Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(26)

He knelt down beside my bed. His breath was bittersweet with alcohol. For a second, I worried I might throw up again, but the feeling subsided.

I took his face in my hands, the way he had described, and I kissed him.

Ace started stroking my hair (which was pleasant, but not romantic—it made me feel like a well-behaved lapdog), and he whispered so low I could barely hear him. “I don’t want to pressure you. I don’t want to be, you know, that guy who pressures you. Do you think we might have sex again someday?”

Without even thinking about it, I sat up in bed and pushed his hand away. “No.”

He replied, “I didn’t mean tonight necessarily.”

I hadn’t meant just tonight either, but I didn’t say that. I told him that I’d gone off the pill, which I had.

Ace smiled all dopey and drunk. “Maybe we could do it at homecoming?”

“Homecoming?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s in three weeks. We’re still going, right?” Ace explained that we had planned to before my accident.

I said yes. I mean, why not? I didn’t remember ever having been to a homecoming dance.

Ace fell asleep on my bedroom floor. I couldn’t, so I just lay in bed staring at him. He reminded me of a six-foot-four baby—he had long downy eyelashes and was drooling. It was more than just physically, though. Sleeping on my floor, he seemed somehow undefined and vulnerable. I even felt a certain tenderness for him. I wondered if that was the same as love.

When I awoke the next morning, Ace was gone. Actually, I should say afternoon. Dad had let me sleep in until around two before knocking on my door. “I’m making eggs.”

I informed him that I couldn’t eat anything, but Dad insisted it would make me feel better.

“Last night, I don’t know if you remember, my little lush, but I was kind of out with someone…” Dad blurted out in the middle of pouring me orange juice.

“The woman with the flower in her hair?” I asked.

Dad nodded. “It was a date.”

“Yeah. I figured that out on my own,” I said.

“Smart girl.” Dad started fussing with the eggs. They had started out as a goat cheese omelet but had ended up scrambled.

“If you play with them too much, they won’t turn out,” I pointed out to him.

“It’s good advice. I’m the one who always says that.” Dad beat the half-cooked eggs furiously. “Maybe I ought to start over?”

“Taste the same either way,” I said. “This woman…is she someone Cheryl and Morty set you up with?”

“No,” Dad said.

“Were you even out with Cheryl and Morty last night?”

“Not exactly.”

I raised my eyebrow at him. “Jesus, Dad, were you lying to me?”

I thought about Dad saying he was getting coffee and his strange, secret phone calls. In other words, it wasn’t his first date with the flower woman. He obviously had been seeing her since before my accident. “You’ve been hiding this from me since I got out of the hospital, haven’t you? Why would you do that?”

“It looks bad. I know how it looks, but in my defense, I wanted to break things to you slowly. You had so much to take in with your mom, the divorce, having a sister and everything. I didn’t want to add to your load.”

“But you lied to me! What makes you think I’d even care if you had a girlfriend?”

“She’s not just my girlfriend.”

“What do you mean?”

For the longest time, Dad wouldn’t answer me or look at me. The only sound in the kitchen was the hissing eggs, which were getting good and burned. I hadn’t had much of an appetite for them to begin with.

“I’m getting married, kid,” Dad said. He looked up at me guiltily.

Dad was getting married.

“She’s a dancer. How ’bout that?”

Aside from the flower, I hadn’t gotten much of a look at her in the car. In my head, I pictured the exotic kind. You know, a stripper, probably my age, with DDD breast implants and a fake tan, so I insisted he clarify. “What kind of dancer?”

When he said tango, I was slightly relieved. “She’s traveled the world. She’s won just about every award a professional tango dancer can win.” He sounded the way he did when I’d brought home a particularly good report card. Proud, I guess. “Now she mainly teaches here and in the city.”

He told me they’d met a year ago. He’d had to take dance lessons for an article he had been writing for a men’s magazine. When everyone partnered up, he’d been the odd man out. “She had to take pity on your old man,” he said.

“Do I like her?” I asked.

Dad cleared his throat. “It’s been difficult for you. With Mom. And everything.”

That meant I didn’t like her.

“But maybe your injury could be an inadvertently fortuitous event?” Dad said. “A good thing. A new start.”

A new start? That kind of talk didn’t sound like my dad at all. There was nothing good about what had happened to me. Except maybe meeting James, and that had turned out to be a pleasant but anomalous event that had momentarily distracted me from how much everything else sucked.

“There’s nothing good about this,” I yelled. I grabbed Dad’s keys off the kitchen island and ran out the door and straight into his car, which was parked in the driveway. I didn’t necessarily plan to try driving again; I just wanted to be alone. I couldn’t be in the same physical space with Dad.