Seeing my father’s face front and center as the headlining story in a tabloid should be more surprising. This would come as a shock to any normal, healthy, semi-functioning adult with anything resembling a normal, healthy, semi-functioning relationship with their parent. A moment in which they might find themselves speechless.
That’s what any normal woman would do when confronted with her father’s face on the cover of such a publication. You know the kind: they run stories about current or former world leaders being reptilians, sent from another galaxy to take over our world.
I’ve never been able to get behind that—or any theory resembling it.
On the other hand, my father had absolutely no problem whatsoever getting behind such ideas. He also provided an amplified stage for anyone who ever had similar thoughts.
My dad, Graham Graves, was the host of one of the most popular AM talk radio shows.
And he’s been missing for seven years today.
I unload my cart onto the conveyor belt, but my eyes remain glued to the tabloid.
The girl at the register starts scanning and bagging, neither of us exchanging more than a stiff smile throughout the ordeal.
I load the last of my items—several bottles of cheap wine—and push my cart around for her to place the bags back in it. I fish for my wallet.
“Hey,” the guy in line behind me says.
I turn, expecting him to ask me where I found something I’m purchasing.
“You’re his daughter, aren’t you?” he asks.
I take in the man’s appearance.
Plaid pearl snap shirt, fitted Wranglers, cowboy boots. And a smile. The kind of smile that you only get when you run into a celebrity. He looks starstruck.
But I have news for him. I’m no celebrity. And I have absolutely no desire to follow in my errant father’s footsteps.
“I am,” I confirm cautiously.
“I used to listen to him every single night,” the man says wistfully.
He’s older than me. The thought strikes me that he’s my dad’s age. Current age. How old my dad would be. The phrasing is strange, and I roll it around in my mind. It occurs to me that I haven’t done a lot of thinking about the implications of that phrasing.
That my father might not be of a certain age.
That he may not exist anymore at all.
For a split second, the wall I’ve erected against such thoughts comes down. It’s momentary. But I feel a stab of something resembling emotion in my gut. A sinking feeling in my chest.
“Oh,” I say.
It’s all I can manage.
“That’ll be one-hundred-and-three dollars even,” the teen behind the register says.
I snap my attention back to her. Away from the man. Away from the other man—the far more familiar man—on the cover of the tabloid.
I slip my debit card out of my wallet and swipe it quickly in the reader. It chirps happily, letting me know the transaction went through. I start to shove my card back into my wallet and my eyes momentarily go to the tabloid.
Without thinking, I reach out and grab it.
“And this,” I tell the girl.
She rings me up once more. I swipe my card again.
I smile at the man who knew my father in the loosest way possible, and I head for the parking lot.
***
After I load my groceries and lock my doors, I get my phone out and check my notifications like a well-trained dog.
Somewhat surprisingly, two names are missing from the screen that I expected to see there.
The first is my best friend, Noelle.
The other is my twin brother, Blake.
I expect to hear from them both today. For entirely different reasons. One pleasant, or slightly so. The other likely unpleasant, and more than slightly so.
I plug my phone into the port that makes it display itself on my car stereo screen. I press the button on my steering wheel that allows for voice control.
“Play my station,” I tell it.
“Here’s some music picked just for you,” Siri chirps back quickly.
Immediately, Third Eye Blind begins to play and I pull out of the parking lot.
At a stoplight, I check my phone again, making sure I haven’t missed anything. And I haven’t. I think about calling Noelle. Just to make sure that we’re still on for tonight.
I can’t imagine she’d cancel.
Not tonight.
Not on our annual thing.
But the thought that she might creeps in and makes me face the idea that I might have to spend tonight alone. Or worse, on the phone with Blake.
I banish the thoughts and head home.
It’s December, and people are scurrying around Christmas shopping. The only person I ever shop for anymore is Noelle. It’s been a long time since Blake and I exchanged anything warmer than fuck you.
At a second stoplight I catch movement in the corner of my eye. I glance at the minivan beside me and see two kids in the backseat fighting with each other. They’re laughing, though. Mom in the front seat reaches back to break it up. But before the light turns green, she’s laughing and dad in the driver’s seat eventually gets involved, too.
They’re happy.
It’s a family dynamic I’m not familiar with.
It’s the family unit I should have had.
The person behind me honks, letting me know the turn light is green. I shake myself out of my little daydream and hit the gas, peeling out of the stoplight, and leaving the happy family in the other lane behind.
The house that I live in—my father’s house, legally still—is just outside of town. Oklahoma City has become somewhat of a booming metropolis in the last ten years. A development I’m not sure any of us saw coming in the 90s. But now, it’s packed. There are breweries and bars, coffee shops and bakeries, restaurants and shopping centers, the likes of which I don’t think I could have imagined as a kid.
And there’s still enough of a rural patch in the city that provides for properties like the one that my dad bought when Blake and I were seventeen.
I slow down just before I get to our—my—driveway. A giant truck that looks like a substitute for healthy masculinity whips around me, the gust of air from it shaking my SUV.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I shout as if the guy in the pickup can hear me.
A little shaken and a lot annoyed, I head down the winding driveway that leads to the property. My dad, for whatever reason—likely his fame, had chosen a piece of land that was isolated on all sides by woods. Trees line the property and even hide the house from the main road. People still know this is his house, though. Sometimes, teenagers will get up the courage to do a little trespassing. Though it’s grown more infrequent with each passing year since his disappearance.
That’s something that hits me with unexpected sadness.
As I wind my way through the trees along the gravel drive, I spot a red car outside the garage and a smile creeps across my face. Relief follows. I guess I hadn’t realized how much it might have depressed me if Noelle had chosen to spend her night some other way rather than in my sad, sad company tonight.
But there’s her sports car, a red Mustang that she just purchased. Prior to that, she’d driven a Mazda Miata that she’d owned since she turned twenty-one. The wheels were ready to fall off soon when she bought the Mustang. She needed a new car. That thing was a coffin on wheels, waiting for the opportunity to take its owner to hell. Oh, what fun adventures we had in that thing.
I smirk as I pull into the garage, thinking about the time that the brakes went out while we were on the highway. We’d screamed and I’d seen my life flash before my eyes. But we lucked out. It happened on a straight stretch of road in the middle of a weeknight. We were practically alone on the interstate.
I shut the garage door and head for the back of my SUV. I grab the groceries, straining under the weight of all of them. The plastic sacks dig into my wrists, but I’ll be damned if I need to make two trips. I’d rather throw my back out.
I reach for the doorknob, but the door opens before I can.
“Hello, gorgeous!” Noelle chirps, her cheeks flushed with either cold or wine.
It isn’t until she embraces me, and I catch the scent of her flammable breath, that I’m sure of which. Her freckled face is flushed with drink and her strawberry blonde hair is tucked up into a messy bun. That always looks better on her than on me. I end up looking bald in pictures if my hair isn’t down and she looks like she just rolled out of a Pinterest ad. Despite her tipsy state, her light green eyes are bright.
“Someone started early,” I say in return. I stand there for a moment, holding the groceries.
“Oh, shit. Here, give me those,” she takes part of them and helps me into the house.
We walk down the darkened hallway that leads into the kitchen. It’s also dark, only the lights beneath the cabinets are on. The fading winter daylight outside casts the house in a gloomy blue-gray light. We place the sacks on the island and get to work unloading them.
Noelle knows all about the importance of certain dates. She’s got a few in her own life with just as grim an overtone as what today holds for me.
“How are you doing?” she asks as we finish up.
I turn to see her holding a glass of white wine out for me. I take it.
“I’m fine,” I tell her with a brittle laugh. It sounds breakable even to me. And I tell myself the reason for that is that today marks uncertainty. Nothing else.
“It’s okay if you’re not, Blair,” she says.
“Why don’t you drink some more?” I say snippily back.
“Why don’t you drink some, period?” she quips in return.
I can’t help but smile. I think in any of our lifetimes, we’re gifted once, maybe twice, with a human being who truly and utterly understands us. For some people, that comes in the shape of a romantic partner. For me, that came in the shape of Noelle.
“I intend to,” I say as I raise my glass to hers.
We clink our delicate drinkware together.
“To the future,” she says.
“To the future,” I echo.
We drink, even though the future for both of us is a murky cloud of uncertainty.
At least tonight, we have each other.
