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  Kai steps back inside and hands me my phone. “Thanks, Dad. I’m going down to shoot some hoops.”

  There’s a basketball hoop attached to the side of the apartment building. I nod, but all I want to do is scream. For all of us.

  Damn her.

  “Want some company?” I ask. I know he doesn’t. He’s the type of kid that needs to be alone to process his feelings. We’ll talk about it this afternoon.

  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.”

  “Vodka. Scotch is for geriatric men.”

  She barks out a laugh and it loosens something inside me—tension and anger. “I happen to love scotch.”

  “How is that possible? You’re not a sixty-five-year-old man.”

  “Quite right, a peen and age are not required to enjoy a glass of scotch,” she says it with a straight face, which makes it funnier.

  “A child’s tumbler of scotch, you mean?”

  She winks. “That’s what I meant.”

  I pour scotch for her and vodka for me. We toast, “Cheers.” Hers is heartfelt, mine is heartless.

  We follow it up closely with two more.

  And then I follow it up with another.

  We sit as it dilutes our blood and our judgment.

  “What do you do?” I ask. It comes out slowly, and I’m already slurring. I don’t drink often, and when I do it’s usually one beer. I’m verging on sloppy. I’m still processing everything, but it’s cloudy.

  She smiles, and her jeweled eyes look sleepy, droopy from the scotch. “Hmm?” she questions.

  “What do you do? You said you worked all night.”

  “I work at a strip club.” She raises her eyebrows when she says it, not as a seductive gesture, it’s just an explanation. She’s sharing information and waiting for me to judge her.

  And normally I would judge her. I would judge the hell out of her. But, instead I ask, “You’re a stripper?” The haziness has me curious.

  She nods.

  “Why?”

  She shrugs. “Why not?”

  “Touché. But you’re a beautiful, smart, young woman. You could do anything. Anywhere. Why that?”

  She sets her cup down on the coffee table and slumps back against the cushion and gets comfortable before she answers, “It’s part of my research.”

  I feel my eyes squinting in quiet assessment. “What kind of research requires stripping?”

  “Life,” she says plainly.

  When she says it, for some reason it makes some sense. It must be the vodka justifying the thought because sober, I wouldn’t consider agreeing with it. I’m a high school counselor; I’m supposed to try to keep women off the pole.

  She begins running a few of her long dreadlocks through her fingers. I don’t know if it’s a nervous habit, but sh
e doesn’t seem to be aware she’s doing it. “For me, I can’t understand something unless I’ve experienced it and I tend to be very judgmental by nature. But, it’s very telling when you see the world from the other side of the lens because it opens the door to self-discovery. Perspective changes everything. I prefer empathy to sympathy if I have a choice. That’s where the research comes in. I’ve packed a lot of life into the past few years trying to understand people and situations. Trying to make sense of my life. I have a lot to work through. My past is something that requires introspection and forgiveness. And that takes time. Research. When I feel like I’ve learned something about myself and grown as a person, I move on to the next journey. Hopefully with new perspective.”

  I don’t know if that’s admirable or crazy, but the vodka has freed my mind a bit, and I find myself saying, “That takes courage to scrutinize yourself so closely. Usually, people avoid taking a peek through that window at all costs. They keep the curtains drawn and hide behind them.”

  She shakes her head slowly and solemnly. I think she’s going to retort, but she just stares at me instead. Tears fill and recede in her eyes and I’m transfixed, unable to do anything but stare back. I have a feeling there are demons to slay in her research. It’s more complicated than she’s letting on. I don’t push, I let people share when they’re ready to. She’s not ready.

  She glances to the bottles after several minutes of unspoken connection asking with her eyes if I want another shot.

  I nod, and she pours.

  Cups are clinked, but we skip the toast.

  We drink.

  When I sit back against the cushions, she stands, taking a moment to right herself on drunken legs, and leaves the room and walks down the hall toward the bathroom.

  When she returns, she sits down next to me leaving no room between us. Our thighs and calves are touching. Then she rests her head on my shoulder and asks, “Are you married, Seamus?”

  “No, why do you ask?”

  She takes my left hand in hers and holds it up in front of my face.

  “Oh,” I say when I see my wedding band. “She’s a bitch. And married to someone else now.”

  She lowers our hands but slips her fingers in between mine and doesn’t let go as they rest on my lap. “That would explain why I never see her around. I thought maybe you were a widow because you always seem so sad.”

  I shake my head, even though she can’t see it because her head is still resting on my shoulder. “I think you’re mistaking bitter for sad. I’m thoroughly bitter, down to my core.”

  She raises her head and looks at me. She’s staring again. And it’s not a surface stare, Faith doesn’t do anything surface, she’s staring into the heart of me. I feel vulnerable and naked. I look away, but when I do I start to panic like I did on the stairs when it felt like I’d lost something, so I look back. And the feeling passes.

  “How long have you been without her?”

  “Miranda?” I correct myself quickly because Faith doesn’t know her name, “My ex-wife?”

  She nods.

  “Physically? Several months. Emotionally? Several years. Maybe forever, hell I don’t know.”

  She pulls her legs up under her, so she’s kneeling on the couch next to me, but she’s still holding my hand. I’m forced to turn sideways to face her. There’s a pull I can’t explain to keep my attention on her. She’s one of those people that you couldn’t ignore if you tried.

  “You still love her?” she asks sincerely.

  “She’s a bitch,” I answer solemnly. I mean it…and I don’t mean it…in equal measure.

  “Bitches need love too.”

  I don’t know when we shifted from sloppy drunk to intensely drunk, but it’s happened fully and completely. I laugh, but it’s humorless because something’s changing, I can feel it. “I don’t love her.”

  “You’re lying. You may not like her, but you still love her.” She rocks back on her heels.

  I huff out a breath and with it comes the truth. And it hurts, the piercing pain of an admission that doesn’t want to be released. “I do.” I shake my head. “How is that even possible?”

  “Time, commitment, children, lots of reasons I’m sure.”

  I release her hand and stand and walk to the window to look out at the street. I have to hold on to the windowsill to steady myself. “More reasons to hate her, though.”

  “Tell me your story, Seamus. The story of Seamus and Miranda and your three adorable kids. I want to hear your story.”

  I turn my head and look over my shoulder. She’s still sitting sideways with her butt resting on her heels. She looks patient and receptive. So, I begin. “I met Miranda in college. She was a senior, and I was a junior. I chased her for months before she gave in and agreed to go out with me. She was pretty and smart. So smart. She got her degree in finance and had several job offers immediately after graduation.” I look back out the window lost in the memories. “Have you ever met someone who gets everything they want?”

  “Yeah.” It’s the first time I’ve detected anything mildly hateful in Faith’s voice.

  “That’s Miranda. Early on, I thought it was a result of hard work on her part and luck. A lot of luck. But, the longer I knew her, the more I began to see the manipulation. She talks a helluva good game. Always has. She’s tells people exactly what they want to hear. And she seems to know what that is before they even do.”

  “That’s a powerful gift to wield—a silver tongue.”

  I laugh a little at her word choice, but she’s dead on. “It is powerful. And ultimately destructive.”

  “Was she a good mom? Is she a good mom?”

  This is part of the story that always makes me sick with guilt and regret because we don’t get a do-over. “No, not really. She worked all the time. That was her excuse. She was climbing the corporate ladder. She had her sights set on a vice president title by the time she was thirty. Which meant I was the present parent. The only parent really. She was more like an aunt who visited on the weekends for a few hours. She went to work before the sun came up, and I woke the kids every morning. I fed them. I got them to daycare when I went to work. I picked them up from daycare. I fed them. I bathed them. I played with them and read to them. And I tucked them into bed before she got home—”

  Faith interrupts. “It sounds like you got the better end of the deal. You shouldered the blessing, not the burden.”

  I think about her words and agree immediately. “My kids are a blessing. Without a doubt. But I wish they knew what a real mother is.”

  “They have a mother. She’s just not perfect. Most parents aren’t.”

  It annoys me that it sounds like she’s defending her. “But she should be!” I yell. “They’re her fucking flesh and blood! And she treats them like an afterthought!” Everything I’ve been feeling for years, but held inside, is flooding out.

  She’s not shaken by my outburst. “Is that how she treated you? Like an afterthought?”

  I don’t answer because I can’t acknowledge the comment without getting emotional and I don’t want to yell again.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. I’m assuming she left you? She’s the one who initiated the divorce?”

  I nod.

  “Why?”

  I’m whispering now because the alcohol and my anger and hurt are bringing me down. “Because I’m broken.”

  Her hand on my shoulder makes me jump. I didn’t hear her get up from the couch. “You’re not broken.”

  I shake my head because Faith doesn’t understand. “No, I am. I have MS.”

  She shrugs. “Not broken. Just a different set of rules for you to play by. Your game, life, changed a bit. I don’t mean to sound insensitive. I know it’s probably come with some obstacles, some of them probably unpleasant, but you adapt. No one’s perfect. We all have obstacles. Remember that.” She shakes me by the shoulders and smiles. “You’re alive, Seamus. You’re alive!” she yells joyously.

  I’m watch
ing her, so happy and so convincing, standing before me, and it’s infectious. Alcohol and Faith are dulling bitterness. Chasing it away. I know it’s temporary, but I’ll take it. “You want to have a picnic? My lunch, your dinner, before you go to bed?” I haven’t been on a picnic since I was a little kid.

  Her grin widens and it’s pride, like she’s in the middle of something she helped create. “That sounds lovely. You want to make sandwiches, and I’ll grab us some water and whatever else I can round up?”

  “I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

  We eat our food on a blanket under a tree next to our apartment building. I brought peanut butter sandwiches. Faith brought green olives and animal crackers. It begins a bit drunk and ends a bit sober.

  And the miraculous thing is that when it’s done, and Faith goes to her apartment to go to bed, and I go to my apartment to wait out tomorrow, I feel a little less bitter.

  And I feel like I have a friend.

  A friend who’s a stripper.

  A nice, wise stripper.

  A nice, wise stripper who pointed out I’m still wearing my wedding ring.

  So, I take it off.

  Because it’s time.

  Win. Motherfucking win.

  past

  Over time, I got used to Seamus’s love and attention being focused on the baby because I was winning at work. I’d battled my way into upper management before Kai’s first birthday. Everything was on track. Pay raises came with each promotion. I’d quadrupled my yearly income in twelve months. The corporate world was my bitch. I was driving a brand new, leased Mercedes. We’d moved into our first home, which was solely in my name. The home was massive, a real statement piece.

  I was winning.

  Until I wasn’t.

  Another cunning fuck you handed down from the universe.

  I don’t know what changed, but I grew antsy and agitated. Suddenly, things weren’t happening fast enough. I needed pace, I needed progression, and the world around me wasn’t keeping up.