Usually at this point, I called Milton.
But Milton and I were no longer together.
Our mutual friends were too busy telling me I was naïve and judgmental for not giving him a second chance. Grayson and Ava were great, but I didn’t know them well enough to dump my personal problems on them. And Célian…a bitter chuckle escaped my lips. I would rather die before confiding in him that I needed help.
Forty minutes later, I decided to go back home to recalculate my moves. I went into our building and found Dad sleeping in the aged-wood-scented stairway. His bald head was perched against the bannister, drool leaking from the corner of his mouth. He looked serene and fragile, like a piece of old art.
I shook him awake.
“Where have you been?” I was shouting and shaking, and I didn’t even care that I scared him.
His eyes snapped open and he blinked, startled. Tears of relief began to flood down my cheeks and neck, and I knew there was no point in wiping them just to make room for more. I held onto him like an anchor—both of us sinking down to a lonely, stain-carpeted stair—and buried my head in his neck. The overwhelming notion that sometime in the near future I wouldn’t be able to do this any more squeezed my throat, suffocating me, and I heaved.
My father was going to die.
I was going to be left all alone in this world.
“I’m okay, Jojo. I’m fine. See? Look.” He wiggled his hairless eyebrows, tapping his chest like it was an old TV that coughed out bad signal. “I just went to visit Mrs. Hawthorne. She was under the impression that I’d sent her flowers. Can you believe that?”
I could. Because I was the one who’d left them at her door. Mrs. Hawthorne was fairly new to our building. She’d moved out of her huge Rochester place when her husband died, seeing as her kids were married and out of the house.
“Anyway,” he chuckled. “Must’ve gotten tired on my way down and crashed. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
I was torn between letting myself break down completely front of him and keeping myself together for him. I clutched his cold cheeks and angled his head so we looked at each other. My dad was a big guy. He’d worked as a roofer in Brooklyn his entire life before cancer came barging through our door. But somehow along his journey with the disease, he’d become scrawny. So frail, in fact, that whenever he accompanied me to the supermarket, I was the one supporting him—the man who’d carried me on his shoulders until I was in first grade.
“Excuse me, little girl, did you follow me?” he’d always said when he put me down.
I always laughed. “You carried me, silly!”
“Huh…” He’d stroked his chin. “Whaddaya know? You’re light as a feather.”
I helped Dad into our apartment. No matter the weather outside, it was still subzero, somehow. I was playing chicken with the thermostat, trying to walk the line between a sensible electricity bill and not freezing to death in this particularly chilly spring. It’s like New York had decided to make life even more difficult on us. I wondered how it felt to be Célian, who probably had heated flooring in his bathroom and never had to experience any discomfort.
I pondered what my boss’s apartment might look like as I made Dad chicken soup, sans the chicken. We ended up watching a rerun of SNL under blankets in the living room. Some might call it a sad state of affairs for a woman in her early twenties to be hanging out with her dad on a Friday night, but there was nothing I could think of that would be better. Even though we were both silent, I drank in his presence, so acutely aware of the elephant in the room.
“Milton has been looking for you,” he said when I got up and stretched after the show was over.
My heart missed a beat. Countless times, I had wondered if I should give Milton a heads-up about my father not knowing about our breakup. But since he was seeking me out so actively, I figured talking to him, no matter the capacity, would just encourage his cheating ass.
“Oh?” I hoped it sounded like, Oh, he has? and not Oh, I forgot to tell you. We broke up a month ago because he was screwing his boss while I was tending to my sick dad. But hey! Now I’m screwing mine, too. The circle of life, anyone?
“Called me on my cell. Asked if I could tell you to get back to him. I’m sure you have by now, but I just thought you should know. Will we be seeing him this weekend?”
Dad fingered his empty bowl of soup and sucked on the leftovers. He liked Milton. Every time I asked him why, he said, “Because he is smart enough to love my daughter.”