Dad told me, “You can do anything you want to!” which sounds really sweet, but he added, “Just remember that everything has consequences,” and suddenly the sugar becomes sticky, like a piece of gum you can’t finish, and it sticks to your lips and teeth and gums, -good luck spitting it out. ‘cause Dad always did what he wanted to. He ran away from home, he worked illegally across Europe, he married three times in a year, and he had me, abandoned me, came back.
His consequence was my hatred.
It was summer with the kind of heat that makes your muscles drowsy, and you can’t think of anything to do ‘cause everything requires moving. So I laid in bed, on top of the duvet, just below the open window, and I counted the clouds on the sky as Dad spoke to me.
He said he was sorry, like you do. That he shouldn’t have started drinking, and that he shouldn’t have left home, and that I was now a big boy, so big I could reach the branches of our tree in the garden. He used to pick me up from the tall grass and put me on it when he mowed the lawn, cut the roses, and burned the trash.
I watched him work, admired his broad back and strong arms, and I thought, There’s no other dad like Dad, and back then it was a compliment. I was proud that he was my dad.
But as he sat there, sobbing about the past, I was glad there were no dads like Dad. Dads are supposed to hang around and see you grow. They measure your height on the doorframe with a pencil, they take pictures of you playing in the garden, they cherish your drawings of monsters, and they tell stories of ghosts and wicked witches at night, trembling like they believe them themselves. They don’t spend ten years ‘popping by the shop for a newspaper’, and then come back with none.
“Alfred, are you listening?” he asked.
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