The Burning Side(27)

I flood with relief. “Dad, where are you?”

Mom looks from the road to me to the road.

“In Waco?” I say into the phone.

I turn and mouth Waco, but Mom is already hanging a U-ey like we’re in an action flick. When Dad tries to argue that he’ll just drive home, Mom holds her hand out for the phone, palm up in a way that says, Oh no he will not.

“Sweetheart,” she says firmly. “Stay right where you are. We’re coming to you.”

After confirming that his phone has battery and the ringer is turned up loud, we hang up and the car goes quiet.

“Why Waco?” I ask.

Mom shakes her head. “I don’t know. Familiarity?”

Dad studied dentistry at Baylor. Four decades later, he went out for champagne and ended up at some hardware store near his alma mater.

“You’ve got to tell people, Mom. This is worse than I thought.”

She sighs. “It’s not only up to me. It’s not like your dad doesn’t understand what’s happening.”

“Did he understand what was happening when he randomly drove to Waco?”

Her eyes are glued to the road in front of her. “Dad knows that he has memory problems—he just doesn’t always know when he has memory problems.” She bites her lip and says, quieter, “We haven’t had enough time to process this.”

I make a face, but I drop it and text Leo. GONNA BE A FEW HOURS.

His response comes immediately. HOURS? SERIOUSLY?

I roll my eyes and turn the phone over in my lap.

“Kids all right?”

“Yeah.”

“And Leo?”

Here we are with a long car ride, sun plunging below the horizon, and I still haven’t told my perceptive mother about my impending divorce. I adjust the air vent and lean my head back against the headrest, sighing. “Will you hate me if we can’t make it work?”

She flinches, trying to tamp down her surprise at the casual severity of my words.

“I’d never hate you. Sheesh, what a question.” She pauses. “Is it really that bad, though? You wouldn’t want to do anything rash.”

I pick a cuticle. “I don’t know.”

But it is that bad, and I already did something rash. She would never understand.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not right now.” Cuticle on my other hand. “Do you want to talk about Dad?”

She adjusts her hands on the steering wheel and sighs. “Not right now.”

So we talk about high-waisted jeans. Adam Driver movies. What form of exercise we’re doing these days. Mom: swimming. Me: nothing, unless you count wrangling my crawling baby, which Mom emphatically does count. The sky shifts from blue to pink to velvety purple.

When we finally pull up at Jed’s Hardware, Dad is on a bench beside a man with a kind smile and silver teeth. Mom rushes over. I follow close behind, wondering if Dad will recognize us—I don’t know much about the progression of this disease.

To my relief, he stands to kiss Mom, a plastic bag around his wrist with red letters repeating thank you thank you thank you. The man beside him has green eyes and a tool belt, and he says, “Looks like you’re in good hands.”

I glance at the shop. It closed over an hour ago. This guy stayed here to watch over my father. My heart lurches in gratitude, and I note his name tag: Ricardo, Manager.

Dad also steals a glance at his name tag, and—as though we’re at some evening shindig—he introduces us. “Ricardo, this is my wife, Deb, and our daughter, April.” He doesn’t seem like a person with Alzheimer’s to me. “Ladies, this is Ricardo. The guy is a hammer expert.” Dad raises his bag-heavy arm. “Got some new ones. Can’t believe we’ve never had a—what do you call it?—jeweler’s hammer before.”

There is no champagne in sight, I note. And then there’s the fact that we are two hours from home. I swallow, understanding that this sickness is no less real for its cat-and-mouse approach. Dad must have dropped enough concerning clues to make this guy stick around after his store closed. My gentle, confused father, who was meant to be celebrating his son’s engagement.

Mom loops her arm through Dad’s and says to the manager, “Thank you for your help.” Then to Dad, “Ready to go home?”

Dad grins as though nothing is out of the ordinary, and I wonder if he truly doesn’t know, or if he’s pretending because he believes that somehow I don’t know. Which makes me think of Sadie. She must have some sense of our marital strife. Parents think we’re hiding things, but kids see straight through us, even if they don’t quite know what they’re looking at.

Dad addresses Ricardo. “Good luck with that timing belt.”

“And good luck with those grandkids.” The two men shake hands, Dad’s arm a blank canvas beside the manager’s sleeve of tattoos. “Take it easy, papi.”

My parents turn toward the truck, and Mom says over her shoulder, “See you at home, sweetheart.”

I’ll drive her car to Dallas, but I hang back.

The manager has already started to walk away when I call after him. “Sir?”

He turns, the moon suspended above him.

“If you hadn’t— I mean, my dad, he could have—”