Page 16 of Guy's Girl
“You didn’t live with your parents?” she asks.
Adrian takes a sip of Aperol. It’s cool and bitter. “On occasion, I stayed with my mom, but she was always working. And my dad... he died a long time ago.”
Grief crosses Ginny’s eyes. Adrian braces himself for it—for the pity and apologies that always accompany this information. A familiar desire to leave pulls at him. To put a stop to this before it begins. He doesn’t understand how they arrived at this conversation, just ten minutes into their first date.
But Ginny doesn’t apologize. Instead, she asks, “How did he die?”
“Car accident.” When Ginny doesn’t react, he continues: “It was winter, and... well, there was ice on the bridge.” It’s a story rarely spoken aloud in his family, but one that Adrian has told himself a thousand times. Every time, he looks for ways it could have been different: if his father had taken a different route, if it hadn’t been dark outside... “It happened a week before I was born.”
Ginny blinks. “Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“That’s... one of the most tragic stories I’ve ever heard.”
Adrian looks down into his glass. Here it comes.I’m so sorry, I can’t even imagine...
“What was he like?”
He looks up. “Who? My dad?”
She nods.
Adrian almost laughs. “Did you not hear what I just said? I never met him.”
“No, no. I mean—what do you know about him?”
God, this girl loves to ask questions. Adrian doesn’t think he’s ever met someone more willing to stick her nose into places it doesn’t belong. He waits for annoyance. For the familiar recoil that comes when people pry into his past. But when he looks into her wide green eyes, so open, so curious, genuine, and without judgment, he finds that hewantsto tell her. About his dad. About Hungary. Abouteverything.
What the hell is happening?
He says, “He was a professor.”
“A professor of what?”
“Mathematics.”
He thinks of the limited times he’s asked hisanya—his mother—about his father. Of the way her eyes shut down. The way shephysically folds inward. Her clipped answers, no more than a word or two, as if to speak any more would physically injure her.
They were deeply in love. That much Adrian knows.
And then she lost him.
Adrian thinks about his father every day. Mostly in passing, like a road sign between thoughts, because to linger any longer opens the door to the guilt. Sticky black guilt, thick as tar. It leaks into his chest, coating his bones and blood vessels. And every time he scrapes the guilt straight off the hard bones of his chest, wiping it away until only a faint residue is left behind.
His mother keeps exactly one photograph of his father, but as far as Adrian knows, she never looks at it. Adrian discovered the photo as a child when he was looking under the sink for the spray that would clean his orange juice out of the carpet before Scott saw. Beneath a box of Swiffer wipes, hidden among all the plastic bags and cans of Shout, was a Bible.
This made no sense. His mother is a devout Catholic; to this day, she attends mass every afternoon and keeps a rainbow stack of Bibles out in the living room, where everyone can see them. To find one hidden away was strange.
Even stranger: when he cracked it open, the inside was hollowed out, pages knifed away until all that remained was an empty stomach.
His mother defaced a Bible?
There, inside that stomach: his father.
Adrian knew right away that it was him. He had never seen his father before, but he knew. It was the stack of books under his right elbow, the long fingers that rested on the door of a pale-yellow car, the unkempt dark hair and the brown eyes, so dark they could almost be called black. It was exactly the way he always imagined his father would look. When he flipped the photo over,in the bottom left-hand corner, his mother’s tight, all-caps handwriting read:ADRI, 1992.
Adrian stuffed the picture into the pocket of his shorts and slammed the cabinet shut. He raced up the steps to his room. He would return the photo later that week, but for now he wanted to keep his father all to himself.
