Page 126 of Return Billionaire to Sender

Dad is in a mood like I’ve never seen. He tells me that he’s been going to AA meetings, and he wants to apologize to me. I don’t know what I like less—people thanking me for things or the idea of my dad apologizing after all these years. It’s so much easier to hate him.

Hate is always easier.

I lean back and cross my legs, stir my coffee drink, contemplate walking out, not letting him have the satisfaction of even apologizing to me. I don’t want to give him anything.

But for whatever perverse reason, I decide to hear him out.

He tells me that he stopped drinking after our fight at the Monaco Club. Does he want an award?

“I want to make amends to you for letting you think you had any part of Genevieve—your mother—leaving,” he says.

I don’t want to talk about my mother. I never want to talk about her. “And this matters why?” I snap.

“I need you to know—Ipushed her away,” he says. “Iwas the bad guy. I told you she didn’t want us, that we were too much for her to handle, but it had nothing to do with you—it never did.”

I act unfazed. I’ve learned never to give my dad anything, any edge, but I can barely believe my ears. This guy, apologizing to me? Claiming full responsibility for driving my mother away?

The central story of our family was that she wanted to get away from the pair of us. That Dad and I were two awful peas in a pod. The story is a part of me, like a tree, growing around a wire, absorbing it in.

“I made you share the blame,” he continues. “I made you an equal bad guy because I couldn’t handle it. And you took that to heart, and you had that personality change when she left, became sullen and angry. Anyone in your position would have felt like that, having the two of us for parents. A better father would have told you that she loved you.”

“We both know that would’ve been a lie,” I say. She never tried to contact me—no cards, no calls. Not to mention an apology.

“She had her own problems, her own issues, but I was a bully to her. A monster—not physically, but…” He shakes his head.

I look away. As if that excuses her. It makes it worse that she left me with him.

“And I made a ten-year-old boy share the blame, like we were a pair of assholes she couldn’t deal with anymore. But you were a good kid before all that—you should know that. I always thought it was weird that you didn’t remember, but I’m telling you now—you were an outgoing boy, a generous friend to Howie, a good boy to your mother, and I was one shitty-ass husband.”

I suppose this is the place where I say a weight lifted from my chest, but I just feel numb. I’m not in a mood to forgive either of them. “So what is it you want from me?” I bite out.

“Nothing. I’m not one of those losers who think making amends means everything’s okay. It won’t make me less of an asshole or change what a bastard I was to you that whole time, but I thought you’d want to know. I thought it might be useful.”

I look him hard in the eye. I have no words. I throw down some money. I get out of there and walk.

The afternoon is foggy and cool, the streets filled with people rushing back and forth. Loud music blares from a passing car.

All this time. Does it matter? I don’t want it to matter.

I walk and walk, as if that might allow me to put it all behind me. The utter anger that I have at this man and a mother who left without looking back. At life.

I took his bullshit at face value. I blamed myself. An asshole from a long line of assholes. Maybe I should feel different now, but I don’t. What do I care? Things turned out fine.

Still.

The time that I spent with Noelle showed me that I’m missing something, that there’s some essential way in which I haven’t joined the human, world—the whole experience of togetherness and sharing and having each other’s backs and all of that. And the darkest thing that’s rattling around in my mind is the question--what if I never can have that? What if I’m broken beyond repair?

It’s here that I wish I could call her.

I’d tell her everything he said. I’d tell her my fears. She’d rise to my defense and fight for me. She’d find examples that I might not have thought of. She’d fight for my heart. She’d be on my side.

It’s too late for that, now.

35

Noelle

The lobbyof our building was glamorous way back when. Nowadays you might describe it as faded glamour; possibly even seriously wrecked glamour or maybe glamour after a seventy-year bender.

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