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It happened on a Thursday night. The next day would be my last day working at my dad’s law firm that summer, before I started at U of C as an incoming college freshman. I’d saved up some money I made that summer and bought him a present. It was a little thing, nothing bigger than a small trophy, the scales of justice in gold, the words LAW OFFICES OF THEODORE DOBIAS engraved in the wooden base.
I waited until the end of the day to pick it up. He thought I’d left for the day and gone home. Instead, I’d stopped at the jewelry store to pick up the order, killed some time downtown waiting for everyone to leave the office, then snuck back up to the office after seven.
It was rare for anyone to be in the office that late. Personal-injury lawyers don’t get paid by the hour, so unlike defense firms that value their associates by the number of billable hours they generate—by how long it takes them to complete a task—P.I. lawyers are more efficient with their written work product and don’t burn the midnight oil unless they’re preparing for trial. Trials aren’t that common anymore, so the odds of anyone being in the office was small.
I used my key card and swiped through. The reception lights were off, and usually the last person to leave turned those off. But then I swiped through the second glass door and could see, instantly, that his office light was on, peeking out from under the closed door. I stopped and thought a moment. My plan had been to put the gift on his desk, so he’d find it Friday morning when we arrived at work together. That wasn’t going to happen with him still here, but at least I could sneak into my cubicle and hide it and give it to him in the morning.
I heard a sound. My first reaction, he was in pain. My first mental image, he was moving something heavy. He was moving furniture and hurt himself, something like that. A heart attack, maybe.
Sometimes I chide myself in hindsight for my naivete. But then—maybe it was okay that a teenage boy didn’t immediately leap to the worst conclusions about his father.
I moved slowly toward the door, carefully along the carpet, as the moaning and the grunting continued, then a thumping noise, and a woman’s breathless voice.
We didn’t have locks on the office doors. I remember my father saying that was a kind of statement, some bullshit about an open-door, egalitarian philosophy around the office.
I wish the door had been locked. I wish I hadn’t opened it.
I wish I didn’t have to listen to him grovel and apologize and try to justify to me why he was fucking around on my mother, who was probably being fed her dinner, spoon to mouth, at that moment by our in-home nurse, Edie.
That was the moment. It got worse, after the money was gone, and we could no longer afford Edie, and Mom was headed for a nursing home at the age of forty-nine. But right there in the law firm, on the seventeenth floor of the Chicago Title & Trust Building, with my father chasing after me down the hall as he pulled up his trousers, trying to block me from the elevator while shoving his shirt inside his pants, begging me to listen to reason, not to go home and do something everyone would regret—that was the moment, for me, when everything changed.
I wish I didn’t let him convince me not to say anything to my mother.
I wish I didn’t let him make me a coconspirator in his crime.
Because he didn’t stop. Oh, no, even after I found out, he kept on. He didn’t tell me, but I caught him again. A few months later, just before Thanksgiving, stepping out onto the back patio for some fresh air, I found an empty bottle of champagne and two glasses tucked in the corner of the porch.
Two glasses, not one, even though my mother could no longer drink alcohol. He wasn’t just cheating on my mother; his lady friend was sneaking over to the house at night after my mother was asleep, and I was working late at the school.
A stupid bottle of champagne, two red-tinted plastic champagne flutes you’d buy at a convenience store. Those things told me that my father wasn’t just a weak man who succumbed to a moment of temptation—he was a liar. He was a cheat. His carnal needs were more important than his commitment to my mother, to our family.
I didn’t throw them away. I started to. I tossed the bottle of champagne and glasses into an empty garbage bag but, instead of heading to the garbage bin, I took it to my room and placed it inside my closet. I didn’t want to forget. I wanted to look at it every day to remind myself what and who my father was.
The day I found that bottle, the day I realized my father was never going to stop cheating—that was the day that Ted Dobias died.
The night he was found with a knife in his stomach, floating in his pool, was just the moment he stopped breathing.