"Someone's Father" by Emily Stedge
Photo Credit: Laura Fehrman, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.
Someone’s Father
The summer after my senior year of college, while reeling from the wild disappointment of not receiving any departmental awards, nor the creative research grant I applied for, I felt like such a failure. My classmates were off to bigger and better things after graduation, and I was the only one who still had one last semester to complete. One was headed to New York for a job with Scholastic, and another landed a job as an assistant at Fred Rogers Productions. A third was headed to the University of Michigan for his MFA, making him something of a legend among our classmates. It all felt unfair. I had been working so hard just to stay afloat that I completely forgot there was a broader future I needed to be working towards.
I determined it was time to hunker down and start laying the groundwork for my new life after graduation in the fall. I quit my job in retail for an office assistant job at a local arts center. I deleted all dating apps off of my phone. I set out to write 30,000 words that summer after hearing it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. I wasn’t feeling great—my anxiety still kept me from doing anything I wasn’t obligated to do, and I still believed overall that my life was meaningless —but the rusty gears were turning. I was trying.
A month into my new job, a part of my past re-emerged as they so often do—when I least expected it, and on a day when I had to wait for the bus in the rain. I was wet and frizzy, frazzled because I was running late, and my manager asked me to cover drop-off for summer camps in our other building. I arrived and nothing I needed was where she said it would be. I was slightly hungover and only just realizing it as I hurried about under the dim fluorescent lights of the lobby. Parents were arriving with their questions and demands and children, and I was struggling to keep up. I could feel my shirt sticking to my chest with sweat, my temples bursting with perspiration. The door opened and another parent and child walked in, and I recognized the father immediately. My stomach lurched and I felt my throat tightening. It was Rick.
***
I knew him before, just months earlier. We met in January, after matching on a dating app. He was forty-eight, and I was twenty-one. I messaged him for the first time while at a bar with a friend. She was telling me all about the new guy she was dating, and suddenly I felt lonely. I was coming off of six months of self-prescribed celibacy, determined to shed my self-destructive ways and emerge stable and strong. But something about my friend telling me about the dates and the sex and the fun made me want to have my own. Simply put, I was jealous and feeling left out without a man to talk about. I stayed active on dating apps, enjoying the confidence boost each match brought me, even if I never messaged anyone or pursued anything. Rick had a sweet smile, and in his first photo, he was tanned and sitting at a table in a chateau I pictured sitting on the coast of Greece. He wore a floaty, white shirt left half unbuttoned so his chest peeked out. I rationalized pursuing him because he was the same age as Hugh Jackman, and it didn’t seem weird to have a crush on an older celebrity, so why would it be weird to have a crush on Rick? I assumed based on his age that he would pay for everything in whatever fling we had, which was very important because I was broke as a joke. He had messaged me the week before, asking me if I realized how old he was.
“Yes, I realize,” I typed back while my friend ordered us another round of beers.
“You should let me take you out sometime,” he replied.
If I hadn’t been thirty minutes outside of the city, I would have set something up with him that night, but instead, we agreed to get sushi the next weekend. He lived just down the street and around the corner from me, so he picked me up on his way to the restaurant, which was within walking distance of my apartment. The moment I saw his smile, the way he was rushing up to the door to escort me down the stairs, how he seemed proud of me for some unknown reason, I could tell he might actually be someone’s father.
He confirmed it later that evening in the tiny sushi joint when he mentioned he had an ex-wife, who he didn’t get along with, and a six-year-old daughter caught in the middle. He talked a lot about his divorce and the custody agreements and disagreements, and I just listened and nodded my head. I was good at listening to adult’s problems and nodding my head in a way that somehow felt like comfort to them. Rick had a strong presence that reminded me of a puppy dog. He was easily excited and amazed in the way a kindergarten teacher is, as if every tiny feat was something to be celebrated. He loved that I was a writer, he loved that I was politically and socially engaged. He thought it was wonderful that I lived on my own and took care of myself. He told me, “You must be so intelligent,” every time I talked about how I was double majoring on top of pursuing a minor and a certificate. By the end of the date, his energy felt overwhelming, like I was going to drown in his compliments and excitement about things I mostly saw as lackluster.
The moment I saw his smile, the way he was rushing up to the door to escort me down the stairs, how he seemed proud of me for some unknown reason, I could tell he might actually be someone’s father.
At his house, his main property out of several he owned and rented out, he showed me photos of his daughter and the fairy lights he’d hung for her in a little nook of the living room. He showed me her books all lined up on shelves I imagined were perfectly her height. Her dolls were tucked neatly into storage bins.
“I recently bought her a guitar,” he said.
“I play guitar,” I said.
“Wow! Maybe we can jam together some time!”
It was so dorky, it almost made me want to leave. But soon, I was in his room, on his king-size bed with the high-thread count sheets and memory foam mattress topper, and we were kissing. I felt very little physical attraction to him, but I was almost always in the mood for sex and knew this was part of the deal. I knew if I just did it, he’d give me what I actually wanted, which was a night wrapped in someone else’s arms. He had incredibly soft skin that made me want to search his bathroom for whatever luxury cream he slathered himself in. I went through the motions of it, admiring the skylight above us and the beautiful sheets and the life I could pretend to have with this man.
We found time together on the nights he wasn’t with his daughter. We’d go out to dinners or glasses of wine. We stayed up late watching movies, waking up to the smell of yeast from a fresh loaf in the bread maker in the kitchen. Some mornings we’d eat leisurely, and others, we hurriedly chomped through jam-covered crusts while watching the news before Rick would drive me to campus for school. We had two Valentine’s Day celebrations together. One was at my apartment, and I cooked him the nicest meal I knew how to cook at the time, and he didn’t like it. The second, he picked me up from my night class to take me to a restaurant he said he knew I’d love because it was “dark and moody and used to be a funeral home.” I ate the best hummus of my life and listened to Rick relive his boarding school and college days, regaling me with stories about testing the limits of authority and what a rich kid could get away with. He popped a bottle of champagne at his house, and we sipped it as we watched reruns of The Nanny.
***
I eventually did take my guitar over to Rick’s so that we could “jam.” I walked the three blocks to his house with the large, black case that housed my acoustic—a high school graduation present from my parents—on my back. As I waited on his porch after ringing the doorbell, I clutched the straps of the case on my shoulders like an anxious kid starting school.
“Oh, you look so cute,” Rick beamed when he opened the door.
We fumbled through chords together, and I loved dazzling someone with the very basic guitar skills I had. Nothing very impressive—just a memorization of chords and natural talent for music that landed me first chair in middle school orchestra despite never practicing at home. Rick smiled with glee, his cheeks punctuated with dimples, as I strummed through various songs at his request, sitting cross-legged on his bed and humming as I moved through an Alison Krause song, remembering lyrics memorized when I was young and riding around in the car with my mother.
I went through the motions of it, admiring the skylight above us and the beautiful sheets and the life I could pretend to have with this man.
“This is the song my daughter and I sing before she goes to sleep,” he said as he clicked around on his laptop, selecting “You’ve Got a Friend,” by Carole King. It made me want to cry, but I just kept strumming, letting Rick lead in the singing. It made me want to cry because I didn’t understand why Rick couldn’t be my father, and why his daughter was so much luckier than I was.
My own father was only three years older than Rick. What I forgot when I let myself believe that my father was a failure in comparison to Rick was that my father and I were very close when I was young. He read the first book of the Harry Potter series to me, and often bought me books he thought I’d enjoy as small surprises, especially when he had been away for business trips. He introduced me to Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Yo-Yo Ma, and The Carpenters, playing them in the car and while he tied flies for fishing at his desk in the living room on the weekends. He’d let me cuddle with him on the couch while watching reality television, and he taught me how to do practical things like build furniture, syphon a pool, remove wallpaper, start a fire, and play devil’s advocate while in mixed company. He paid for a piano when I decided I wanted to learn, only for me to stop caring about it a year later, the piano collecting dust in my parents’ house to this day. He rented PBS recordings of live musicals and watched them with me, encouraging my love for singing and performing. He was not always emotionally available, and he traveled a lot for work, but I knew he loved me.
I forgot all of this because of what happened in the ten years after. In the way I imagine happens in many father-daughter relationships as the daughter hits her pre-teen and teenage years, it’s like one day we started screaming at each other and never stopped. I thought most punishments at the hands of my parents were unjust, and I had no ability to stop myself from arguing my case time and time again, even though the result was always the same: getting a prompt slap to the face or shove to the ground, followed by a command to go to my room and stay there. In high school, the arguments started to be about my grades. My father, nor I, could understand how someone who spent hours studying—redoing tests and quizzes and homework assignments until I had equations memorized so well I could do them in my sleep—could still make silly mistakes on tests. He couldn’t understand how someone who had been touted at their old school as a “brilliant writer” was now consistently getting Bs and Cs on her papers. And he didn’t like that I had no answers for him.
In the months leading up to meeting Rick, my father and I were barely speaking. I hated him, and I told people so. I was floundering, and it seemed like every time I asked for help, he wanted me to jump through a million hoops he knew I’d fail to soar through. If I asked for money for food, he wanted me to send him a spreadsheet of my budget and a copy of my bank statements to prove I hadn’t been mismanaging my funds. I saw it as a breach of my privacy, and a sign he thought I was irresponsible and untrustworthy and never followed through and never got the money from him. I’d resort to standing outside the dining hall at school, asking underclassmen if they’d swipe me in with their IDs.
He thought my struggles with depression and anxiety were simply a sign of mental weakness, and he reminded me often that I was letting myself get in the way of my own success. He wanted me to make lists of my plans and goals and what I wanted for my life, and I could barely get out of bed in the morning. I could barely take care of myself on the most basic level, let alone take care of a future I didn’t see much hope in. And I wanted my father to take care of me, but now I was on the cusp of adulthood, and could feel him pushing me out of the nest.
Rick and I came to a grinding halt the moment I asked him, foolishly, where he thought things were going with us in mid-March. I didn’t ask him because I wanted to be his girlfriend— with the age gap, and my general lack of attraction to him beyond the false sense of security he gave me, I knew deep down nothing about it was practical—but because I wanted a better sense of if and when he might go away.
And I wanted my father to take care of me, but now I was on the cusp of adulthood, and could feel him pushing me out of the nest.
I felt myself needing him more and more with every nice thing he did for me. He recorded the Grammy Awards for me because he knew I didn’t have cable. He drove me to campus, swinging by my apartment on his way to work at one of his many properties around the city. He always bought me or made me a meal when we were together, as if knowing I was subsisting off of coffee and gum for most of the day. He dropped me off at the bus station downtown, letting me wait for the bus to Philadelphia in his warm car instead of on the freezing sidewalk. I liked feeling taken care of by someone, like there was someone looking out for me, so I didn’t have to do it all myself.
But I started to become jealous when Rick would choose his daughter over me. He had her every other weekend, and Mondays and Tuesdays, and there were sometimes when the days he didn’t have her were reserved for rest or catching up on work instead of spending time with me. I would cry alone in my apartment on these nights, forgetting that this was a man who really owed me nothing. As far as a friends with benefits situation goes, we both were upholding our ends of the bargain. I was forgetting he didn’t owe me anything because I was forgetting he wasn’t a father to me at all. Of course he wouldn’t choose me over his own daughter—I was a girl he met on a dating app, and his attraction to me probably boiled down to a desire to inflate his ego.
He went silent after I asked him where things were going, which only made me cling to him harder. I sent him a recording of me playing the guitar. I invited him to a concert with me. I asked him what he was thinking, why he was being distant. After a couple of days of unanswered texts, I broke things off. I didn’t really want things to end. I hoped it would be met with him fighting for me, but he didn’t. He simply said, “I understand.”
***
At the front desk of the arts center the day Rick and his daughter showed up, a woman was speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear her through the racing thoughts springing to mind at the sight of him—somehow my old life colliding with the new life I was trying to build. I felt my pulse in my ears and the woman with a ponytail so tight she had to have had a headache was staring at me like I was some idiot under the weak fluorescent lights in the lobby. And then my coworker was next to me, able to handle the woman’s question and take her away to where she needed to go. Rick looked down at his daughter as he approached the desk, not realizing who I was until halfway through his sentence when he looked up and I smiled at him as if to say I was sorry. I prayed that maybe he had forgotten me, but when I saw the spark of recognition on his face, I shifted to praying that he’d pretend to not know who I was, like any respectable person would do.
“Oh, it’s you!” he said. I looked from him to his daughter, who I had never met. To her, I was just some stranger on her way to a summer camp.
“You’re here for camp?” I asked, nodding my head. My cheeks twitched, as if they knew I shouldn’t have been smiling.
“Yeah, this is my daughter,” he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “You work here now?”
“Yeah, I work here,” I said, motioning to my sides, as if the lobby were my pride and joy.
“Congratulations,” Rick said. “I’m glad you’re somewhere more aligned with what you want. You know, with creatives and your writing—”
“The camp is downstairs, and the stairs are right through that door over there,” I said, cutting him off. I hated being frazzled by men, especially men who didn’t deserve the satisfaction. I would have rather been physically ripped to shreds than let Rick make me cry at a job I only had for a few weeks, where my coworkers were largely under the impression I was a very good, responsible person. I worried if someone found out about my past fling with a camper’s parent, I’d be fired. He took my cue and guided his daughter to the stairs, and I let out the breath I was holding.
I never thought I would see Rick again. I had been so lucky up until this moment—I never encountered a single past fling unexpectedly in my entire two years of random hookups. I simply hadn’t prepared mentally for this kind of thing, and unfortunately, in the moments after Rick walked away, I let myself imagine a world where this chance meeting reminded him how much he had cared for me, and how much he missed me. I still wanted to be taken care of by someone other than myself; I wanted life to feel slightly easier. I let myself picture him coming back upstairs and stopping at the desk to tell me he wanted to see me again. I let myself desperately want this because at the time, it seemed like such a quick and easy fix to the loneliness I still felt, and the uncertainty that plagued me. I wanted to feel wanted by him, one last time.
But Rick emerged from the doorway and gave me a solemn nod, saying nothing more than, “Be sure to take care of yourself,” as he waved goodbye.
Emily Stedge is a writer living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. She earned a BA in English Writing and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh, and she is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. Her work is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and Litro Magazine.