Page 10 of The Rom-Commers

That’s why I did not trust Sylvie to take over.

I wasn’t sure I trusted her to run things forsix days—much less six weeks.

And that’s why, now, I couldn’t sleep on the plane.

What was I doing? This was lunacy. I couldn’t just leave my dad with a twenty-two-year-old. Even a college graduate with a Phi Beta Kappa key needed more than one week to prepare for this. Our widowed next-door neighbor Mrs. Otsuka had agreed to check in on them after she saw me burst into tears in the laundry room, but that would hardly be enough. Leaving—actually packing up and getting on my first flight anywhere in almost a decade—felt so astonishingly irresponsible, I couldn’t believe I was letting it happen.

Sitting on that plane, wedged into a middle seat in the last row, listening to toilet flush after toilet flush, I realized I was shaking.

Like genuinely shaking. A lot.

Not just my hands, the way you might on a cold day if you’d forgotten your mittens. My whole body. From the core. And my heart was just thumping like a kettledrum—so big and so hard that when I looked down, I could see the fabric of my shirt vibrating.

Was it fear?

Was I afraid to fly? Afraid to leave my dad? Afraid of changing my narrow little life?

Sure. Yes. All of the above.

But more than that: I was going to miss him.

My dad wasn’t just a dad. He was my favorite person.

He was everybody’s favorite person.

He was adelight.

Sometimes a TBI will cause personality changes in people—you hear a lot about anger and depression in the wake of brain injuries like his, and reasonably so. But if it changed him, and I’m not sure this is even medically possible… it made him sweeter.

My dad was always the dad everybody wanted. If there were a dad store, he’d be a bestseller. They’d have rows and rows of him for sale, right up front. He was always warm and encouraging and connected and goofy—even before.

But now, in the wake of it all, he was something even more astonishing.

He wascheerful.

He lost everything in that rockfall—and he found a way to keep going. And not only that. He found a way to laugh. And sing goofy little ditties. And close his eyes and turn his face to the sun.

And he got me to do all those things, too.

How did he do it? How did he stand beside a personal Grand Canyon of suffering and manage to feel…grateful?

And how on earth would I cope out in the heartless world without him?

Who even was I on my own?

Before the rockfall, my dad was a cellist.

After the rockfall, he taught himself every instrument you can play with one hand—mastering the harmonica, the bones, the zither, the tambourine, the tin whistle, and the slide trombone. He also learned one-handed crochet, and potting on a wheel, and beading. “You pick the colors,” he said, “I’ll make the magic.” He got so good at beading necklaces that he opened a jewelry shop on Etsy.

Which actually added a fair bit of cash to our monthly budget.

I would really miss him, is what I’m saying. And I found myself wondering, as we hit some turbulence and I white-knuckled the armrest, if maybe dreams were better off never trying to become reality.

Four

DON’T MEET YOURheroes. Isn’t that what they say?

Oh, god. They’re so right.

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