After my mother died, my father, Jack Weber, moved to his condo in Florida. No more lawyering for Lobo Meat Pack. For years his condo was off limits to my mother and me. Dad took his R&Rs down there while we stayed snow blind in Chicago. My mother surrounded herself with sugar cookies, travel brochures, vodka, and held long conversations with her imaginary friends, Mims, Paula and Monica. I was spinning my wheels chasing a master’s degree in archival humanities and living at home. My father was no doubt wearing that ugly floppy terrycloth hat and combing the beach for a stray quarter. My closest friend was a nicotine-powered housekeeper, Lady Macbeth with a Swiffer. Once a week she’d tell me that I was a one-and-doner, the only child my parents could make, and that I should find a way to do what any other young man would do. I asked her what that meant, and she gave me the phone number of her oldest daughter who needed any kind of love she could get. My name is Connor but she called me Buddy.
Months passed while I camped out in the house thinking the future was a slimy wall covered in hope. After three glasses of wine, on a night I should have been celebrating my twenty-sixth birthday, I called my father to see if he missed my mother and me. He answered the phone breathless and blunt, and announced that he had a partner now, a woman named D’Licious Montoya. He spelled her name out for me, and I couldn’t decide if he was joking or not. Together they were working flea markets selling sunglasses and ceramic seagulls. In his words, “Her wonderfulness hits me like a ton of bricks at least ten times a day.” At that moment I could see my inheritance buying D’Licious a ton of pancakes at IHOP and a wardrobe that was gold and tight. I imagined my father pumping away on D’Licious, her hands grasping his loose flesh, a humid breeze lifting the curtains, her future assured. The day my mother died my father showed me his financial records. He had $790,000 invested in bonds and mutual funds and part ownership in a newspaper in Twin Falls, Idaho. All news to me and I wondered why he told me. Maybe it was a hammer, maybe a cushion.
He wished me a happy birthday, and after a pause and a whisper, he said I was welcome to come to Florida but not to expect much because they were on a budget.
I tossed a handful of my most Florida-appropriate clothes in a musty suitcase, gassed up my mother’s aging Volvo, and drove seventeen hours without sleeping, arriving at the condo at 9:30 on a glossy Sunday morning. I’d stepped into Key Largo, my mother’s favorite movie. Dad’s place was like a movie set: a perfectly square patch of turf, a perfect palm tree, a pink doormat, perfect birds, perfect wind chime. The ocean air made me brave and healthy.
I knocked and the door was opened by a woman dressed in a turquoise leotard. She was at least forty years old, not the twenty I’d imagined. In the background my father marched on a monster treadmill.
“I’m D,” she said.
“I’m Connor,” I said.
D’Licious Montoya did not glitter or shine but her fingernails could slay a dragon. She had brown hair with a tint of red in it. She might have weighed one hundred pounds, half of it muscle. Her lips were a pleasure to watch. My father had found his Penelope Cruz.
My father dialed the treadmill down and gave me a quick single-handed wave of hello. His hair was shaggy, salt and pepper gray, pulled back into a fraying ponytail. His forearm featured a tattoo of a red heart inside a blue heart. D put her hand on my shoulder and guided me to the kitchen where two children stared back at me with faint smiles on their faces. The boy was missing a tooth and holding a parakeet, the girl was munching nuggets of pineapple.
“This is Leyla and that’s our birthday boy, Marcus. He was twelve yesterday.”
The children had narrow faces, familiar faces, faces reflecting what I stared at each morning.
“This is Connor,” D said. “Your big brother.”
She winked at me, capturing whatever I was going to say. Jack Weber smiled at me for the first time in twenty-six years.
Oceans, oceans everywhere.
Gordon W. Mennenga lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
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