He’s referring to my fiancé, Jim, whom he recently met at dinner. Right after the salads were served and before Jim came back from the restroom, my father told me he saw the signs, the signs that instead of warning me away, only drew me closer. “Be careful, Paula Girl. I like him, and it doesn’t really matter that he’s older and already has kids. But his face is bloated. He’s an alcoholic. Things trouble him too much. That’s probably why his first marriage broke up.”
I take the cordless phone into the family room where I check the cuckoo clock, a rather obnoxious engagement gift from my father, suggesting I’m crazy for wanting to marry this guy. We live in Lake Arrowhead, over an hour’s drive from the Kat Nip. And that’s exactly where he’s at because I hear the D.J. announcing “Naughty Natalie,” the next girl up on stage with classic Billy Idol belting out, “In the midnight hour, she wants more, more, more . . . ”
After another five minutes, I’ll come up with an excuse, a late dinner I need to cook or a moonlit walk to the water with my fiancé.
“Jesus, Dad,” I say. “So what if I love him. It’s not like I’ve had a lobotomy.”
Jim sits in the other room, chasing down a half-pint of Smirnoff with a Killian’s Irish Red. Too sensitive for his own good, he is a writer, my former professor. My father’s summation of him is dead-on. Alcohol only makes Jim feel more, and if he catches me talking so bluntly about him, he might launch into a rant. Or just the opposite and begin to cry. It’s more than just the beer and the vodka that’s making him so emotionally reckless. Our love for each other has proven devastating. He’s left his family to start a new life with me. No matter how miserable things may have been at home, the guilt and the shame for selfishly thinking about his own future happiness over theirs are undoing him in painful ways. He sees himself as a bad husband, a bad father. My father knows better than anyone how a man has to bottom out before he can rebuild.
He laughs at my lobotomy crack. Sarcasm has always been our private language. It’s how we reach out to each other.
“Okay, okay. Just promise me you won’t get knocked-up. You’ll get your degree first. As soon as a woman gets barefoot and pregnant, she’s vulnerable.”
My father is proud that I’ve been accepted to graduate school where I’ll earn a Masters of Fine Arts degree. At this point in time I’m only twenty-nine and changing careers. Instead of high school with its juvenile detention slips and parent/teacher conferences, I’ll be covering Chekhov, Hemingway, and Morrison to adults in college. Not only am I the child that stayed after my mother left, I’m also the one who has followed in his footsteps by pursuing an education. I’ll be the first professor in the family.
My father talks like he knows something I don’t, and it bothers me. He couldn’t be more wrong.
“Who said I wanted a kid, anyway? Jim already has three. Don’t worry, Dad. I’m off the hook.”
Just as I’m hanging up, Jim comes into the room. He shakes his head.
“Why don’t you ever say goodbye? He’s your father.”
“We never do. It’s just our way.”
How we speak to each other may be unclear to Jim. But I’m only too aware of the change in my father’s voice and what I’ve just done by making him this promise. By breaking away from my father, I’m somehow breaking him. Many would argue he’s been broken for some time, both financially and morally. Over a million dollars of his clients’ money is missing. What can be accounted for had been invested in speculative ventures, undeveloped property in Hawaii and Nevada, a horse farm in Tennessee, thirteen purebreds, all in my father’s name to “protect his clients from liability.”
The State Bar Review Board didn’t buy it and in revoking his license, a generous judge found my father had “committed acts of moral turpitude,” instead of calling it for what it is: embezzlement. After I read the ruling on the State Bar’s website, I looked up the word “turpitude” in the dictionary and found beside the definition synonyms like “vileness, depravity, shame.” For any more information it suggested I look up the word “evil.” My father maintains he did nothing improper. He had power of attorney. Although I have my doubts, I know for certain his conduct was no more or less moral than other lawyers who distort the truth to suit their own ends.
For better or worse I am a shyster’s daughter and regardless of my father’s guilt, I will defend him.
Even now, after years of struggling to come to terms with what happened that night, his phone call replays over and over in my head. He expected me to keep my promise of not getting pregnant, but unlike his word, mine can always be trusted. His timing can’t be ignored. What he saw as a wake-up call is a warning of another kind. In less than eight hours after that phone call, my father was found dead.
PRISON WITHOUT WALLS
I am twelve years old when Kevin Cooper escapes from the California Institution for Men less than three miles from our home. That it is late and a school night doesn’t matter. My mother is six months pregnant, and I help her drag our royal-sized dining room chairs in front of the sliders, blocking the glass with lumbering wood. Of course these heavy chairs will not stop him. But they may slow him down and give us those few seconds to either get out of the house or give my father time to aim.
My father is outside in his T-shirt and boxers, barefoot, yet armed with a hunting rifle. He checks the front and back doors, and inspects the garage, to make sure it holds nothing more than his diesel Mercedes and our Schwinn bicycles.
On the loose for less than seventy-two hours, Cooper is already suspected of bludgeoning a family in the hills. The carnage, the bodies, the blood, are all too grisly for the local networks to show. We only hear the details, which somehow makes them worse. Cooper has used a knife and hatchet. These are hands-on murders, the personal kind, though Cooper is a stranger to this family.
We see his mug shot—a black man in an orange prison jumpsuit with the start of dreadlocks springing from his head. I’ve seen enough prison photos from the files my father brings home to know that Cooper’s smirk is nothing more than a pose. What I see is the face of a coward.
A weakling who rapes a woman with a screwdriver against her throat.
He is no man.
My mother must see it too because she turns off the TV. Her face is pale but it’s always that way against her dark hair.
We live in a ranch-style home surrounded by oleander bushes, perfect for hiding.
My mother parts the curtains.
“He could be watching us right now,” she says.
At age forty, her pregnancy is high-risk in more ways than one. An accident, she and my father say, but I know having another child is a last ditch effort at keeping our family together. My older sister and I are no longer enough.
It was my father’s idea to move us from L.A. to Chino. He’s moved his law practice too. A change is supposed to do us good.
“An alarm should’ve sounded,” my father says, coming back into the house. His shoulders are nearly as wide as the doorway, and his neck is as thick as a linebacker, which he was, having once been recruited to play for Stanford. My father is not a man to be messed with. “It’s supposed to go off every fifteen minutes when someone’s escaped.”
My mother laughs at this, at him, and places a protective hand over the hard mound of her belly.
“Who’s supposed to hear it? Other prisoners?”
“What the hell kind of comment is that?” The gun lags at my father’s side. “I’m doing my best.”
“I know, Paul. I know. While that sick son of a bitch is hacking up me and the girls, you can hand him your card. He’ll need a slick pro like you to spare him from the chair.