With a Little Luck: A Novel (36 page)

Yeah. I’d better fight through this.

I walk to the corner and convince a guy to let me borrow his phone to call Triple A. And while I wait for them to show up, I think about my morning and realize that the mug breaking wasn’t number three; I’d forgotten to count the alarm not going off. So essentially this has been bad thing after bad thing in no particular order.

When I finally get back in my car, I have three missed calls from my dad.

I dial his number, and a stranger answers.

“Who’s this?” I ask.

“This is Lenny,” the voice says. “I’m a friend of your dad’s.”

“Is he okay?” I ask, panicked, my heart speeding up to DefCon 5 mode.

“Your dad got arrested. He gave me his phone and told me to call you. He needs bail money.”

“Slow down—arrested for what?” I ask, my head now spinning.

“I—uh … he had a bench warrant for a ticket. He needs five hundred dollars.”

“So … okay, where is he?”

“I can just meet you and you give me the money and I’ll go to the bail bondsman and get him out. He doesn’t want to take up too much of your time.”

“It’s fine,” I say, thinking at this point I should now call Indie 108 and ask if I can do my walk-through tomorrow. I got rear-ended, for Pete’s sake. I have … Well, there’s a scratch on the
bumper. Maybe they’ll understand. “Look, um … Lenny, right? Where’s my dad?”

“I’ll just meet you,” he says again.

“What jail is my father in?” I ask, and I hear rustling.

“I don’t know,” he says.

That doesn’t sound right.

“Lenny, how are you going to bail him out of jail if you don’t know what jail he’s in?”

“I have it written down on a piece of paper somewhere.”

“Then get the paper and give me the info,” I say, losing my patience.

Silence.

“Hello?” I notice the call was dropped. I call back, but the guy just lets it ring through to voicemail.

So someone’s trying to put one over on me, and it sure as hell appears to be my dad. Really bad day to try that.
Think I’m that dumb, Dad? Really? Let’s test it out
. I drive to a pay phone and call my dad’s cell … and, yep, my father answers.

“Dad?”

He says nothing for a few seconds. It worked. He didn’t expect it to be me calling, because my cellphone number would have shown up.

I’ve never been more disappointed to be right.

“Hi, baby,” he says, trying and failing to sound natural. He knows I know.

“Did you just have your friend lie to me to get five hundred dollars?”

“Baby … I’m so sorry. I … I knew I couldn’t just ask. I know how upset you were last time, and I felt like a loser.”

I’m seething. He lied to me, tried to get me to give money to a stranger because I thought he was in jail?

“You felt like a loser? Really, Dad? And you thought the appearance of being in jail was somehow less loserish?”

“Cookie, I’m sorry,” he says. “I really am. Look, I’m going to pay you back this time. I just need it today. I woke up at eleven-eleven. You know what that means. And when I looked in the papers I saw that there’s a horse running today named Make a Wish. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is. Sweetie, you know how this works. It’s golden. Everything’s lined up, and that horse is gonna win. And then I’ll be able to pay you back big. It’s just that—”

“Dad,” I interrupt. “Stop.”

“Sweetie, look, I know that—”

“No. Just stop. I need to say this.”

He waits. I take a deep breath.

“Dad, I love you. I love you so much. And Dad, I cannot do this. I will not do this. This ends right now. I can’t keep taking care of you. It’s over.”

Silence. I take another deep breath and continue.

“And Dad, this stuff … all of it, it isn’t true, this ridiculous, childish way of thinking. I’ve had the worst morning I’ve had in as long as I can remember, and it wasn’t because I did something I shouldn’t or I forgot to touch the wall when I left or took my lucky necklace off. You know why I’ve had this morning?”

“Why?”

“Because sometimes shit happens.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long while. And I don’t say anything, either. I’m standing at a disgusting pay phone that I had to use to trap my own father into answering his phone.

And this is all a lot to take in, and it hurts in places I didn’t think existed. But at the same time, on some level, it’s unbelievably freeing.

He speaks first. “You’re right.”

Daddy, I love you, but you’re not getting off that easy. Not this time
. I find myself screaming into this nasty germ-encrusted phone, “The guy who can’t get himself out of bed and go to a real job and has his friends call me up and scare me half to death thinking he’s dead at first but then reassuring me that no, he’s not dead, he’s just in jail … which is a total lie, because he really just needs to borrow money and doesn’t want to ask for it. Again. And I base everything I do on wisdom passed down from this guy?”

“I know,” he says. And the words come slowly, heavily, and I can hear his throat tightening up, I can tell he’s starting to cry. “You’re right. You’re one hundred percent right. Baby, I don’t want you to be like me. Don’t. Don’t ever be like me. I don’t know what happened to me, and I’m not gonna change. But you can.”

I don’t know what to say. I feel so sad for him. But there’s only one thing I can say, for both of our sakes.

“Dad, I’m sorry. And I do love you. But I’m not giving you the money.”

“I know, baby,” he says, and he actually sounds relieved. He’s really crying now, and it’s breaking my heart. “I don’t want you to. I want you to be better than me. Which isn’t hard, I know. I love you, cookie.”

“Goodbye, Dad,” I say, and hang up.

In a few minutes I’ll call the station and tell them I’m running late but I’m on my way. I’m not going to rearrange my life because of bad omens and bullshit reasoning.

But first I take five, lean back against my car, and feel myself calming down, getting it together. I can handle this.

That was excruciating. That was amazing.

That was the best worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.

The Indie 108 folks couldn’t be nicer. They show me the break room and take me to the kitchen. They warn me about the bad coffee, and it’s pretty much like every other radio station in the world in that they all feel like home to me.

Only one other place feels like home, come to think, and that’s with Ryan. Sending that email was a chickenshit move. Ryan reading my letter, saying he’d give the girl a second chance. That’s great, but would he give me one? I mean, it was nice to hear that he’d be forgiving in some hypothetical situation, but I’m not a hypothetical. This is me, and I want him back.

As soon as I sign my contracts and leave Indie 108, I find myself driving to KKRL.

He’s still on the air. I have my phone out as I walk to the lobby. I wait to dial so my call doesn’t get dropped in the elevator, but once the doors open on his floor, I hit the speed dial. I tell Randy, the board op, to patch me through but not to tell Ryan it’s me. Randy, always up for some fresh drama, doesn’t hesitate.

“This is Ryan. You’re on the air,” he says, and I take a deep breath.

“So about that letter you read with the girl asking about second chances,” I say. I’m peeking into the booth, staying out of his view. For now.

“Um … yeah?” he replies. “I think … Screwed Up, right? A little while ago?”

“Right. You believe in second chances, even after some seriously obnoxious behavior?”

How can he not recognize my voice?
“Well …” he says. “How obnoxious are we talking?”

“I’m talking really obnoxious,” I say. “Like headache-inducing.
Like doubt-inspiring. Like relationship-killing. Like calling someone’s baby uglier than a pug to her face. That level of obnoxious.”

Is that a tiny smirk on his face? The cat’s maybe out of the bag. It’s hard to tell with me not yet ready to be seen. I’m still gauging his response.

“That’s … Yeah, that’s pretty obnoxious.”

I go on. “Believing in the tooth fairy, but being afraid that if she leaves an even number of bills under your pillow you’ll die in your sleep. That sort of thing. Do you think you know where I’m coming from?”

He doesn’t yet know where I’m coming from. Or he does, but he’s not sure what I’m getting at.

“Well, caller, I’m starting to get a vague idea. But I really think it depends on the person. I mean, there’s obnoxious and then there’s obnoxious. And Lord knows I’ve dealt with someone who could be like that at times.”

“That’s fair, but what if Queen Obnoxious wanted a second chance? And she swears she’ll be less obnoxious?”

“How do I know she won’t be obnoxious again? I mean, she’s really good at it.”

“You’d have to take her word. You have to take into consideration that this very private person is calling into a radio station to publicly grovel. That’s gotta count for something.”

“Well, technically … being a voice on the radio isn’t exactly outing herself.”

Oh, fine, you bastard. Want to flip it on me like that?

I tap on the window, and he nearly falls out of his chair.

“Gurrrk” is his on-air reply, which is mighty impressive from the “Doctor.” But his face lights up. He smiles. God, I missed that smile.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, recovering impressively, motioning
for me to take a seat in the guest chair. “We have here for you now, in the studio, in the flesh—well, in the flesh but wearing clothes, I assure you … the one and only Berry Lambert!”

I sit but keep talking into the phone. We’re locking eyes, and I’m not sure how this is going to turn out but, man, I’m glad I’m doing this.

“So,” I continue, “what if this girl is willing to admit that she only ended things because she believed that everything happened in threes? And because you were Guy Number Three in a string of bad dating experiences … Much as it pains her to admit this, and admit it publicly … she thought you couldn’t possibly be Mr. Right.”

Ryan cocks an eyebrow. “Um … wow. Well, I guess I’d say that was far and away the dumbest reason to end a relationship ever.”

“You’d be right.”

“Okay,” he says. “We finally agree on something.”

“So if this girl realized that she was being silly … and wanted a second chance … on a scale of one to ‘she drove me crazy,’ where would you fall on getting back together?”

“Oh, she definitely drove me crazy,” he says.

“She wasn’t all bad, was she?”

“No,” he admits. “She was pretty awesome. Actually, she was the most awesome woman I’ve ever met. I mean, when she wasn’t being insane.”

“Okay. We can definitely work with awesome. Talk to me. Ratio of awesome to insane.”

“Okay … sixty-forty awesome.”

“Sixty-forty!”

“Fine … fifty-fifty,” he says, and I choke on my own spit.

“That’s worse!”

“Seventy-thirty?”

“Okay.” I nod. “Seventy percent is pretty good.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It is. But what’s to say that this girl won’t find a penny on the ground and take it as a sign to delete everything on my DVR?”