Why wasn’t my father more fucking concerned about me? Why didn’t he think about what this was doing to me?
Ariane and Barbra huddled together at the oven. My father was cross-eyed, lighting up.
‘Don’t you have to go to work today?’ I asked him.
‘Let’s call your sister.’
‘Why?’
My mother and Abigail would not want to know about this. They wouldn’t want to know about the sordid scene last night either, shyster smoke, girlfriends intertwined. Abigail, especially, would be horrified. Nineteen years old, my sister was the only one of us who had totally cut out Barbra from her mind.
My father lobbed his phone at me. ‘Check when the plows are coming through.’
Abigail said that she did not have time for liars. Liars disrupted her focus. She called Barbra a leech.
I was knee-deep in leeches. Leech-liars triggered my thinking, my cock getting hard.
The kettle shrieked. What the fuck were Barbra and Ariane doing? My father was watching the asses of my girlfriends. God, I needed to calm myself, stop the chaos: think.
‘You making coffee there, Barbra? A bisl chalav. Todah rabah.’
‘I need to talk to you,’ I hissed at my father, who sucked on his first cigarette in thirty fucking years again and again.
‘Just a sec,’ said my father, proud of his Hebrew, trying to get Barbra’s attention.
I hissed my truth. ‘Now.’
But everything felt too late. There was no time for now. It was too late for some kind of alignment with my father. I’d been trying too hard. I’d soaked up his methods of control. Like, my whole entire life I’d soaked in this brine. Like, the way he could talk himself out of anything – anything – by framing himself as the hero. My father’s mock self-deprecation, bad smoke inside our kitchen. The way he talked to my mother, the way he talked to me.
‘Chalav and a bisl tsuker. Like a latte, okay? Sugar’s right there. I like a little latte.’
Like Kafka, I hated my father. Then the shyster walked in.
‘Who’s this?’ said my father, genuinely surprised.
The shyster wore a matted red terry-cloth robe. His hair was all out, wiry white and down to his shoulders. He entered the kitchen to shake my father’s hand.
I was riveted by my father’s reaction, how he received the Frenchman as a threat to his kingdom. He refused the hand and popped up like a jack-in-the-box.
‘You slept here? Barbra?’ My father was suddenly hostile, completely confused.
‘Dr. Christof Laliberté. I speak Hebrew and Amharic. A little Arabic, too.’
My father looked at me, his lips downturned. Involuntarily, I smiled. My father took a stress drag.
‘I don’t understand,’ my father said. ‘I’ll be honest with you.’
‘I do mediation,’ said the shyster. ‘My specialty.’
I laughed out loud. Cock fight! My father rushed at me, smoking. He gripped my T-shirt to yank m
e out of the kitchen with him. I saw Ariane looking at us over her shoulder. It was totally clear to me what Ariane was thinking: my father’s aggression was mine, too, all mine.
My father huffed on his cigarette. ‘They call that schmuck out there a mediator?’
His clown face was morphing, lips encircled with stubble.
Schmuck was better than shyster. My dad was always outperforming me.