I have to admit that during Veronica’s dinner party I only thought of you as an easy lay. I sized you up in your stupid Eagles jersey and figured I could get you to f**k me, so I could pretend you were Tommy. I hadn’t done it in a long time. I no longer wanted to have sex with strangers, but you weren’t a stranger. You were handpicked by my own sister. You were a safe man with whom Ronnie was trying to set me up. So I figured I would begin to have sex with you regularly, just so I could fantasize about Tommy again.
But when you held me in front of my parents’ house, and when you cried with me, things changed—in a very dramatic way. I did not understand it at first, but as we ran together and ate raisin bran at the diner and went to the beach and became friends—simply friends, without any sex to complicate things—it was sort of nice in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I just liked being around you, even if we didn’t say anything.
I knew I had feelings for you when I began to cringe inwardly at the sound of Nikki’s name. It was obvious you were not ever going to get back together with your wife, so I called your mom and got her drunk at the local bar, and she told me everything about you. You didn’t see me, but I was in the driveway when she came home so loaded and you helped her into the house. I drove her home that night. After what happened to Tommy, I don’t drink at all. We’ve been meeting every week since, Pat. She needed a friend; she needed to talk to someone about your father. So I listened. At first I was just using her for information, but now we are sort of girlfriends. She did not know about the letters I was writing as Nikki, and she was really mad at me for a while after the Christmas episode, but she knows about this letter obviously, since she delivered it for me. She is a very strong and forgiving woman, Pat. She deserves better than your father, and maybe you deserve better than me. Life is funny like that.
I wrote those letters hoping to provide you with the closure I somehow found through casual sex after Tommy died. Please know I began the liaison scheme only after I was certain that Nikki would never agree to talk to you again under any circumstance. Maybe you will never be able to forgive me, but I wanted you to know I had the best intentions—and I still love you in my own f**ked-up way.
I miss you, Pat. I really do. Can we at least be friends?
Tiffany
Booyah!
When Danny finishes reading Tiffany’s latest letter, he sighs, scratches his Afro, and looks out my bedroom window for a long time. I want his reaction because he is the only person I know who doesn’t already have a strong opinion about Tiffany. Everyone else is obviously biased—even Cliff.
“So,” I finally say from my bed. I’m sitting with my back against the headboard and my cast propped up on a few pillows. “What do you think I should do?”
Danny sits down, opens up the Parcheesi box, and takes out the hand-painted wooden board and pieces my mother gave me for my birthday. “I feel like being red today,” he says. “What color you want?”
After I pick blue, we set up the board on the little table my mother put in the room for us when I first came home with a broken leg. We play Parcheesi like we always do when Danny visits, and it becomes obvious that he isn’t going to weigh in with an opinion regarding Tiffany, probably because he knows that only I can make this decision—but maybe because he just wants to play the game. He loves Parcheesi more than any man I have ever met, and when he lands on one of my spots and sends one of my pieces back to the start circle, Danny always points at my face and yells, “Booyah!” which makes me laugh because he is so goddamn serious about Parcheesi.
Even though I don’t really enjoy playing Parcheesi as much as Danny does—and he won’t answer any of my questions about Tiffany—it’s nice to have him back in my life again.
We play Parcheesi for so many hours—days pass, and my record against Danny grows to 32 wins and 203 losses. Danny is a supreme Parcheesi player, and the best dice roller I have ever met. When he says, “Papa needs a doublet,” he almost always rolls two sixes. Whatever Papa needs, Danny rolls.
Break Free of a Nimbostratus
A week after my cast has been removed, I stand alone on the footbridge in Knight’s Park, leaning my weight on the railing, gazing down at a pond I could walk around in less than five minutes. The water underneath me has a thin layer of ice on top, and I think about dropping rocks through it, but I do not know why, especially since I have no rocks. Even still, I want to drop rocks through the ice so badly, to puncture it, proving that it is weak and temporary, to see the black water below rise up and out of the hole I alone will have created.
I think about the hidden fish—mostly those big goldfish people stock the pond with so old men will have something to feed in spring and little boys will have something to catch in the summer—fish now burrowed in the mud at the bottom of the pond. Or are these fish burrowing just yet? Will they wait until the pond freezes completely?
Here’s a thought: I’m like Holden Caulfield thinking about ducks, only I’m thirty-five years old and Holden was a teenager. Maybe the accident knocked my brain back into teenager mode?
Part of me wants to climb up onto the railing and jump off the bridge, which is only ten yards long, only three feet above the pond; part of me wants to break through the ice with my feet, to plunge down, down, down into the mud, where I can sleep for months and forget about all I now remember and know. Part of me wishes I never regained my memory, that I still had that false hope to cling to—that I still had at least the idea of Nikki to keep me moving forward.