He shook his head and smiled like I was asking him to go to the moon.
“I’ve been doing this too long to change now, Phoebe. Soon I’ll get better routes with better clients. Someone’s retiring. Soon we’ll have a better plan.”
“Right. Better this, better that, soon,” I said, disgusted, and went to bed hoping to bury my frustration and anger deep into the pillow.
Damn you, Mama, I thought. If you were running off, you could have at least taken me along. I fell asleep dreaming of it.
The next morning Daddy was up ahead of me and had my suitcase at the door.
“Can’t wait to get rid of me, can you?” I told him bitterly.
“You know that’s not so, Phoebe. You know what’s going on as well as I do. Don’t make this harder than it is for me. Or for yourself, for that matter,” he said.
Sullenly, I drank some juice, smeared some jam on a piece of toast, and drank a cup of coffee. He sat there turning the spoon around and around in his cup, his eyes down. This might very well turn out to be the last breakfast we have together, I thought, and despite myself, I started to feel sorry for him, imagining him all alone in this dump. What would he do for fun? What would he look forward to in his life now?
“You gonna go out with someone new?” I asked, and he looked up sharply.
“What?”
“Someone new? Mama’s gone for good, so why wouldn’t you?” I pursued.
When I was very young, I saw him and Mama behave more like a husband and wife, kiss each other, hold hands, laugh, and even dance. I had no idea what had changed it all. It seemed almost to have happened overnight.
“I wouldn’t go out with another woman while I was still married to your mother, Phoebe. That’s adultery.”
“Well, she’s doing it.”
“I’m not her,” he said.
“But you’re getting a divorce, aren’t you?”
He nodded slowly, making it look hard to do, like someone who didn’t want to face his troubles.
“So,” I said, shrugging. “It’s just a matter of paperwork before you can have some fun. Unless you’re just going to join a monastery,” I quipped. His eyes heated.
“That’s enough of that,” he said. “Contrary to what your mother might have drilled into your head, sex isn’t the end-all of all things, Phoebe. It’s a horse that pulls you along, maybe, but you gotta keep it from going wild. All you’ll do is end up like she will someday, crying over a glass of cheap gin in some dump bar, deserted by men who found younger women and dumped her like yesterday’s newspaper. Just keep that picture in your mind whenever you stop to think about her.”
There was no doubt that was what he envisioned, or hoped.
“You really hate her now, don’t you?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I really feel sorry for her, but the way I feel sorry for someone with a contagious disease. I don’t want to get too close
.”
“You two weren’t always like that, Daddy. What happened to change it?” I asked.
He raised his eyes in surprise again. I thought he was just going to tell me not to think about it or say something to pretend it wasn’t so, but he nodded slowly instead.
“I guess you’re old enough to know. This is hardly the first time she betrayed me with another man. I caught her with someone once before, someone I trusted, too, and in our own home!”
“Why didn’t you throw her out?”
“It’s not that easy, Phoebe. I was hoping it would be different,” he said. “She seemed remorseful, and I thought if I forgave her, we’d get back to the way we were. That didn’t happen, but there’s no sense talking about all that now. Let’s just think about the future.”
“Right,” I said, “the future. Like I have one waiting for me out there.”
“It doesn’t wait for you. You have to make it for yourself,” he said.