How I Met My Father [1]

[1]

                My knees buckled as they readjusted to my weight after I stepped out of my mom’s van. Interlacing my fingers and arching my back like a cat, it felt good to stretch after the long ride from Hamilton to New York City. Mom wrapped her arm around my shoulders and grinned at our new home. We had never lived in a condo before, but I guess our old ranch houses in Virginia were never really our style.

                As far as I know, most sixteen year old girls would be upset about moving away from the same miniscule, traditional, population-nine-hundred town they’d lived in their whole life. To leave behind every old memory and best friend they ever knew. I, on the other hand, am not going to start this off on a bad foot. Not at all did I mind moving. The odds of me finding a close acquaintance in the sea of Lauren Conrad wannabes in my hometown weren’t too great. As for memories- I was glad to leave those behind.

                When I was eleven, my parents split up. Being the young, naïve, only child I was, I blamed myself for the whole crisis and went into my own state of tween depression. That was probably when I started to drift away from my childhood friends to spend all my time comforting my mother, who gained full custody in the divorce. A major part of the argument was that my dad never wanted a kid. That was okay; I never really wanted a dad. At least not a dad like him, anyway.

                Thinking back, it wasn’t really the divorce that set it off for me. My parents were always fighting, and at first, I thought their separation would make everything better. It might have been the disappointment that made me hit rock bottom. When they were married, the disputes were about money. Dad held a somewhat-steady job at an auto shop, while my mom was a budding writer. Every night at 5:42, my father would come home from work to find Mom on our old PC that was possibly older than I. He would open the fridge, take a swig of Budweiser, and scold, “Susan, when are you going to get a real job?”

                Mom always maintained her composure for the first few blows coming from my ornery father, responding with something like “I’m working on it right now, dear,” or “When I lose all sense of vocabulary and get a mullet. Then I’ll get a ‘real job’,” when she was in a sarcastic mood.

Dad would suck down more beer and snap back, “Well you’re the one who wanted a kid so bad. Now you gotta pay for it. You wanna see how much that kid racks up every month? I can show you, and it ain’t pretty.”

“Roger!” My mother would hiss. “Don’t say things like that. Juliet is our daughter and we both love her.”

Dad would let out a smoker’s cackle and respond, “I would love her a lot more if she wasn’t so damn expensive.” By this time, my thoughts were so muffled by tears and sobs, I wouldn’t be able to hear any more.

After they broke up, the fighting only got worse. Neither Mom nor Dad agreed to move out for months because they both believed the house was still theirs, along with everything in it. In the end, they finally made an agreement that Dad could have everything except for the house and me. Dad always mocked Mom’s decision, probably out of disbelief.

“You idiot! What are you going to do with an empty house and spoiled brat kid?” I watched him taunt her one day, so close that I could smell the corned beef on his breath and feel his saliva on my face just from looking at them.

“Well, I would give you the house, too,” Mom responded, “but I need a place to take care of my Juliet. She’s all that really matters to me.” She would add a little acid for him and a little sugar for me in that last statement. As far as I knew, that was the last thing she ever said to him, because at that, Dad walked out, allowing us all to move on with our lives.

I always loved the way Mom called me “my Juliet.” While everyone else found it sickening to add a sappy pet name to an already cheesy name, it made me feel cherished and just about made up for my father’s neglect. I was also honored to be named after a character of Shakespeare, my mom’s favorite writer. She and I were best friends, partners. We didn’t need Dad- we didn’t need anybody. As soon as we rebuilt our lives in Virginia, we packed them right up and set out to start over in New York City and, to sum it up, I couldn’t have been happier.