Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(73)

“Lucky little girl.” I almost ask what her name’s going to be, but I can’t go there. What if it’s Delia?

Dad winces like I kneed him in the nuts. He rubs his forehead.

I turn my face away and look out the window so Dad can’t see the tears welling in my eyes. “Does Marisol know?”

“About you?”

“Yeah.”

“She…does.”

“That sounded very tentative.”

“It’s so weird that you know words like ‘tentative’ now.”

“Does she know or not?”

“She sort of knows. She doesn’t ask many questions. I don’t think she really wants to know.”

“So no.”

“Sort of.”

I keep looking out the window. “This is so weird.”

“She knows it’s a painful topic for me and I have a hard time talking about it. She has her own past anyway.”

“Does she know your name isn’t Derek Armstrong?”

“It is Derek Armstrong.”

“Does she know you weren’t born Derek Armstrong?”

“No.” Quiet for a few seconds, and then he asks, “Are you hungry?”

My stomach is technically empty, but it’s not sending me any signal as unambiguous as hunger. It has other things on its mind. But I say, “Sure.”

“Still like pizza?”

“Do people generally outgrow liking pizza?”

He smiles thinly. “Not usually. I know a place.”

???

We sit and order.





“I was hoping it would be Cicis,” I say, looking for some hint of recognition of the reference.

“Really?”

“No.”

“Because I bet we have one.”

I can’t tell if he gets it. “No, I’m good.”

I’m sitting across from my dad. I’m about to have pizza with my dad again. I feel the tingle of tears gathering in my eyes. One falls in spite of my best efforts. I quickly wipe it away.

“Delia,” Dad says softly.

“I’m fine. This is…a lot.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” I dab another tear with my napkin.

“I can’t believe how big you are. When did you get—” He motions at the bottom of his nose, where my septum is pierced.

“Last year.”

“What’d Mom think?”

“She took me to get it.”

He laughs. “Sounds right. I can’t stop looking at your face.”

I guess I don’t need to wonder anymore if my show ever somehow reached him. Nope. “Didn’t you ever, like, Instagram-stalk me or anything?”

“A couple times. But seeing you…from that distance—it broke my heart. I couldn’t handle it.” Tears well up in his eyes. “Wanna tell me about your life?”

More than anything. And also no. But I do. A little. “After you left, things were hard for a long time. Mom wasn’t doing well at all. Me neither. It sucked. For years. But we survived. We each got on medication that helped us a lot with our depression. And—” I realize I’m about to tell him about the most important thing in my life. The thing I made to try to get him back. My sacred thing. “I started a show with my best friend, Josie. Called Midnite Matinee. It’s on TV Six in Jackson and some other public access stations around the U.S. We’re horror hosts, like Dr. Gangrene or SkeleTonya.”

“Are you serious?” he says, awestruck.

“That’s why we’re in Florida. For ShiverCon. Josie is meeting with Jack Divine in Orlando right now.”

“Jack Divine? As in Jack-O-Lantern? He did SkeleTonya’s show?!”

“The very one. He’s talking to us about working together on our show.”

Dad sits back. “Wow. Wow. DeeDee, that’s amazing. Good for you.”

And now he knows. It feels strangely anticlimactic. I think about all the times I sat there, Arliss counting us in, waiting for this. The moment he knew what I had done with my life. Now he knows. And nothing is different. The earth is unmoved.

“Josie’s pretty great,” I say. “She wants to go into TV professionally, so she makes our show a lot better than it would be otherwise. She’s super funny.”

“She sounds awesome.”

“Do you still watch horror movies?” I ask.

“Sometimes. Mostly newer stuff. Marisol isn’t a horror fan. She gets too scared.”

“Do you ever watch horror hosts anymore?”

“No.” He stares at the table.

So you were never going to see me anyway. Great. Excellent plan, Delia.

Our pizza comes. After the waitress leaves, Dad says, “The reason I couldn’t watch horror hosts anymore is because they reminded me.”

“So you ran from something you loved.”

Dad doesn’t say anything for a while. “How is she?”

“Mom?” I say through a mouthful of too-hot pizza. Per usual, I’ve burned myself.

“Yeah.”

I shrug. “She’s Mom. She’s a manager at Target. She earns extra cash doing palm and tarot readings at our house and selling jewelry she makes on Etsy. I have to stay on her to take her medication. When she takes it, she’s good. When she doesn’t, she’s bad. We’re thinking about getting tattoos together.”