Page 2 of A Very Grumpy Father's Day
Declan
I GOT KNOCKED DOWN, BUT I’LL GET UP AGAIN
*One week before Father’s Day*
Everything hurts, and I’m an idiot.
But I’m not dead.
This is excellent news.
Without having to open my eyes, I can tell that I am covered with a blanket and there’s a pillow under my head.
That is also excellent news.
It means I’m at home, under the care of my loving, beautiful wife. Somewhere under this roof, our infant daughter is either sleeping or playing or babbling or eating soft foods or feeding at her mommy’s magnificent breast. The great news is I have lived to adore and protect my girls another day.
The bad news is I’m in our bathtub and I might have licked a sidewalk last night.
It is entirely possible I jumped from a moving truck and then it backed up over me. My ancestors on both the Irish and Italian sides are ashamed of me for different and opposing reasons, and they are all yelling at me from inside my head. It’s problematic.
I am haunted by slow-motion strobe-light flashes of memories that make no sense and also feel entirely familiar: I am playing pinball in a laundromat; I am playing “Heart and Soul” on a grand piano with Jon Bon Jovi somewhere in the Hamptons; I am sprinting across the field at an empty Yankee Stadium—naked; I am giving all of my cash to a homeless man who looks like Jack Nicholson; I am weeping at the sight of a hot dog that someone dropped in the middle of Times Square and people won’t stop stepping on it.
These are the standard symptoms of an O’Sullivan-Cassidy clan−induced hangover.
My cousin Billy is in town. Why? I never know. He appears and then he disappears—unpredictable as Boston weather patterns and yet also still the same person he was when we were children. If he were a comfort food, he’d be a Dunkin’ Donut filled with Pop Rocks. My Irish cousin Nolan, despite now being a domesticated, happily married father of two, still believes that anyone who has a blood alcohol level of less thanWhy Do You Have Two Faces, Man?!percent when they’re partying with him is being disrespectful. If he were a comfort food he’d be Colin Farrell holding a bottle of Jameson and a shotgun.
The terrible news is that I am a domesticated, happily married father, the rich general counsel at one of New York’s leading real estate firms, with a new kickass condo that I do not enjoy leaving. It has a den. A fucking den, for Christ’s sake. I have a wonderful hot wife, a beautiful baby, four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a den, and no dignity—because I still can’t say no to those assholes when they want me to go out with them.
The very worst news is that another night has been wasted—on epic, legendary urban hijinks with male relatives—when I could have been here, complacent in my exquisite new home, consuming actual comfort food and trying to get it on with my hot wife.
The prospect of getting it on with my hot wife is what gives me the strength to arise from my porcelain-coated, cast-iron early grave. The need to convey to my child that she is far more important to her daddy than his super cool shithead cousins is what motivates me to stand up straight, even though I would rather curl up on the marble floor and groan for a fucking year. The desire to remind myself that I am a thirty-five-year-old man who is still in his prime is what drives me in the direction of the sink, ignoring the stringy-longhaired ghost girl from that movieThe Ringwho’s sitting in the corner of my bathroom.Fuck you, ghost girl! I’m not afraid of you.
I splash cold water onto my face before squinting at my reflection in the mirror because the primary fear I have whenever I wake up after a night out with Nolan and Billy Boston is that one of them drew a penis on my forehead.
But there is no penis on either of my blurry, alarmingly attractive foreheads.
I splash more cold water onto my face and dab at my eyes with a dry cloth. I rinse with mouthwash and attempt to scrape the fur off my tongue with a toothbrush. Then I take a deep breath and check my extremely sore body for new tattoos or broken bones. Despite all sensory evidence to the contrary, my joints are neither fractured nor have they been fused together. I do not have a tramp stamp on my lower back.
All is well.
I am still hot as fuck. I am worthy of the woman who married me and the tiny person who shares our sensational DNA. I am resilient—no, I am invincible. But mostly, I’m horny.
Today is the day I get busy with Maddie again. After seventeen horrible days straight ofno sex. Today will be the day ofyes sex.
Unless I slept through Sunday, which would really fucking suck.
I open the door to our bedroom. The bed is made. I scan the room and see that my cell phone is charging on my bedside table. I’m not a guy who cries easily, but this makes me tear up. Because there are many things I don’t quite remember about last night, but I know for a fact that I didn’t think to pull my phone out of my jacket pocket and plug it into the charger as I stumbled toward the bathroom to lie down in my bathtub. My wife did that for me. She did that and she brought me a pillow and a blanket and probably removed my shoes for me, instead of berating me and asking for a divorce. I can list fifty reasons why I love being married to Maddie at the drop of a hat, but that right there is Top Ten. The tank top and panties that she just happened to drape over the end of the bed for me to see when I got up are Top Five.
Yeah. Today’s the day. Daddy’s gonna get some.
I hear my wife and my baby laughing down the hall. I say a silent prayer of thanks. I note the time—1:30 p.m. That is unfortunate. But I still have time to turn this half-wasted day around.
After lying facedown on my bed for what turns out to be twenty-five minutes, I change into the pair of jeans that Maddie once said made my butt look so good she wanted to punch my face. At this point, my body is ready for absolutely any form of physical contact with her, even if it’s her sexy fist to my chiseled jawline.
Yeah. I’m not putting on a shirt. We have a ten-month-old baby, two rooms full of unpacked boxes, and jobs to go to in the morning. There’s no time to mess around with shirts.
Also, I just need to lie down again for one minute.
