A Place In This Life

Chapter 6

There had always been a sense of embarrassment between myself and my father, as if he was afraid that I was embarrassed of him and vice versa. I could never figure it out, but it felt embarrassing to be myself around him, as if I was doing something wrong. Now there was even more reason to feel this way as he drove me back to Newport.

"That was some apartment," he said, starting a possibly bad conversation. I rolled with the punches.

"Yeah — they need a maid, don't you think?"

"Really, Natalie, it was kind of... gross," he said, trying to drop semi-hip words that I would respond to like a native tongue. Unfortunately for him, "gross" was neither hip nor anything close to native to me, but simply just was.

"Maybe they can't make cleaning a priority right now, with his... leukemia," I said, questioning how safe it was for someone with cancer to live like that. Wouldn't there be issues with germs? Then again, germs existed whether Lysol was present or not.

"I would think it compromises the immune system when you don't keep things clean, and frankly, his immune system looks like its pretty shot, sorry to say." My eyes opened wide, and I turned to face him. What was with everybody?

"You don't know how it is for him," I said, thinking it was wrong of him for saying that shit.

"But he seems like a nice boy, Natalie. It's sad. I never like seeing a young person sick."

We both went quiet for a few minutes.

"Dad, when grandma was sick, did you and mom think a lot about whether she would die, and when?"

He answered by lighting a cigarette and rolling down his window to create an armrest for his bad habit.

"Nobody wants to think the worst. Your mom was upset, but numb. I was just looking out for her, and she went through a tough period. Your grandma never accepted what was happening to her, and she took it out on her family, as you probably remember."

"I didn't think she would die," I said, recalling the drawn-out time it took for her to succumb to the cancer. We would get phone calls in the middle of the night, my mother and father scurrying for the phone in their underwear. There were also long moments spent with coloring books in hospital waiting rooms, my aunts taking turns waiting with me and my cousins. And then there was the hamburger incident. But never did I sit and think she would die, because grandma had always had her wits about her, and dammit to hell she was going to live. That's why she went through all that chemo, taking everyone with her on the descent into a hell of chemicals and tubing.

"Do you think it's weird that I'm hanging out with a boy who has cancer?" It was more like I wanted to know if there was anything wrong with pursuing a relationship with someone who was so...

"No, I don't, Natalie. You're being genuine. You look beyond the obvious and see the good in things. In that, you've got the best of them beat." There was a warm knowing that I was doing the right thing, satisfying the hollow that had been eating me from the middle outward.

My dad pulled the car in front of Todd's garage and waited as I slowly got out.

"I'll be back at 4:30. Call if you need me to come sooner. And have a good time," he said, putting the behemoth car in reverse and gunning it back up Lido.

I stood for a moment, looking up the stairs toward the closed door, my hands clenching a small handbag and bottle of water that had collapsed on itself from transference of the pressure I felt inside. Each step I took up the stairs felt like I was going toward a magnetic pull, while also struggling to escape the grip that made me want to turn around and run. Eventually, I knocked.