My Father Coming Through
Trigger Warning: mention of parental death
It was always the same routine, more or less.
‘Your father’s coming through next week,’ my mother would say while she making our breakfast. ‘Wants to see you. You want to see him?’
‘Of course,’ my sister would say.
‘You?’ she would ask me.
‘Yeah, suppose,’ I would say, although if my sister had said no, I would also have said no.I was pretty sure my mother would have been pleased if we had both said no.
I was two when they separated, before that I have no memory. Cheryl, who is older than me, remembered him, the four of us as a family, although I never heard about it in any detail. I had the feeling that my father was a subject my mother didn’t want to discuss. He must have sent money, though; there was no way my mother could send us to the schools we went to on her salary, or buy the kind of clothes she wore.
The fact was we hardly saw him. When we did, it was at the airport, when he was coming through. That was the phrase that was used, ‘coming through’. So, once in a while, maybe every year or so, we would be put into a cab and taken the fifteen miles or so out to the airport. There, in the first-class lounge, he and Cheryl would babble about this and that while he waited for his connection. She used to be pretty excited about the whole thing, would want to know where he had been and where he was going, and he would tell her about the various places, and how he would take us there when we were allowed. Cheryl would look the places up when we got home, the populations and the climate, the famous people who lived in the places he was going to take us.
He would call us kiddo, and lean over and land soft punches on my shoulder, but I never knew how I was supposed to respond, and I felt sorry for him when that happened. I didn’t mind the whole thing too much though; the airport burgers were great, and you could see the runways. I liked to imagine where all those people were going, and hear the announcements, the different places. Because the fact was, the only place we really went to was to my grandmother who lived out in the sticks. We went for two weeks every summer, but she and my mother – her own daughter – didn’t get on and the atmosphere was always wrong and I couldn’t wait to get back to the city.
The last time we saw him he was with a woman called Debonie. She said to call her Debs, which was what he called her. Cheryl also called her Debs. I didn’t call her anything. She was a lot younger than him; I was thirteen then and noticed things like that, and I could tell as soon as I saw her coming into the restaurant with her arm through his, smiling at us like we were old friends. By that time, he had quit punching me on the shoulder. They were on their way to Chicago where he was producing a film, whatever that meant. I used to see his name sometimes at the end of film, still do.
Back then, I liked the idea of a father; not my father from the airport, but rather some abstracted figure; a father like I thought my friends had; someone to throw a ball with, or watch a film, or maybe get advice from. The only advice I ever got at the airport, when we were leaving, was to work hard at school and be good for my mother. But I already worked hard, and caused no problems that I knew of to my mother, unlike Cheryl who was always arguing with her, especially when we got back from those visits. My mother’s friend, Flonnie Maddox, was always there on those occasions, the two of them drinking wine. In fact, Flonnie was there a lot, the two of them swapping their grievances.
A few weeks after that last visit, my mother was doing breakfast. She said, ‘I’ve got some bad news for you kids.’
She often had bad news, it was usually to do with her being too busy or too hungover and not being able to do something she had previously promised to do. But this time, when my sister asked what the bad news was, she said, ‘Your father’s dead.’ She just came out with it like that.
‘What?’ Cheryl said. ‘He can’t be.’
‘Can be and is,’ my mother said.
‘No way. How?’
‘Car smash, him and his woman, whatever her name was.’
‘Debs?’
‘Whoever. Sorry and all that.’
‘We only saw them a few weeks ago.’
‘I know, sad. But it’s not like you were close, is it?’
‘Where?’ I asked, thinking I should say something.
‘America. Chicago, I think.’
‘Chicago, wow,’ Cheryl said. ‘That’s where they were going, the Windy City, biggest city in Illinois. Not the capital though, that’s Springfield.’
‘Well, that’s fascinating, Cheryl,’ my mother said with massive sarcasm. ‘Now how do you want these eggs? Scrambled, fried, what?’
‘Most people think it’s Chicago, the capital. He’s dead?’
‘Eggs?’ my mother said. ‘How?’
Later, when I was away at college, and Cheryl was working in a different city, my mother took too many of her sleeping pills. At the funeral, Flonnie Maddox got up to say some words; she said my mother was her best friend but that life had not been good to her. And Flonnie started crying and couldn’t finish. I got the feeling that she was crying as much for herself as for my mother.
Back at the house, Flonnie told Cheryl that my mother always regretted having the affair which separated her from my father, and that she never got over losing him. Flonnie didn’t think she was telling Cheryl anything new.
Ed Walsh is a writer of not yet published novels and occasionally published shorter fiction. He lives in the north-east of England.
