“Okay, James from Columbia, are you ready?” Sam’s father asks as Sam reaches for the beer resting against Annie’s pillow. It’s a broadcast of a game on June 12, 2016, available on YouTube, and Sam has now watched the three minutes and sixteen seconds that his father appears on-screen seventeen times. Annie is visiting his mother at Rushing Waters, and he’s on his third beer; his father is standing on a pitcher’s mound with an oversize microphone and an arm draped around a pudgy guy in stone-washed jeans.
Most serious announcers probably hate being forced to shill, but Sam can see how much Ted relishes this part of the job—emceeing the trivia game after inning five, introducing Tonight’s Special Guest before the first pitch. Of course he does. Gives ol’ Teddy from Freddy the chance to show off his many charms and get a turn in the spotlight, his preferred position in the world. “Get this right, and everyone in section six will go home with a coupon for a large pizza with a topping of their choice from our good friends at Capitol Pizza, where every night is family night. Okay, here we go.” Ted lifts the index card. “Where did Frank Key, our good friend and great mascot, get his name?”
That’s a cinch. Even if Sam hadn’t heard this question seventeen times already, he’d expect people to know it’s Francis Scott Key, golden boy of Frederick, Maryland, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But James from Columbia doesn’t know and nobody goes home with a free pizza and Sam closes his laptop, wondering what Annie’s going to say when he tells her about the debt.
He’s going to do it when she gets home, any minute now. He’s been practicing what he’s going to say for the last hour. Easy: the truth. His mom made the whole thing up. His father’s divorce, the two million dollars, the letters on fancy stationery every year, letting Sam know he was loved . . . and oh yeah, guess what, there’s no money! He read the letter again, which he’d filed away in the drawer where he kept all of his “father’s” letters, understanding the depth of his mother’s delusion. I don’t think there’s been a day since I left that I haven’t thought about you, Maggie. I’ll always regret what I did.
Sam will argue that he’s having a hard time deciding who’s more pathetic: Margaret, for pining away for the asshole for twenty-four years, or Sam for falling for it. He’ll explain the holes in his thinking, how he should have taken Annie’s advice and waited for the money to come before financing a shiny new Lexus RX 350 with leather interior and automatic ignition. If he had, maybe he would have realized how unlikely it was that the father who thought to call his son twice a year at most and each time only to talk about himself—“Can you believe it, Sam, you’re talking to a guy with a goddamn wine cellar!”—suddenly gave the family he abandoned $2 million because he cared about their happiness.
Additionally, Sam will point out, it also probably would have been a good idea to consider the possibility that the letter wasn’t written by his father but by a woman with a rating of 2 on the Clinical Dementia Rating scale, the stage marked by a disorientation with respect to time and place, a lack of judgment, and a propensity for alternative realities such as, for example, that the selfish prick she married regretted ruining her life.
Sam heads to the kitchen for another beer. He’s going to tell Annie as soon as she gets here, and she’s going to understand. Who knows? Maybe she won’t walk straight out the door and return to New York. Maybe she’ll forgive him. Hell, maybe she’ll even feel sorry for him. “I think you’re an idiot for spending money you didn’t have,” she’ll say. “But I get it. You wanted to believe the money was real because it meant getting the one thing you’d been searching for your whole life. Proof your dad loved you.”
“Yes, that’s right,” he’ll reply, relieved. “Classic case of wishful thinking, or, more technically, decision-making based on what is pleasing to imagine as opposed to what is rational.” It’s so obvious, Sam will have no choice but to smack himself in the head. “You’d think, given my training, I would have been smarter about the whole thing.”
He takes the last beer from the refrigerator and hears a car pulling into the driveway. Annie’s home. He twists off the beer cap and takes a long pull. I can do this, he thinks, as his phone beeps on the counter.
Hello Dr. S. It’s me. Charlie. Your favorite new patient. What are you doing?