One Last Thing Before I Go (3 page)

“You want to go sit by the cabanas?” he says.

“Sure.”

As she walks ahead of him, he catches a glimpse of color, a flash of red on her shoulder.

“What’s that?”

“It’s just a rose,” she says defensively.

As far as tattoos go, it’s fairly restrained; a bloodred rose, with a single leaf, tattooed onto her scapula. Even shitty fathers can cry from something like that. But he has long since squandered any rights to paternal indignation, so he figures he might as well score a point.

“Nice.”

Casey smiles wryly, on to him. “You should see the one on my ass.”

“Jesus.”

“Focus, Silver. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“Such as?”

She turns to face him, still smirking, but her eyes are wide and he can see her trembling.

“Such as,” she says, “I’m pregnant.”

There are moments when you can literally feel the planet spinning beneath you, so much so that you instinctively need to hold on to something. He gently grabs Casey’s arm and looks into her eyes and they stand there, with the world coming apart around them, both of them waiting to see what it is that he is going to say.

CHAPTER 5

“W
ow
.”

That’s what he says. She doesn’t know what she was expecting, really. Drew Silver is not exactly famous for knowing what to say in a pinch. Or out of one. Ever, really. But in his defense, here are the things he didn’t say:

“Are you sure?”

“Who did this to you?”

“You’re not the girl I thought you were.”

He doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t yell, and he doesn’t look away. If there’s a perk to having such a fucked-up father, it’s that he’s in no position to judge. Silver looks right at her and takes hold of her arm, which normally would piss her off, but right then, having just said the words out loud for the first time, she kind of needs someone to grab her arm. And as soon as he touches her, she feels something, some long fossilized knot inside of her, shift and loosen.

He says “Wow” again. He doesn’t yell it, his jaw doesn’t drop, nothing like that. The “wow” is just filler as he absorbs this sad fact and all the secondary information that comes along with it, like someone who has spent a good part of his life absorbing sad facts, and she understands now that this is why she came to him.

And even though he’s a lousy father, and she knows he’ll almost definitely disappoint her sometime in the next five minutes, in this moment she could cry from how much she loves him, even as she hates herself for it. So she does. She cries. In front of these sad broken men and the half-naked hotties lying out over at the shallow end—and who lets those girls in here anyway? That Russian doorman acts like he’s guarding the White House, for God’s sake. It just goes to show you how far you can get if you’re rocking a nice set of tits.

And Silver, he pulls her into this kind of one-armed hug, like he’s not sure how to do it, like he’s scared he might break her, and how the hell do you go through life without learning the basic mechanics of a hug? Usually she hates it when her pity for him interferes with her anger, and she compensates with extra nastiness, but now she closes her eyes and disappears into the rough, weathered cotton of his T-shirt for a few moments while she gets her shit together. She breathes in his familiar smell, the one she thinks of as Eau de Deadbeat, a mixture of aftershave and talcum powder. And even as she holds on to him like she’s drowning, she can feel the familiar anger returning, like an old song that you’ve heard so many times it’s not even a song anymore, just a wasted pathway in your brain that you can never reclaim.

She feels the anger rising up inside her—at him, at herself—and she shakes herself out of his inept embrace, maybe a little more roughly than she’d intended. He takes a step back, confused. She knows this expression well—that dumb, startled look, like the world is simply moving too fast for him to keep up. It’s pretty much how he’s looked at her ever since puberty, like, once an ice-cream cone won’t do the trick, he’s out of his depth. She assumes it’s a look her mother got to know pretty well in the years before they divorced, although they’ve never really talked about that. As much as she despises Silver, she doesn’t let her mother talk shit about him anymore, not because she feels any loyalty to him, but because her mother is on a lifelong mission to exonerate herself with regard to the fucktrap of her first marriage, and that’s a bone Casey is just not ready to throw her. Even though she’s pretty sure her mother is right.

Case in point: After she gets the waterworks under control, she looks up at Silver, this man she’s come to in her moment of need, in defiance of all conventional wisdom. And Silver, he runs his fingers through his long, messy hair, rubs his jowls thoughtfully, and then says, “You want to get some ice cream?”

* * *

If being the valedictorian and the only girl in her grade to get into an Ivy League school isn’t irony enough, there’s this: Up until three weeks ago, Casey was a virgin. She didn’t even have a boyfriend.

She had one earlier in the year, the somewhat implausibly named Jake Prudence, but he broke up with her in March for a needlessly complex network of reasons that could all be summarily boiled down to the fact that she wouldn’t have sex with him. They’d get naked in his Jeep, or his bed when his parents were out, and he’d stick his fingers in her even though she’d hinted repeatedly that on worked better than in. Then he’d lie between her legs, grinding on her, and just as she began to feel the hot stirrings of something, he’d moan and she’d feel the sticky wetness explode across her belly, and that would be that.

“Did you have one?” he would say afterward.

“No,” she’d answer as she cleaned off her stomach with a baby wipe, the smell of his semen reminding her of the indoor pools where she’d spent so much of her free time over the last few years competing on the swim team.

And Jake would flash her this wounded look that said he wished she’d just be a sport and fake it once in a while. “You would have if I was inside you,” he would declare.

Somehow, she suspected that would be even less satisfying, if that were possible. In any case, she didn’t feel like surrendering her virginity to find out.

It was in these supposedly intimate moments that Casey found she liked him least. Jake was funny and honest and had a softness to him that she found endearing. But once they’d progressed to naked petting, their entire relationship seemed to become colored by his campaign to deflower her, and she found herself cast in the role of the reluctant prude, which seemed grossly unfair considering his lectures on the topic often came while she held his throbbing dick in her hand.

At some point, it became an unspoken ultimatum, and Casey opted out. Two weeks later Jake was with Lucy Grayson, who’d been a JCPenney model when she was younger, and who’d been with so many guys in their grade she was practically a rite of passage.

But somehow, despite holding the line with Jake, Casey still managed the trick of being, as far as she knew, the only valedictorian in the history of Washington Irving High School to deliver her speech not quite twenty minutes after peeing on a stick in the girls’ locker room. And two pages into her speech, she realized that she was still clutching the EPT stick in her hand up at the podium. And every time she looked down at her text, there they were, those two pink lines that laced everything she said with a secret irony. “And as we head out into the world, the only certainty is uncertainty. . . . Ultimately, we will become the sum of our choices, and our mistakes. . . . We can already see this life we hold so dear fading behind us, to be rediscovered one day as a memory to share with our own children. . . . Blah, blah, blah . . . the friendships made, the lessons learned, the experiences shared . . .” et cetera, ad nauseam.

And all the while, that stick of doom in her sweaty hand, tapping the podium as she turned the pages, and the thing inside her, that convergence of lust, apathy, and biology that even now must have been splitting and multiplying in her uterus like there was no tomorrow. She fantasized about tossing her prepared remarks, holding up the EPT, and issuing some heartfelt confession that would earn her the respect and sympathy of everyone in the room.
You think you’re scared? Check this shit out!
And after she finished, and Justin Ross came up with his black eye shadow and his guitar to sing Green Day’s “Good Riddance,” there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the room, and she would become something of a local legend.

When she was done, the auditorium erupted into the standard canned applause, and she saw her mother and Rich beaming at her. And way in the back of the room, against all odds, Silver, in jeans and black button down, standing against the wall, clapping. So when the tears came, as she made her way back to her seat, she couldn’t be quite sure exactly what she was crying about. Take your pick, right?

CHAPTER 6

“H
ow’d
your mother take it?”

“She’s OK.”

“Really?”

“I haven’t exactly told her.”

“Ah. Smart move.”

“You’re the only person I’ve told.”

“OK.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“You sound like my therapist.”

“You still go to therapy?”

“Nah. I gave up years ago.”

“Mental health isn’t for everyone.”

“Neither is contraception.”

“Well played, Silver.”

“Have you made a decision?”

“I decided I’m an asshole.”

“How far along are you?”

“Not very. When do you count from?”

“I don’t know. Conception, I think.”

“So, three weeks or so.”

“OK. So you have a little time.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“I think you should probably have an abortion.”

“Wow, Dad. That didn’t take very long, did it?”

“You asked me what I thought—”

“I mean, just come right out and say what you think, Dad.”

“I just did.”

“No thought at all to the life I have growing inside me.”

“Is that how you see it? As a life, I mean?”

“Yes. No. Sometimes. I don’t know. How do you see it?”

“How I see it doesn’t matter. You have to do what feels right to you.”

“What feels right to me is not being pregnant.”

“Don’t cry, honey.”

“Don’t tell me not to cry. I hate that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I mean, Jesus, Dad. This is like, the perfect time to cry. I’m fucking pregnant.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Can you tell me something?”

“Sure.”

“Does it upset you that I’m not a virgin?”

“It upsets me that you’re not seven years old anymore. It upsets me that I blinked and you’re already a woman, and I’ve missed a million moments I can never get back. It upsets me that I was a lousy father. You deserved better than that. But as for your virginity . . . I guess I just assumed that you were active by now. So no, that doesn’t upset me.”

“OK.”

“Are you crying again?”

“A little.”

“You don’t have to decide today.”

“I don’t want to decide. I want someone else to decide for me.”

“What does the, um, father say?”

“There is no father, because there’s no baby. Just a cluster of cells that, left to its own devices, might turn into one.”

“OK. So you don’t feel the need to tell him.”

“Look at you, identifying with the father. Seriously?”

“You just said there is no father.”

“There isn’t. It’s an immaculate cluster.”

“I’m not identifying with anyone. I’m just trying to keep up.”

“Well, try harder. Hey! Where are you going?”

“I’m going to get another ice-cream cone. You want one?”

“Two ice-cream cones in one sitting? Seriously? What’s your cholesterol like?”

“It’s a special occasion, right?”

“Yeah. I’m going to go now.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“Well, in your defense, there is no right thing to say.”

“Will you let me help you?”

“I might. Maybe you already have. I don’t know. I have to go be by myself and process all of this.”

“If you decide on an abortion, I’ll take you, OK?”

“There you go, stumping for the abortion again.”

“I’m just saying, if you don’t want to involve your mom and Rich.”

“Yeah, it would suck for you if Rich got to take me.”

“I’m sorry I offered.”

“Don’t be. I’d have written you off for good if you didn’t.”

“Then why are you giving me shit for it?”

“Because you deserve shit, Dad. Because you’re a shitty father, and just because you get to bail me out of this now, that doesn’t change anything.”

“So I do get to bail you out?”

“I was speaking hypothetically. In the event that you do.”

“I understand. Can I at least drive you home?”

“You don’t have a car.”

“I use Jack’s.”

“It’s OK. I have my own wheels.”

“Since when?”

“Mom and Rich got me a G35 for my graduation.”

“That was nice of them.”

“Mom’s still compensating for you. I milk it a little.”

“I would. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why’d you come to me?”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I care less about letting you down.”

CHAPTER 7

W
hen she’s
gone, he sits there, gutted like a fish. Casey has always been like that, so quick with the blade that only after she’s gone does the blood start to flow. They’d been sitting in Champs, the small coffee/sundry shop shoehorned into a kidney-shaped alcove in the back of the lobby. The shop is run by Pearl, a buxom Hungarian widow in her fifties who applies her makeup with a paintbrush and whose every move is punctuated by the rustle of nylons rubbing together and the Christmas jingle of a thousand golden bangles.

“Your daughter,” Pearl says in her almost comically accented English as she rearranges the inventory of headache remedies behind the counter. Aspirin is a big seller at the Versailles.

“Yes.”

“Beautiful girl. Nice legs. She’s going to get herself in trouble with those legs. My Rafi, he was more of a tit man.” She pauses to indicate her own massive cleavage, bolstered by an unseen system of pulleys and straps that must have long since carved permanent tracks into her back. “But fashions change. Now it’s all about skinny girls with the legs. You better watch out. A boy sees those legs, all he thinks about is spreading them. Right?”

“I’ll watch out.”

She shrugs. “Nothing you can do. Kids going to do what they want, right?”

“Right.”

Through a quirk they could never trace, instead of calling him “Daddy,” Casey called him “My Daddy” when she first learned to speak. He can see her now, marching joyously across his and Denise’s bed in nothing but her diaper, her small, round belly poking out like the world’s tiniest beer gut, saying “My Daddy!” over and over again, her high, excited voice pealing with laughter when he made a grab for her ankles.

“Hey, Silver. You okay?” Pearl asks him.

Even if he could suck in enough oxygen to speak, he would have no idea how to answer.

* * *

He has lost so many things: his wife, his home, his dignity, and, most famously, his job as drummer and co-songwriter for the Bent Daisies. Pat, Ray, Danny, and he had begun playing together after high school; punk, post-punk, and then something a bit more full-throated, skating up to the edge of pop. They played the rock clubs up and down the East Coast, cutting demos whenever they could scrape the money together for studio time.

Silver couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t been drumming. His mother always said she’d been able to feel him banging out beats in her womb. When he was four, he built himself a drum set out of buckets and boxes, setting it up next to his father’s stereo speakers, and he would drum along to the Beatles and Crosby, Stills & Nash using chicken skewers. They bought him a drum set when he was six, and started him on drum lessons, figuring he’d move on to something else within a few years. But the drums, it turned out, was the single lifelong commitment Silver would make. When he sat behind his kit all the restless parts of him—his throbbing legs, his fluttering heart, his racing mind—all came together under one unifying rhythm. It wasn’t something he understood consciously, but drumming was the only time Silver was at rest.

After Casey was born, there was a noticeable change in Silver’s songwriting. His ballads became grittier, more passionate. He was seeing the world differently. The Bent Daisies began to mature, and the roving A&R guys they’d been meeting for years took note. A year or so later, they were finally signed, in a small deal with a major label. Their first single, “Rest in Pieces,” rode one of those perfect accidental waves up the charts, and they were international rock stars for a few weeks, as these things go. Long enough to taste it and never forget.

Then Pat McReedy came down with a fatal case of front man’s disease and decided he would do better with a solo career. The three remaining Daisies, Danny Baptiste, Ray Dobbs, and Silver met for drinks to decide their next move, but they could see the truth in each other’s eyes. The only thing worse than not having your dream come true is having it come true for a little while. Ray moved down South to work for his brother-in-law and they never heard from him again. Silver still ran into Danny on gigs once in a while—they overlapped in some of the same wedding orchestras—where they would share a rueful grin, a lazy man-hug, and would occasionally, when the band heated up, throw old familiar riffs at each other that no one else could hear.

It would have been easier to swallow, he suspected, if Pat had crashed and burned, as they all expected (hoped) he would. But years later Pat is still out there in Los Angeles, winning Grammys and sleeping with movie stars, and Silver’s only consolation is the shrinking residual check he still gets every month for “Rest in Pieces,” which sadly remains his greatest source of income, his orchestra gigs and professional masturbation notwithstanding. Publicly, Danny and Silver wish Pat well. Quietly though, at gigs, when they’ve had enough from the open bar to loosen their tongues, they are not above expressing the sincere hope that Pat is, right at that moment, snorting that fatal cut of blow off some model’s ass, or sliding the business end of a shotgun past his pouty, front-man lips to the back of his throat. If Pat did kill himself, they’d both find it in themselves to say generous things when the VH1 film crew showed up.

* * *

Tonight he is playing a wedding with the Scott Key Orchestra. Silver slaps away at his kit, pretty much on autopilot, ignoring the one or two drum geeks that always stand on the side to watch. Every so often at these things, someone figures out who he is and he draws a slightly bigger crowd, but after a while they all come to realize that there’s nothing any more exciting about watching a once-famous drummer than any other drummer, and they go back to their arugula salads and filet mignon entrees.

They are seven pieces and two backup singers tonight. You do this long enough, it isn’t even music anymore, just trained monkeys being put through their paces. Scott stands at the mike, singing “The Way You Look Tonight” with too much lounge lizard lilt in his voice, compressing the lyrics and stretching the odd vowel for effect, and you just have to be thankful that Sinatra isn’t alive to hear it. Baptiste grins at Silver and rolls his eyes. Silver nods back and tosses in an offbeat fill that throws Scott, who misses his mark. Scott turns to glare at Silver, who smiles vacantly, playing dumb. Baptiste laughs. We are all losers, Silver thinks, each in his own way.

* * *

Once in a while, after a gig, he can get laid. If he hasn’t sweated too much, if he is wearing the larger tux, the one that manages to streamline his gut, if they’ve played a good set and the energy is up and there has been ample time for bar breaks, so that everyone in the band is feeling happier than their personal realities would normally dictate, if all of that has happened, then there are backup singers, dance motivators, waitresses. It all turns on a complex sliding scale of how badly everyone doesn’t want to go home.

Dana is one of the backup singers. It takes Silver three trips to load his drums into the back of Jack’s car, and when he’s done, Dana is still smoking in the parking lot. She is thirty-five or so, and a knockout at fifty feet; slender, with great legs and a luxurious mane of auburn hair. Only up close do you see how tired her eyes are, and a hardness in her features that has set in over time as life failed to live up to her expectations. One of life’s unassailable truths is that no one sets out to be a backup singer.

She takes off her shoes in his car. She’s been standing and swaying in six-inch heels for six hours. As he wordlessly steers them to the Versailles, she puts her feet up on the dash and cracks the window, her hair fluttering wildly around her. He can see in her profile the cheerleader she once was, the homecoming queen. There was a time when she had the world on a string; friends, the quarterback, and whatnot. Now she is going home with the fat marching-band geek just to feel alive, or at least less lonely. Maybe she doesn’t see it that way though, because if she did, she’d wait until the car had gathered enough speed, then throw open the door and hurl herself onto the thundering blacktop.

Once in his apartment, Silver rejoices invisibly. He has not had sex in quite some time, and getting them through the door is half the battle. He takes a quick shower, tending to his nethers with a bit more care than usual. Once out, he overapplies his deodorant and attempts to make sense of his untamable mess of hair. When he emerges, in boxers and T-shirt, she is lying on his bed, still in her short black dress, aimlessly channel surfing. She takes slow sips of the whiskey she’s poured herself, absently sucking the lone ice cube into her mouth then dropping it back into her drink again. In the blue light of the television she is beautiful again, and he experiences a surge of affection that has no place in these utilitarian proceedings. Although he’s known her for a while, he knows nothing about her. For instance, he made up the part about her being a cheerleader. For all he knows, she wore a scoliosis brace and stuttered.

She rolls into him as he lies down beside her, either voluntarily or because the mattress has shifted under his weight, and rests her head on his shoulder, her hair tickling his chin. He closes his eyes to inhale her shampoo, falling briefly but deeply in love even as he knows that tomorrow, in the light of day, he will have trouble making eye contact with her.

“You smell nice,” she says, her sung-out voice just above a whisper. “Like autumn.”

“Irish Spring.”

He watches her chest rise and fall with her breath, the soft roundness of her breasts gathering at the top of her dress, and he can feel things starting to stir down below. Then she turns her head to look up at him, and he could cry from the desolation in her eyes.

“Is it okay if we just lie here for a bit?” she says.

Not really, no
. “Sure.”

Teenage vampires skulk on cable. Outside, a truck horn blares. He watches Dana’s toes as they curl against his comforter and experiences what might be best described as homesickness, but he’ll be damned if he knows what or where it is that he’s missing. Tomorrow morning, with the skies still pink from the inevitability of sunrise, he will drive her back to the catering hall, where her small car will be sitting marooned in the vast empty lot like something lost, waiting to be claimed. The sight of it will sadden both of them in ways they couldn’t begin to explain.