How High We Go in the Dark(36)

My brother tried to call me repeatedly when my father died of plague complications. Most would say I should have learned a lesson from this, grown from the experience, but I’ve been too busy running away from it. And then there was the voicemail my mother left after the funeral, a duration of eight minutes and thirty-two seconds, which I deleted without listening. Sometimes I fantasize about that message, waffling back and forth between “We love you, Dennis. Please come back,” and “Your father died disappointed in you.”

The last time I saw my father was ten years before his death. I had crawled back home after failing to launch a career in my twenties, my credit cards maxed out from years of trying to keep up with my more successful friends, buying drinks for strangers who I thought could open professional doors. I’d started stealing from my job at Patagonia—a few dollars here and there, a fleece, a hat. When my parents finally bailed me out with a ticket home to Nevada, my mother greeted me at the airport, waiting outside our twenty-year-old station wagon, arms crossed.

“You think you’re Mr. Big Shot?” she said. “We dipped into our retirement funds to cover your debt. The invoice is in your room. You’re paying us back, in case you didn’t get the hint.”

My dad played the good cop and hugged me. I was shaking and he probably saw that I’d turned into a thirty-year-old kid waiting for the business end of a belt. “You messed up,” he said. “We’ll look into AA for you, therapy. We’ll get through this together.” He told my mom to back off. But I was just so far deep, living in sad-sack city. I didn’t fully appreciate how my parents were going out on a financial limb for me.

I was home for only a few days when everything exploded. My dad told me to pick up our beagle’s shit from the pads in the basement, and I sassed back.

“I’ll do it when I feel like it” is what I probably said.

“You’ll do it now!” he yelled. “Right now, your job is picking up d’Artagnan’s shit. In return, you get to live here. Do you understand?”

Of course, I did not like that one bit. I stormed out of my room, leaving my futile online job search, and got in his face in the kitchen. When my dad was pissed, he puffed himself up like he must have done as the only Asian kid in a rural New Hampshire school district, defending his lunch money from the white bullies who’d taunted him, asking if he could see in widescreen.

“You want to come at me like that?” he said. “I will knock your goddamn teeth in if you’re going to be a punk.”

And maybe that was true when I was a teenager, but even if I was scrawnier than him, I had a few more inches and I didn’t have arthritis. I wanted him to punch me, just so I could hit him back. Right then I fucking hated this guy. So, without really thinking, I took it up a notch, pulled a butcher knife from the Cutco set some salesman had duped my mother into buying. Sweat pooled around my grip. I imagined plunging in the blade and running out the door, a fugitive. Temporary insanity, my lawyers would call it. I’d sleep under a highway overpass, eventually hitchhike my way out of state and on and on.

My mom heard the commotion and came running from her craft room downstairs. I dropped the knife as soon as she turned the corner, but she’d already seen me—and in the split second it took for the knife to fall, my father landed a halfway decent right hook. I answered in turn, tackling him to the floor. One. Two. My father’s nose cracked. Three hits before I felt my mother prying me off him. She cradled my father’s bloodied face, shielding him from me. She stared at me for a moment, sobbing. I might as well have been an armed robber.

“Get out of my house!” she yelled. “Get out now and don’t come back.”

So, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist like my brother to figure out why I’m not close with my family. I probably should have returned home at some point to patch things up before my dad died. Instead, I did what my mother told me to do: I left and never went back. It was easier pretending I was alone.

Business at the elegy hotels had been on the downswing lately due to new treatments and organ donor programs. Mr. Fang referred to it as an opportunity to restructure the brand. He started sending bereavement coordinators out into the city to talk to residents about our funerary and crematory services. Send off your loved ones in our luxury suites! Say goodbye to morgues and cold storage and hello to a 3? Star Resort Treatment! Low Interest Payment Plans Available! One of our competitor hotel chains in Oakland—Elysium Suites—was now selling itself as a care facility, linking to early reports that the experimental plague treatments produced memory loss. I’d been excluded from the past few community outreach endeavors, thanks to what management liked to call a dickhead attitude, but other nearby chains and even our sister locations had been ramping up their marketing efforts, so one day Mr. Fang partnered Val and I together, probably hoping her hospitality skills would rub off on me or something.

Val really hoofed it in the field, as if we got a commission based on the number of brochures we handed out. I enjoyed watching her work and learned that a lot of people will let you into their homes once they know you’ve experienced a tragedy of your own. Val began with her broken widowed smile and ended with a foot in the door. She always asked for sparkling water. This was the balance between customer service, door-to-door sales, and funerary stoicism that I’d never quite mastered.

“Maybe try not smiling like a friggin’ serial killer when you walk up to their door,” Val said on our first neighborhood assignment.