Eliza Hammond, April 6, 2018

♫ Remind Me - Röyksopp ♫

“Ding, ding ding.”

“Ding, ding ding.” Ugh.

“Ding, ding ding. In one-point-five miles, turn left.”

I cracked open my eyes and stretched. Those few seconds after waking up, when I hadn’t yet remembered who I was, were the calmest I’d experienced all night. It was with great reluctance that I emerged back into the land of the living. “Mmm,” I grumble-yawned. “Are we close?”

“In half a mile, turn left,” intoned the clear-set voice of my father’s GPS system. “Your destination will be ahead on the right.”

Dad sat in the driver’s seat. It was moved as close to the wheel as possible; he wouldn’t be able to see the windshield if it wasn’t. “Almost there, Emmett,” he affirmed, his eyes firmly on the road. “Passed the state line a few minutes ago.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry, dad. This is all my fault.”

His distressed expression, which had remained plastered on his face since we’d left Grand Rapids in a hurry, began to pacify. His eyes even crinkled a little. It didn’t last; the sympathy vanished as quickly as it appeared. “We’ll talk about it when we get inside.” How ominous!

We pulled silently into the driveway. My father normally floated through life in an ignorant malaise. That normally meant not paying attention when my mom yelled at me, and not listening when I complained. Not tonight. Tonight, he parked perfectly perpendicular to the curb. Tonight, he didn’t crack a single joke as he opened the trunk and got our bags. Because tonight, we knew things were different.

I felt weird, paranoid and stressed. Everything felt hyper-salient. Every word my mother said was lodged deep in the folds of my brain. Above me, the night sky was clearly visible, stars twinkling away as though nothing had happened. They used to soothe me, as a child. I’d count them with my fingers when I had trouble falling asleep. I’d try to find Mars and Venus in the night sky. Hold my thumb in front of the lights and watch them eclipse. Today, that sky felt terribly imposing. A thousand eyes picked me apart. Worthless boy. Don’t you understand how you’ve torn this family apart? Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe I was too small to be worthy of their scrutiny. Too small to be worth gazing upon at all. I rushed through the yard to the front door and rang the bell.

‘Ding, dong,’ the doorbell said. It wasn’t cold out, but I was shivering. Come on, already. ‘Ding, dong. Ding, dong.’ I could feel the stars burning a hole in my back.

What felt like an hour later, my grandmother opened the door. This time, she was dressed in a bright polka-dot skirt and a T-shirt that read ‘Sometimes, you just gotta goof out!’ Her usual eccentricities. Apparently, someone didn’t get the memo that tonight was supposed to be different. “Hi, mom,” my dad said, lugging our suitcases up the yard behind him. It was a harder task than you might think; my grandma never mowed her lawn. ‘Why would I destroy all that local wildlife for a field full of stupid grass?’ she’d questioned during one of her surprisingly-enrapturing rants. On cue, my dad started cursing at his suitcase, which had caught a wheel on my grandmother’s wild peony patch (the Indiana state flower, doncha know). He pulled it away angrily and met me at the door.

“Hi, grandma,” I mumbled, my mind still half-vacant. She pinched my cheek, right where… nevermind. It wasn’t important. Don’t think about it, Emmett.

“Can we stay with you for a while?” my dad asked. His voice was firm as it had been all night, but his eyes silently begged her to accept. “Prudence and I, uh… had a fight.”

“Again?” my grandma pried. That was enough to shock me out of my ennui.

“‘Again?!’” I echoed. The hell did she mean, ‘again?’

My dad looked even more stressed out. “We’ll talk about it inside,” he repeated, enunciating each word as though it was precious. “Uh…” he turned towards his mother, apprehensively. “May we please come inside?”

My grandmother just smiled pleasantly and waved us into her home. “Of course, Lawrence. Stay as long as you like.”

Eclectic was possibly the mildest word to describe the elder Hammond household. On the outside, it was mid-century modern, all sharp lines and glass panes. The inside looked like Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin, provided it had been ransacked by birds. The wooden rafters that crisscrossed the tall ceiling were covered in scratch marks and fairy lights, and my grandma’s knitting supplies were in piles so tall they’d collapsed under their own weight. Her house was potentially the worst place for us to have fled to. It was not fit for guests.

“I’m going to bed,” I grumbled. I wasn’t angry (at least not at my dad), but I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. I walked toward the guest room, which was once my dad’s childhood bedroom. I heard my name mentioned somewhere behind me, but I was both criminally uninterested and freakishly tired. The bedroom was stuck in 1986, equipped with a lava lamp and an unnecessary amount of Rubik’s Cubes. The walls were plastered with posters, mostly for my dad’s favorite films as a teenager: Full Metal Jacket, Back to the Future, and, weirdly enough, Howard the Duck. There was a surprising amount of Howard the Duck memorabilia, actually. Weird, but I wasn’t in the headspace to judge. I just flumped on the soft duck-print comforter and passed out within seconds.

After a short sleep full of half-remembered nightmares, I woke up to the sound of a toilet flushing. I wasn’t normally this light of a sleeper, but I guess I was still a little skittish. It was definitely after midnight, but still hours out from dawn. The only lights in the foreign bedroom were the moon and the stars (oh, and the lava lamp). I tossed and turned beneath the night sky’s prying eyes. My restless mind kept me from getting comfortable, and I eventually figured I wasn’t going to get any more rest. So I got up and circuited the house, looking for a distraction from the horrors of consciousness and the burden of memory.

I found it in the photographs. On the faux-wooden walls of the main corridor hung photo after photo of my grandparents. They made a strange couple. Caleb Hammond was a strong, well-built ginger from a wealthy Irish family (possibly probably definitely tied to the mob). Mamori Hammond, née Tanaka, was a foot shorter than her husband and grew up at least ten times as poor. Caleb was a devoted husband, father, and grandfather, and we all missed him dearly. Especially my grandma, who now lived alone in a house they’d bought as newlyweds in the sixties. I’d once asked her how my grandfather’s parents reacted to their marriage. ‘They told him he could marry whomever he wanted… as long as they weren’t Anglican.’ Pretty progressive, for the sixties.

If I hadn’t visited my grandma’s house before, I might have been scared out of my mind. It was a funhouse that somehow combined the ugly parts of every American architectural style, from New England colonial to whatever Michael Graves’ whole deal was. And the place was filled with artifacts: strange statues with glowing eyes, and pictures with piercing gazes that followed you down the hall. But I found it homey and comforting and warm in all the ways I desperately needed. Every weird interior design choice, every haunted photograph, captured a fragment of my grandparents’ bottomless familial love*.

(*Available at Olive Garden for $14.99.)

I eventually settled on the living room couch, carefully pushing the knitting needles out of the way. The scarf my grandmother was working on had her husband’s name embroidered around the edges. Would I ever experience the kind of love they had for each other? To exist shamelessly and flamboyantly, the way my grandmother did? It felt like a pipe dream, achievable only for someone far less flawed and far more stable. Tears started coming, and then sobs. Giving up on distraction, I put my head in my hands and let it all out. It was the first time I’d cried in years.

Crying can be awfully therapeutic. This was not one of those times. I hysterically heaved into the crocheted pillows that lined the arms of the couch, probably ruining my grandma’s not-so-careful stitchwork. It didn’t help. Just as sleep only postponed the reality of my condition, crying failed to solve anything. My mother had virtually disowned me, and my dad…? I didn’t have much faith in Mister ‘Let’s talk about this later.’

As I came up for air, I felt a hand gently rubbing my back. I thought everyone was asleep! I turned around with a start and nearly headbutted my dad. He looked nearly as bad as I felt; worse, maybe. His eyes were bloodshot, on account of forgetting to blink the whole drive down here. His hair was unkept and shaggy, his shirt was on backwards, and, I swear to god, he had jowls. Old ass.

Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. He just gave me this look, halfway between pity and anger but somehow combining the worst parts of both. It made me feel small. It made me feel ugly. I closed my eyes and tried to block out the piercing gaze he’d adopted from my mother. I leaned my head into his side and tried to cry again–to let out something, anything–but I came up empty-handed. Empty-eyed? Dry-ducted? Whatever.

As I caught my breath, he finally spoke, in a frustrated voice not dissimilar to the seriousness of the car. “What the heck, Emmett? Taking black market hormones?”

Geez. He saw me bawling my eyes out and his first thought was to yell at me? Apparently, being completely abysmal at comforting broken people ran in the family. “Gray market,” I corrected, my voice hollow from years of puberty and fifteen whole minutes(!) of crying. A surpringly long time, y’know, considering.

“Black, gray, whatever.” My dad looked like he was going to yell, but then he took a deep breath, and his eyes crinkled again. “I’m at a loss, Emmett. I want to understand, but I don’t. You risked your health taking drugs you didn’t understand, hoping that it would, what? Make you less masculine? Why would you do that to yourself?”

Sometimes, during arguments with my family, I’d volley back insults until I was red in the face. Even when I was blatantly in the wrong (which didn’t happen often (I’m right all the time)), there was a stubborn part of me that refused to budge an inch. Other times–particularly the instances when my mother broke down over petty things; rampaging through my stuff because I forgot to pick up cilantro, peppering her rants with insults about my social skills–I was an empty shell. Maybe it kept me from going crazy. Maybe it was the only way for any shred of dignity to survive the slaughter. Be the punching bag they want you to be, Emmett.

My dad wasn’t frustrated with me. He was frustrated because what little he had was falling apart, and I was the only person who loved him enough to run away with him. “I needed them,” I stated simply.

“You don’t even know what they were made of,” he rebutted. His calloused left hand balled up the duvet cover of the couch. His right hand made a fist. Reddened fingers buried themselves in sallow skin, trying to knead out emotional knots. Distressed.

“I needed them,” I repeated, in a slightly firmer tone. The voice that bubbled out was too deep. Too loud. I cringed a little as I spoke.

“Lawrence.” I looked toward the hallway, where my grandma leaned against the wall. She was still wearing her Goof Shirt, but had replaced her skirt with pajama bottoms. She also wore one of those striped sleep caps straight out of A Christmas Carol. It made her look like a weird, anachronistic ghost. “Go to your room,” she commanded. She didn’t yell–it was much too late at night for that–but she didn’t need to.

Dad rubbed his eyes as they adjusted to the darkness of the hallway. He made disgruntled eye contact with his mother. “Ma, I’m forty-nine.”

She stood there, tapping her foot impatiently. “Irrelevant.” My dad eventually got the hint and got off the couch with a grunt.

I expected my grandmother to join me on the couch, but she walked past me without a glance. Her kitchen was open-concept and connected straight into the living room, so I got to watch her busy herself for the minute it took to pour me a glass of water. “Drink,” she commanded, handing me the glass. “We don’t talk until that cup is empty.”

The adrenaline of earlier that night had long worn off, and I was sore and incredibly thirsty. I chugged it with the quickness. When I finished, she handed me a shot glass filled with a brownish-maroon liquid. I gave it a suspicious look. “Drink this, too,” she said. “Throw it back like a shot.”

I didn’t know how to drink a shot, but tried my best to keep it from hitting my tongue like I saw in movies. I failed, and started coughing hard. “What–” sputter “What is this?” It was disgusting!

She shrugged. “A shot. Brandy, specifically.”

“Grandma, I’m sixteen! You’re gonna get me drunk.” I’d been drunk before, but only on hard lemonade I stole from the cooler (great coping mechanism, highly recommend). Certainly not on brandy, and certainly certainly not in front of my grandma.

“What’s so bad about being drunk?” I couldn’t argue with that logic–being drunk was pretty dandy–so I didn’t. Once again, things went silent. Tap, tap, tap. My finger idly played with the empty shot glass. Grandma sat next to me, periodically adjusting her position. She was much more comfortable with silence than I was. She was also much more comfortable with the sound of her own voice. Honestly, she was probably just more comfortable in general. Tap, tap, tap. “You think you’re done raising a child when they go out into the world, but that man still has much to learn,” she grumbled after a few minutes of quiet. “How could he say those things to his own daughter? That man has been tainted by your mother, I swear to you.” Tap, tap–

I made a choked noise somewhere between a gargle and a cough. The bitter aftertaste of the brandy was still stuck in my throat. “Did you just call me his daughter?” I wheezed.

She looked at me like I’d just asked if the sky was real. “That’s what you are, right? You took those hormones for a reason.”

“Yeah,” I answered without thinking. She just made it sound so simple. “Wait, no. I’m still his son. I want to be his daughter, but I’m not.”

“That’s disappointing. I always wanted a granddaughter.”

I looked at her, confused. “You have Olivia.”

“Correction: I’ve always wanted a granddaughter who talks to me. She goes off to college and it’s like I don’t exist.” She crossed her arms and ‘hmpf’-ed. “Have you picked out a name, at least?”

Holy shit. “Um, yeah.” Holy SHIT! Okay, you can do this. “It’s Eliza,” I told her. Then, in a whisper: “Short for Elizabeth.” Yeah, bet you never guessed Eliza was short for something. What a twist! I was too busy imagining myself from a third-person perspective to acknowledge the narrative bomb I’d just dropped. In South Bend, Indiana, there sat a sad, greasy boy (and I’m not talking about Pete Buttigieg! *laugh track*). He wore a hoodie streaked with snot and tears, and talked desperately about his desire to be female. Spilling his deepest fantasies to his fucking grandmother. It was sick.

“Elizabeth? Like, your aunt Elizabeth?” she asked, eyebrows knotted together. Bewildered. I felt another sudden wave of self-hatred. Like a tsunami, if the tsunami had trouble getting up in the morning. I stole her daughter’s name. Her dead daughter’s name. Without asking.

“Yes,” I whimpered. “I hope that’s okay.” What if she didn’t approve? Would she hate me? Would she look at me, and finally see me the way I saw myself?

But when I finally met my grandmother’s gaze, I was welcomed with gentle, even loving eyes. “Oh, baby, it’s more than okay.” She hugged me tightly to her chest. For a waifish septuagenarian, she had surprisingly strong arms. “She lives on in you, you know,” she gushed, her already-quiet voice sounding muffled through her ribcage.

My face was wet; I was crying again. Happy tears, this time. I tried to ramble through it. “Thanks, grandma. I-I wasn’t sure if it was okay.” I was 5’6” and a hundred-twenty pounds soaking wet, and was such a lightweight it wasn’t even funny. So I was a little tipsy, and the words just came out. “Like, maybe you wanted to save the name just for her, or maybe I wasn’t good enough to deserve it, or–”

“Shhh, Eliza. It’s okay.” Hearing her say my name was something special. Significant yet comfortingly natural. It was the first time anyone had called me Eliza. “You don’t need to be so in-your-own-head. Sometimes, you can just be.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” I responded immediately. Being was hard.

“Me neither. But it’s nice to pretend it is, right?” She smiled at me, and we sat in a more contented silence; grandmother and granddaughter, if just for a moment. “Look, I’m going to talk to your dad. The man loves you, he just suffers from Complete-And-Total-Idiot Syndrome. I think I’ll be able to convince him to let you start hormones. For real. Not whatever third-rate garbo you’ve been taking.”

I smirked at her confidence. “That would be nice,” I said, releasing my arms from around my knees and stretching.

---

July 10, 2018

Snake Doctor was a weird guy. His name was actually Dr. Salazar, but he had this speech impediment that made him ssssstretch his ‘s’-es like a snake. That, and he looked like a reptilian. Whatever. He was still better than Doctor Briggs. “Are you ready for your ssssshot?” he asked.

“Yessssssss,” I hissed back, mimicking his speech patterns. A pretty mean thing to do in retrospect. He got his revenge a moment later, when he jabbed the needle into my arm as slowly and painfully as possible. I’m pretty sure he even jiggled it around a little bit. “Ow!”

“Sssssorry,” he apologized insincerely. When I looked back on the injection site, he’d patched it up with a Barbie bandage. If he thought I’d be embarrassed, he’d be sadly mistaken; Barbie: A Fashion Fairytale should have won an Oscar. But I wouldn’t have cared if the Band-Aid was Kevin Spacey-themed, because I just got my first estrogen shot! I could feel it fixing me already, rushing through my bloodstream and flushing out all the ick. Or maybe I just had to pee.

One quick bathroom trip later, I met my dad out in the waiting room. He was sitting anxiously in one of the chairs. Yes, my grandma convinced him to let me see an endocrinologist, but he was still uncomfortable whenever the topic came up. If you think about it, I won on a technicality. There was a subtle threat in my DIY-ing estrogen. It told my parents: get me to a fucking endocrinologist, or I will poison myself. Potentially. I wasn’t losing anything in the gamble. If it really was estrogen, then I got what I paid for. If it wasn’t, well… maybe it’d finally put me out of my misery. Because my dad cared about me, loved me more than I loved myself, he caved. Let this be an unethical life lesson: hold your body hostage, and good things will happen. Potentially.

But just because dad let me see Snake Doctor didn’t mean he had to like it. And based on how much he’d complained on the car ride there, I half-expected him to leave me at the doctor’s office, just like when… nevermind. That’s not important. “How was Snake Doctor?” my dad asked, reluctantly adopting my nickname for him.

“Weird. The shot was good, though!” I gave him a thumbs up with my right arm, then winced: a sharp pain where I’d been shot. Er, where I received my shot. (God, I really need an editor.) I also got drained of six vials of blood, so I felt like a walking pincushion. New theory: maybe Doctor Salazar was a vampire.

If he was, we didn’t have much of a choice. He was the only doctor in Grand Rapids covered by our insurance. My grandma’s supposedly limitless charity had ended after two weeks when I broke her favorite vase (it was shaped like a trout). Luckily, dad found a two-bedroom apartment back in Grand Rapids, so that’s where we’d live until I went off to college. As we left Snake Doctor’s office, a shady walk-up built above a rotting Culver’s, my dad remarked, “You look happy.”

I tried to hide my smile, but couldn’t. I was really fucking happy. “Yeah, well. I’ve been waiting for this for months.” Then I corrected myself: “Years, actually.”

“I’m, uh… happy for you, Eliza.” My eyes widened; that was the first time he’d ever called me that.

But he was glowering; not an uncommon sight, since that fight back in April. “You don’t look too happy,” I muttered.

“Well, this is a lot to absorb,” he said, repeating the mantra he’d use whenever I was trans within a hundred feet of his person. But for whatever reason, this time felt different. I stared at him for a second until he cracked. “Fine. I also got some bad news. About your mother.”

Mom? “Oh god. What is it?” I hadn’t heard from her in months. We both expected her to put up more of a fight to keep me in her custody, but she seemed almost happy to get rid of me. I tried not to think about it. There were a lot of things I preferred not to think about.

My dad shut his eyes to focus and nearly tripped over his own feet. Clumsy. “Your mom is sick. I think it’s called, uh, dilated cardiomyopathy.” He sounded out the syllables like a kindergartner learning to read. “Basically, her heart’s too big for her chest,” he elaborated. I rolled my eyes. Ironic!

“Is she okay?” I asked; code for ‘is she dying?’

“She’s fine for now, but–”

“Good,” I interrupted. “Then I’d like to talk about something else.”

He stopped walking. “Come on, don’t do that. Don’t change the subject.”

“Please?” I begged. I really didn’t want to think about my mom.

Dad huffed, but relented. He always sucked at saying no to manipulative women. “Okay, sweetheart. Did you hear they finally got those Thai boys out of that cave?” There’s probably a euphemism in that last sentence about gender, but I’m too scared to make it.

---

April 8, 2020

“Have you decided where you’re going for college?”

“I haven’t even decided if I want to go to college.” That was a lie. I wanted to go to college, if only because I wanted to fly as far from Michigan as possible. But I knew my dad also wanted me to go, and I liked pissing him off.

“Listen, young m–uh, lady. You’re going to college,” my dad commanded, before adding “please” in a quiet voice. I’d found that he could only assert himself in circumstances that prompted extreme levels of adrenaline and testosterone, or arguments over the lack of the latter. Bullying him was almost getting boring.

“I know,” I admitted. I was standing up over the coffee table in the living room, arms splayed over the sides. Five college brochures sat in a semicircle below me. They were all surprisingly good schools, considering my slightly-above-average ACT score and slightly-below-average GPA. The least exclusive of the bunch, and the second-most expensive, was Bradshaw College in Brooklyn. It was also the furthest school from home, which made it my top pick. And it wasn’t a bad school, either. Despite the self-deprecating brochure, it had one of the highest-ranked history majors in the state, and a level of alumni involvement that Forbes called ‘a little pathetic. Seriously, did you peak in college?’

“Why not Calvin University? It’s close to home.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem.” The main campus was a ten-minute drive from my dad’s apartment. If he wanted to, he could bring me lunch. Ew.

“What about Bradford McKinley?” I just shook my head. I couldn’t see the Eliza of my dreams on a quad in a sleepy college town. I preferred to imagine myself on the streets of the Big Apple, involved in 30 Rock-style job hijinks, Sopranos-style mob hijinks, or Sponge-style Bob hijinks.

“I want to go to Bradshaw,” I responded, resolute. I limply shoved the other brochures off the table in what was probably the least badass move of my life.

Once again, my father sighed, but relented. “If that’s what you want…”

---

March 27, 2021

“Hey, Eliza. Um, I’m doing okay. Olivia has a new boyfriend, and your mom is… stable. I know you’re probably busy with classes, but I just wanted to see how you’re doing. You’re probably busy with midterms, so I understand if you’re too busy to chat.” He sighed. “If you want to talk, just call me back. Please. Okay, love you. Bye.”

I deleted the message.

---

December 2021

When I arrived at my dad’s apartment on the twenty-third of December, I was shocked to find that the walls of my room had been repainted. What once was a pale off-white was now a vibrant red, my favorite color. I loved it. It shouldn’t have felt so much like home; I’d only lived there for about two years before going off to college, and most of that time was spent crying, wishing I could cry, or just staring into space at the aforementioned white walls. But everything about the place was reassuring: the bookshelves that overflowed in the living room-slash-kitchen-slash-dining nook, the stuffed animals that I was ashamed to still own (and cherish) at age nineteen. The place felt like my grandmother’s cabin, though it sadly lacked the toy dolls that definitely had souls. Even my dad himself had been a constant, albeit awkward, presence in my life since The Great Fight of 2018. Not that I’d tell him that.

I missed talking to Will. I remembered his parents as judgy and overly-scrutinizing, and I did not want to deal with them again. So I just languished in my dad’s apartment alone, waiting for him to call. On the twenty-ninth, he did. “Hey, Eliza,” he said, in that calm, assured voice of his.

“H-hi! Um, how are you doing?”

“Good, actually! I sort of made up with my parents, I think? Things aren’t completely better, but we’re not yelling at each other, so that’s a plus.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” I said, wistfully.

He must have noticed my tone, because he responded, “I think you can make things right with your dad, if you wanted.”

Could I? “I don’t know,” I responded. “He was kind of an asshole.” I thought for another minute. “We’ve both been assholes.” God. All those ignored phone calls, all those rude remarks about his relationship with my mom. Did he really deserve that, just because he ignored the way She used to treat me? “I think I need to talk to him.” I moved to hang up.

“W-wait!” Will yelled through the phone, suddenly nervous. “I, uh, need to ask you something crazy.” He proceeded to regale me with the confrontation he’d had with his parents, and the fact that they’d be moving to Detroit by the New Year. “-so, uh, can I stay with you until the end of winter break?”

“What?! Stay with me? In my dad’s apartment?” I might have been blushing. Just a little bit.

He tried to sound calm. “Yeah, as long as you have room. I could sleep on the floor.”

“No, I won’t make you do that. Look, my dad has a guest room. I’ll talk him into it.”

“Yes, thank you! You’re the best!” After we’d said our goodbyes and my head hit the comforter, all I could think about were those last few words: you’re the best. I’m the best!

---

That night, my dad and I sat down for dinner. He’d made shrimp carbonara; not my favorite, but still spectacular. More important than dinner was the realization, a few years too late, that he was trying. He was trying to be a good dad this whole time. Well, maybe not the whole time, but he got there eventually! He even used my preferred name almost constantly! “I’m sorry for ignoring you,” I murmured into my pasta.

“Huh?” I don’t think he heard me.

“I’m sorry for being a bad daughter,” I repeated, a little louder. My dad put his fork down and met my gaze.

“You’re not a bad daughter, Eliza. Heck, do you know how proud of you I am? Going to college in a faraway city, but still trying to be yourself?” I didn’t dare correct him that I wasn’t really trying. Not hard enough. “You’re incredible, and… I’m sorry it took me such a long time to realize that.”

Could we both be at fault? Maybe it was as easy as saying, “Thank you.” It felt good, even empowering, to forgive him. It didn’t do anything to erase the years he’d spent at work instead of with his children, or the times he’d sided with my mom over me, but it was a start. And god, did it feel so fucking good to start something.

He looked at me seriously for a minute, eyes watery. “Are you happy like this?” he asked.

“Yeah, dad. I’m happy.”

“Okay. Then I’m happy, too.”

---

January 3, 2022

I would never be the son my dad had always wanted, and there were some offenses time would never smooth over. But my relationship with my father was improving, slowly but surely. On the third of January, I woke up on the living room couch, after an intense night of Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition. I looked around and saw my dad rousing on the chair next to me, looking almost as groggy as I felt. “Ugh, wha’ happened?” I muttered, massaging my temples.

My dad yawned, stretching out his aging back. “You fell asleep during the Balrog fight, but you looked so cute sleeping there I just had to leave you be.” Aww.

Hanging out with my dad was a uniquely fulfilling experience. Growing up, I was never completely sure he knew I was alive. Now, he was trying to make up for that treatment with constant familial love, the necessary doses of which I’d been deprived of since my jaundice-ridden birth. Will was around somewhere, probably in the guest room. But his arrival is a story for another time, another chapter. Let’s just say it was nice.

My dad tried making breakfast for the three of us, but found himself lacking in pancake mix. I was the one who decided to venture out to the store to pick up some groceries. It was an olive branch (or pancake branch?), to show my dad that I was willing to put in the effort. As long as he was, too, of course. I wasn’t that much of a simp.

My dad’s apartment building had a little lobby, complete with a concierge and seating area. It looked like a hotel’s evil twin. I was ready to walk straight out the door and into the cold Grand Rapids morning when I locked eyes with a person whom I had no intention of ever seeing again. She was lounging on one of the worn leather chairs, clutching a cane and staring at me with her discerning, piercing green eyes.

My blood ran cold. Birds cawed in the distance. Vultures circled overhead. “Hello, mom.”