So Much More(10)

He shakes his head and tries to put on a brave face. “No. I’m just working on free throws.”





Scotch is for geriatric men





present





Miranda’s back from her honeymoon, apparently ready to make an attempt at parenting in person.

I’m sitting in my car watching her drive away with my kids.

I don’t think of them as our kids anymore.

I think of them as mine.

I feed them.

I shelter them.

I talk to them.

And most importantly, I love them. Every minute of every day.

She left.

She hasn’t been around to do anything for them, least of all love them.

Her feeble attempt at connecting over the phone has been pathetic.

I try not to dwell on it because then I demonize her.

More than I already have.

It exhausts me and chips away at the goodness that I used to think cocooned my heart. The dark ugliness of hate peeks through the recesses and blots out the light of decency. I wonder how long it will be before I transform completely into my hate.

I’m fighting it for my kids.

But it’s a conniving bastard that doesn’t fight fair; it fights dirty, a knife in the back of hope.

I shake my head to clear it and take a few deep breaths. She’s here for twenty-four hours with my kids. It’s eight in the morning on a Saturday. I’ll pick them up in this coffee shop parking lot tomorrow morning at eight o’clock so she can make her 10:00 AM flight.

I don’t know what to do with myself. I haven’t gone twenty-four hours without a child in over eleven years. For a moment, I consider just sitting here in my car until they return in the morning.

But I crank the engine and drive back to my apartment.





As I climb the stairs, the panic starts to set in. It’s similar to the initial feeling you get when you realize you’ve lost something important. The gripping, instantaneous fear associated with not only loss, but an incompleteness. As the panic rises and builds it becomes shockingly apparent how much of my identity is tied to my kids. I am my kids’ dad. I am their caretaker. Everything else that used to make Seamus McIntyre, Seamus McIntyre, is gone. I am a parent. I don’t know how to do anything else. I don’t know how to be anything else. My chest hurts. The pain is alarming. Piercing. Am I having a heart attack?

“Seamus, are you okay?”

I look up and have to squint through the bright sunshine to make out the worried, sapphire-colored eyes staring down at me. It’s Faith. I nod. I don’t know if I mean it, but I’m nodding instinctively trying to calm her. Her expression is concern and fear. And it’s then that I feel the rough concrete of the steps against my palms. I’ve fallen, in my panic or just as a result of my useless legs I don’t know, but I’ve fallen. “I’m okay,” I reassure her.

She places her hand on my back and whispers, as if to soften the message she’s about to deliver. “You fell. You’re bleeding. Let me help you up to your apartment.”

“I don’t need any help!” It’s loud. And defensive. And condemning. Followed by a much quieter, “I don’t need any help.” A declaration that starts off annoyed…and finishes up embarrassed. When I look into her startled eyes, I expect disgust and hurt, but what I see is empathy and acceptance.

She pats my back once before she grasps my forearm in her hands and prompts me to stand with her help. “We all need help. Human-ing is hard to do all by yourself,” she whispers when my ear comes level with her mouth.

Inside my apartment, I want to apologize, but I head to the bathroom to wash up my bleeding knee instead. I feel like a jackass.

She’s standing in the same spot near the front door when I return. I thought she’d be long gone. Because she’s still standing here, I’m anticipating a motivational talk or a homily, so when she says, “Let’s drink,” I’m surprised.

I glance at the clock on the DVD player—eight forty-five. “It’s a little early to start drinking, don’t you think?”

She shrugs. “Nope. I worked all night. I go to bed in a few hours, consider it a nightcap.” I don’t know what she does for a living, but she doesn’t look like she just got off work. Her dreadlocks are pulled back in a thick, low ponytail and she’s wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, not to mention that when she helped me on the stairs, she smelled like soap, clean and freshly showered.

I miss my kids like hell, and I hate my ex-wife with a passion and I can’t see beyond that, so despite my mind screaming at me to dole out the obligatory rejection, I say, “Fuck it all, let’s drink.”

The smile that unfolds on her face is the most wickedly approving smile I’ve ever seen. I have a comrade. “Hell yes, Seamus! I knew there was a little bit of rebel in you.”

Within two minutes she’s run down to her apartment and returned with a bottle of cheap vodka and cheaper scotch.

We sit side by side on the couch, and I hand her a Pokémon plastic tumbler. She eyes it approvingly. “Pikachu was always my favorite.”

“It’s your lucky day then. Sorry, I don’t have a lot of grown up glassware.”

“No worries. It all goes down the same.” She points to the bottles on the coffee table. “Pick your poison.”