remained—his monetary support, weeknights at our favorite restaurants. We both went through the motions of father and daughter, but an unspoken undercurrent of guilt and confusion always ran beneath.
I relented and walked into Denny’s. The woman at the hostess stand smiled and looked past my shoulder, as if expecting someone with me. It felt rude not to take a menu from this woman who clearly had a harder life than I would ever encounter. She led me to a booth in the corner facing the counter where several large men perched on stools with newspapers and stale coffee. I studied them from my seat. They could have been one of dozens of men who had done work for my dad before, but I just couldn’t seem to bring any of their faces into the present. I ordered a coffee from an equally burdened waitress but had no appetite for anything else. When the formidable waitress brought me the check, I spoke up, “Um, do you think I could ask you something?”
“Sure, doll, what is it?”
“I’m looking for my dad. He drives around this area about this time most nights. I thought maybe he could have come here from time to time.” I said. She looked at me as if she was expecting some sort of nefarious follow-up statement. I didn’t elaborate. Her face grew concerned.
“Oh, he’s okay, nothing’s wrong with him or anything, I just would like to know where he’s going,” I said, the words tumbling out, suddenly worried I’d implied something else.“
“What does he look like, honey?” she said, shifting an empty serving tray to her other hip.
“He’s dark-skinned, athletically built, perfect teeth, usually has a baseball cap on, and drives a white Ford F150.”
She looked at the large men at the counter, their bellies nestled snugly into the chrome edges. “No, can’t say that I have, because I’d remember a guy like that,” she replied. Just then, one of the pot-bellied men commented loudly in our direction, “Hey, Desiree, is your friend there looking for some company?” The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Desiree clicked her tongue and stared daggers at the man.
“Might I suggest shutting the f*** up if you want to keep your pecker, Lionel!” she projected loudly, then gave me a playful wink.
“You should probably go, darlin’,” she said, wiping down my table. “Just keep your wits about you when walking back to your car out there, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered as I stood up and left a twenty-dollar bill on the table, then exited quietly, aware of the eyes on me from the men roosting at the counter. None of them made a move. I had to giggle at myself, envisioning some large truck driver trying to chase me around the parking lot. It would be interesting to see how agile they were when they couldn’t even see their own feet looking down those sloping bellies.
I made it back to the Mustang without any intrusions. There was a catcall from a dark corner of the parking lot, a spot where the moth-ridden lampposts had no reach. I locked the doors once I was in the car and started the Mustang. I knew the sun was about to be up because, one by one, the mail trucks darted across the intersection, filing out of the post office’s main parking lot. White truck after white truck putted past me as I sat listening to the BBC World News, waiting to make my way back onto the highway toward home.
I sailed down our street, coasting the Mustang, trying not to make a commotion with every shift. I couldn’t be sure of the time, but I was putting it somewhere between 4 and 5 AM.
Ahead of me, I made out a figure walking with a small dog. As I got closer, I saw that it was our neighbor, Nancy, laser-focused on everything in front of her. Nancy was not only our neighbor but my fourth-grade teacher too, and she saw me leaving and coming at all hours of the day, never wavering in her enthusiastic grin, the same grin she gave me all those years before, unchanged.
I tried to slow the car down as I rolled past her to turn into my driveway. Once she saw it was me, she stopped and waited for me to pull into our garage.In the rearview mirror, I made out her unmistakable wave in my direction. Engaging with her now, after my clandestine pursuit, felt seedy. Instead, I just closed the garage door and stepped inside our empty house.
“I lay on the couch, the heavy cough syrup bottle prescribed for my dad somehow finding its way to my hand. I lounged mindlessly, taking intermittent sips. The couch felt weightless under me as I nodded in and out of consciousness, the stereo broadcasting NPR in hushed, hypnotizing voices. They sounded so far away, reporting from places like Damascus or Darfur on the plight of their people, a world away from my own small, private war.
Slipping into another interlude of sleep, I dreamt about the night when I was around six and my father gave a ride home to a young girl who worked at McDonald’s. She was left without a ride, and he had swooped in to offer a way home. I stayed silent in the back seat as she navigated him to somewhere unfamiliar, where all the houses seemed temporary and dogs lunged on chains as the car went by. I trudged out of the memory, approaching wakefulness, just as the air around me turned sweet and earthy, the girl’s shampoo scent wafting into the backseat of the car that night. It was as if she’d just left the room.
I tried to get up, but my bones felt as if they had been replaced with cotton candy, soft and expansive. More NPR played, and I fell asleep once more.
My eyes opened to the sound of SportsCenter on the TV and the radio turned off. Dad was sitting on the hearth of the fireplace, cracking sunflower seeds into the empty fireplace. He saw me stir and chirped, “Hey there, Buckaroo!” He didn’t seem concerned with the cough syrup bottle on the coffee table. Sleepily, I stared in his direction. His face revealed nothing. He sat as he always did, skimming the channels between ESPN and the Golf Channel, his jaw expertly cracking the sunflower seeds. I would dare say he seemed content in moments like this.
With him there, the wild speculation dissolved. He exuded a certain peace, a familiar comfort that I now knew wasn’t entirely healthy. It was a current pulling me away from the early morning’s events, away from truly understanding him. I found myself ready to let him keep his secrets, a silent truce borne of his unspoken knowledge of my own furtive behaviors. The words clawed at my throat: “Daddy, I’m here, look at me! We can go back to how it was, I know it! If I could just outrun this darkness, then you’d never have a reason to leave in the middle of the night because what we have would be enough!” Even just thinking about them left an ache in my core that I couldn’t push down. When I stood, the couch seemed to release me slowly, like a circus tent settling, its unseen ropes gradually loosening their tension.
“I’m taking a bath,” I said, the announcement feeling strangely heavy. “Sure,” he murmured, eyes still on the screen, “then maybe we can get something to eat.” I craved the water, needed to scrub off the suspicion that clung to me like a second skin. Immersed in the steaming heat, leaning against the cool tile, I closed my eyes. I wondered what secrets I would someday curate, while someone I loved drove around looking for me.
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