Page 65 of Drilled (Dad Bod Contracting 2)
Franco’s eyebrows shoot up. “Damn. He must really suck, then.”
I blow out a breath. “Yeah, that’s the understatement of the millennium.” I pause, thinking, and then continue. “I don’t feel much better about my mom, but for totally different reasons.”
I rarely talk about or even think about this, so it’s difficult to get the words out, and I pause frequently in the telling.
“They met at a bar, hooked up a few times, dated on and off for a few months, and then my mom came up pregnant. She wheedled enough money out of him for an abortion, but couldn’t seem to keep clear of Dad for whatever stupid fucking reason. Went right back to him. Ended up pregnant again, with me, this time. Why she didn’t abort me, too, I’m not sure. Maybe he wouldn’t pony up the money again, or couldn’t, or she didn’t find out in time. I don’t know.”
Franco frowns at me. “It couldn’t have been, oh I don’t know…maternal instincts to want to keep you?”
I laugh at that, and not kindly. “Oh no. Nope. Definitely wasn’t that. Mom never wanted to be a mom, and she told me as much in so many words when I was…eighteen? Nineteen? She didn’t come out and say she didn’t want me, per se, just that she’d never wanted kids. I’m pretty sure as soon as she was able to afford it, after I was born, she went and got her tubes tied so there’d be no risk of getting saddled with any more damn kids.” I shrug. “So there’s that element—I was a burden to her, and even more so to my father. They were never married, and still aren’t, but they’ve been circling each other for forty-some years, getting into blow-out fights, breaking up, getting back together—it’s happened too many times in my life to even begin to count. I’d stopped keeping track by the time I was in fifth grade. The cycle was this: Dad couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, but he’s a lazy good-for-nothing son of a bitch who can’t keep a job, can’t do his own laundry, can’t pay his own bills, can’t cook his own food, so he needs my mom. And she, in turn, is lonely and sad and hardwired for codependency. She needs to be needed—just not by me; I’ve never counted in the cycle. So Daddy Dearest would go out drinking, pick up bar tail, get caught cheating because he’s the least tactful or circumspect human ever to walk this earth, and my mom would lose her shit, break up with him, kick him out, swearing up one side of the trailer and down the other that it was the last damn time.”
Franco has the block into a recognizable shape at this point—a bird, it looks like, something wheeling on a wingtip, a raptor with a sharp beak and extended talons. All this in a matter of minutes, with a few economical strokes of his knife; now that he has the major shape outlined, he switches to a smaller, sharper knife for more detailed work.
“Well, about two weeks later she’d be horny and lonely and maudlin and had herself convinced he’d learned his lesson, and that he’d be sick of McDonald’s and Mad Dog and dirty clothes, and he’d come crawling back and turn on the charm. And ohhhh yes, good ol’ Pop could be a charming motherfucker when he wanted to be; even I wasn’t immune to it as a kid. He’d lie and manipulate and promise and charm and wheedle his way back home and into her bed, and things would sort of stabilize for, like, a week or even a month here and there.” I sigh, fiddling with the rabbit he’d carved. “Then the whole thing would start over again. He’d stray, and she’d find a condom wrapper in his laundry or lipstick on him somewhere or she’d get a call from one of her many gossip hound friends telling her he’d been seen stepping out with so-and-so. He never really tried to hide it, I don’t think. I mean, Dad’s a lot of shit, but he’s not stupid. He just didn’t care enough to bother hiding it. I don’t know. And Mom is just…weak. Needy, and without enough self-esteem to kick his ass to the curb for good.”
“That sounds about as chaotic as my own childhood.”
“Oh yeah. And the fights they’d get in? Oh man. Cops were at our door regularly. I was on a first-name basis with a few of them by high school because they got called to our trailer so often. I’d have to sit outside with one of them while the other went in to talk to Mom and Dad, and sometimes they’d take me for ice cream or to Seven-Eleven for a Slurpee. I honestly wished more often than I care to admit that one of those officers would just take me to their home, or at least just leave me on the street and not make me go back home. I was so sick of Mom and Dad’s bullshit that being homeless sounded more appealing most days.”
