“Don’t want to ruin her big moment.” He fidgets some more, catching my eye and looking away. I lean closer.
“Dad? Dad. Look at me.”
He hesitates, then looks at me full on. Even in the dusk, I can see that his pupils are pretty much the size of dinner plates. “What have you taken? Valium? Something prescription?”
“I’m fine,” he says, straightening up. “I’ve just got to make it to the election and then I’ll go into rehab and we’ll all be a family again.”
“I’ll be living two states away.”
He slumps a bit. “Yeah. Yeah, I knew that.”
“What are you doing here, Dad? Are you really meeting Mom or did you drag me out of the busiest night of the year just so you could tell me you’re going to rehab in six months?”
He frowns again, looking back up at the moon. “There were going to be cities up there. No poverty, no war. That’s how it was supposed to be.”
“Okay, I’ve got to go. I’ll get Mel to drive you home–”
“I need to borrow some money,” he blurts out.
Well, that stops me. “You what?”
He sighs. “The campaign didn’t think it was a good idea for me to have full access to the accounts.”
He shrugs, like he can’t blame them. “I’m short of cash. I don’t want to ask your mother.”
I don’t know what to say. What can I say? I’m not even angry at him. Just so sad I can barely look him in the face.
I take out every tip I’ve collected that evening and hand him the whole wad of cash.
“Thanks–”
“Go wait in your car,” I interrupt, still not looking at him. “Do not drive it.”
I turn my back on him.
As my dad lurches into the parking lot, I step into the entryway of the restaurant, grabbing the front door handle. A small red light catches the corner of my eye. I look over. Behind some bushes, in the shadows–
Nathan, smoking.
“I’m sorry,” he says, quickly. “I saw you talking to him and I was going to say hello but then…”
He doesn’t finish, but I know. He was going to say hello, but then he heard my dad being
embarrassing and tragic and he got stuck there, not wanting to alert us to his presence by going either backward or forward.
“How much did you hear?” I say, heat in my voice.
“Mike, I–”
“I can’t believe you smoke,” I say. “It’s disgusting. It stinks. You get breath like a dog. And it won’t kill you fast enough.”
“It was an accident, Mike, I swear.”
My chest is burning, like it’s being squeezed in a molten vice. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
I don’t look at him once the rest of the night, even though he sits with Henna after Mel takes Meredith and my dad home. At the waitress station, Tina uses every opportunity to shout at me, but I don’t listen to her. I’m too busy repeatedly counting ketchup bottles and wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead.
CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH, in which Satchel cries in her room, taking the blame for all her friends’ deaths, even though everyone she knows assures her that it’s not her fault; Dylan knocks on her window; he comforts her, finally kissing her; she stops him, says she understands his desire for her, but she’ll have to break his heart; they’re surprised by a knock at the front door; her mother yells up that it’s second indie kid Finn; Dylan looks surprisingly serious, and asks, “How do we know we can trust him?”