a short story I've been working on since 2009 and JUST finished!

Ash Wednesday

Victoria and I had a strange arrangement. But, then again, we always had.

"Why do you want to see her, Arthur?" her voice coaxed on the phone, slightly irritated. "It's not like you to be this interested."

"She's my daughter, Vic. Of course I'm interested." She has every right to react the way she does. I will not take that away from her. I realize I have a tendency to do that.

It wasn't like we were ever married, common law or otherwise. We had one of those doe-eyed long-term relationships, where you have the misconception everything is going to go fantastically because you're really doing it for love, this time. Of course, it was not the case. One day, she leaves. And if you happen to be unfortunate or lucky enough to have a child, she takes her with her. By the hand. The last thing you see are those unforgettable blue orbs watching you, complete with tears, headed out the door. "Come on, Charlie. Let's go."

And then you become a man, possessed by work. Dogged by fleeting and often meaningless inspirations. You chase metaphorical butterflies that explode into flames upon the slightest touch. It was always the problem to begin with; it's what scared her away. Your intensity about ideas. But it just worsens. How is leaving helping?

Victoria laughs. It's harsh and bitter. It’s an almond being forced between my teeth. It makes me wince.

Outside the rain is coming down- how expected, it's almost comical- and I'm watching with my head resting against the bare wall. I know, from the weather forecasts I don't really trust, that the weather will get worse because it's getting colder and all the rain? Well, it's going to be snow and slush and ice soon enough. What do you expect from a Great Lakes February?

"I don't know what's gotten into you lately," she says with this meandering sigh. I can imagine her examining her nailbeds and thinking I need more calcium in my diet.

I don't blame her for being, well, reluctant to help. The change has been gradual. It wasn't like one day I woke up and thought "I have a teenage daughter now. I should get on bonding with her before it all becomes too late."

If it wasn't too late already. Neither Victoria nor I trusted trippy legal jargon we didn't understand. Neither of us wanted a cold and perhaps unfeeling government, a machine of modern status quo, involved in our very personal affairs. She knew, as hard as I could be to love sometimes (and I was like a dog, always shitting and vomiting on our carpets), that I would not give up on my own kin financially, at least.

She knew I wouldn't have given up on Charlie so hard otherwise, either, if it wasn't for her, deliberately wedging herself into our bond and keeping me a cartoonish figure, who only somehow emerges on holidays and other conveniences. I just stopped fighting, after a while. I gave up.

"It's a good thing," I say and know that she's thinking "no, it's really not. I liked you better when you had half a spine."

"You love someone else?" she asked me one night, ten or so years ago. We were in bed. I was writing in my notebook; she was reading the latest paperback bestseller I couldn't stand.

"Just Charlie? Does that count?" I don't even peek my head up for a second. I don't want to look at her. I remember feeling my stomach shift like the earth below me.

"You know what I mean." But she turned and I felt her hunched shoulders towards me.

"Well, I can't just give her up to you for the weekend now, Arthur. She's 15. She has a life." I flinch. So already, I'm belated on my welcome.

"Yes, yes...."

I try to remember my own life at 15. I can't.

"I'll ask her. See what she says. You know, she's a few stupid decisions away from being an adult now."

"I know. I hope the stupid decisions," I look down at the speckled floor I stand upon, rather weakly. "...never come for her, though."

Victoria is silent again. I think she's disgusted.

"Goodbye, Arthur. I'll call later." The click carries such resonance.

But she doesn't call back later. Later comes in a few days. In a week.

"She's not busy." Well, glory be. A fifteen year old's schedule is a blank slate. Maybe I should get down on my knees and thank Allah?

"That's great, I was thinking I could take her to the count-"

She laughs then. It's a heartless laugh; I don't think she's aware of that. I don't think she's aware of the sensation my ear has upon hearing it. A rupture.

I'm standing shirtless in the hallway and I've turned no lights on. There's some wayward city streaming in the windows; that's about it.

"No, no Arthur. You can't. You're taking her to the dentist." I stop for a second and wrinkle my nose. Last time I checked I was a father and not a chauffeur.

"What?"

I'm quiet to process this. I take into my mouth and chew it. It's a start.

Wednesday comes and I realize it's Ash Wednesday by the small print on my calendar. Tiny print, I'm squinting my eyes to read it.

"How about that," I echo. I'm sure if I had turned the TV on the day before, I would have seen some of that glitzy coverage of the Mardi Gras down in good old New Orleans.

I pull on a sweater, get my overcoat because the weather ceases to be shit, step into my shoes and lock up.

I think about bringing Charlie flowers. I feel at first this is weird for a dad; she’s not my girlfriend, she's my daughter. She's the little girl I held while watching bad movies on Sundays lost long ago. She's the kid I bathed and was only allowed to use the strawberry-scented shampoo on.

I haven't seen her since right before Christmas. And even then. Even then.

I ax this idea and get into my car and drive downtown to pick her up. I don't remember exactly the address of the dentist because it's not the same as mine. But I've looked it up in the phonebook and written it down and have it taped to my dashboard. When the car moves, it flutters.

At red lights, I note the pedestrians. Maybe it's the blur of the rain or distance of their fast-moving bodies, but I don't see any black blotches decorating foreheads. No, their brows are naked. Maybe the rain would have washed the traces of Catholicism or last year's Easter palms away.

"Victoria I'm here!" I shout into the speaker. I don't mean to shout, but the water is filling up my shoes. "Can I come in?"

There's a loud beep. The door unlocks itself and I start sprinting up the stairs. Part of me is nervous.  I haven't seen Charlie nor Victoria before last Christmas. That meeting was brief. I would have liked it to have been longer, but as Victoria informed me, she had a new boyfriend and they were going to meet his parents, wealthy WASP-y types in town from New England for the holiday.

"I don't expect you to understand," she had said in a monotone while fixing her hair in a mirror near the door.

That was a favorite phrase of hers, and to me, always the most heartbreaking. The inability to understand is an insensitive feature routed in all men, like rudeness or distaste. Or that jealous impulse to do something destructive for the sake of a jilted heart.

"I don't expect you to understand."

"I don't expect you to understand."

"I don't expect you to understand, Arthur."

Sometimes I didn't.

The number is 309 and I knock tentatively under it. There's the sound of commotion behind the security of the door, the tumult of finding keys and getting clothes together. I am used to it. Women.

"Coming!" Charlie's voice raises and I want to swallow a breath. There's a jingle-jangle and then she's standing before me.

She just looks like a little model Victoria, except she has the color of my hair to call her own. That is about the only thing I've ever given her.

I don't know how to greet her, at first. There is too much and not enough for me to say. My mouth has grown dry and my tongue stumbles.

"Hello." Charlie's expression does not change, at all.

She has this regality to her and I am not sure where she got it from. Certainly not from me, but from Victoria? Victoria does have a Russian ice princess way to her.

"Hi," I try and smile. I think I blush some.

"You're taking me to Dr. Freeman?"

"I suppose I am."

"I will get my coat. Mom!" She heads behind her. She seems an inch or so taller than I remember. Can someone grow that much in such a short change of time? Well, teenagers. I suppose.

I can hear Victoria's footsteps before I even see her. And when I do see her, I almost shake inside.

‘"You're here," she says. I am impressed she says anything at all.

I smile but it's more of a wince. She knows that.

She adjusts her earrings, her hands knowing precisely where to go. She is still beautiful, settling nicely into middle age and beyond. But she is not mine and she will never be mine again.

"Yes. I'm here."

"I have a meeting tonight. Do you think you could do me a huge favor and take Charlie to her boyfriend's house afterward?"

She does not even look at me. She looks over me.

I stop. My throat clenches, choking me. Times, to paraphrase Mr. Dylan, are changing.

"Boyfriend?" And I remember when she was 4 and told me she'd never marry anyone, save Simon from the chipmunks.

Victoria stands before me. Just like twenty years ago and she wouldn't have failed to embrace me. Her perfume would have clung to my cheek.

"Ask her."

"Do you...like him?"

"I don't not like him."

She shrugs. I nod.

"What, um, meeting?"

"Work. Dinner meeting. My boss will drink too much wine and I will leave early."

Charlie emerges then, with a purse and overcoat on. She's trying to mimic her mother, I know that. And it's somehow disturbing to me to see this natural progression or trend, if you will, manifesting in my only daughter. I don't ever remember wanting to be my dad. The antithesis, maybe, and look how far it got me.

"Ready," she says breathlessly. She manages a smile and her teeth glow from the freedom of not wearing braces anymore. She had since she was 12 and I know she hated every moment of them. I know, because I had them too once.

"Where are you going to dinner?" I'm a little chagrinned:  my socks were just starting to dry, after all.

 "Chili's?"

"Ah." Then I turn to my daughter because I can say nothing positive. It's a horrible restaurant. "After the appointment, I am to take you to...?"

"To Winston's." My daughter is dating a boy with the name of Winston.  Well, at least it's not something vile like Butch or something stupid like Tyler.

"Your boyfriend?" I lower my head at her. I have an image of how I must look at that moment- the atypical clueless negligent dumb dad. Of course.

"We can talk about it in the car, Dad."

She pushes past me. I take one last look at Victoria, with my mouth kind of open.

"Winston," I say again to her. Victoria nods.

"You wanted to see her. Have fun." There's a resigned sigh to her voice. She doesn't smile.

Charlie never smiles either, really. Sometimes she smirks. Her smiles come infrequently. I used to worry about her as a child. You never met a kid so serious.

While leaving Victoria's apartment, I contemplate two very separate items. One being her relationship with Charlie and the other being the night we conceived the girl I'm following out the door. Her figure is lean, willowy. I know boys have noticed this and it makes me want to panic.

"You still have this piece of junk?" she asks about my loyal old Toyota.

"Well I'm not exactly rolling in money."

"Didn't you get a lot of money when you published that book?"

"That was one book." That was one book that was ten years ago. I hope she does not press on with this. It's a sore subject.

"Why aren't there others?" It's a child's innate curiosity. Her head is even cocked to that right angle, like a picture frame askew.

"Charlie." I wonder if she can tell I'm pleading. She disappears into the car. She does not understand.

We had a hell of a time conceiving. Victoria was trying anything and everything. Me, for lack of a better term: I was a passenger.

"Okay."

"Whatever."

"You know best."

Victoria had manuals, charts, machines and logbooks. She had her ovulation cycle down to a well-defined art. She knew which methods were proven to work and those that were defunct. And still.

Our trash, piled high, with failed pregnancy tests. Dowsed in pee.

"We have to try now." She was insistent. Passionate. Ablaze. "We must!"

I did not think there would ever be a time I would get sick of sex. As a young man, I could have only dreamt of such exploits. But after a while, being forced to perform at the clap of a hand. There was no romance. 

It was like infertile animals at the zoo, forced to do the "dance" for the sake of procreation.

"You want to be a father, right?" she asked me breathlessly one night. She was clutching the sheet to her skin.

“Yeah, of course.” I clear my throat. I thought by now she would know my intentions and I would have stated her my unhappiness if there was any. There wasn’t. “I want to play catch with the kid, make breakfast. Typical Dad stuff.”

I’m aware it might be a weak response, but it’s true. It’s from my gut.

“That’s the Hallmark card version,” she says tautly.  I feel heat rising in my cheeks, steam from city streets.

I pull in and out of her and I am always careful to cum inside of her flesh.

“Again,” she demands in my ear. It’s a hot whisper. I can feel spit in her breath, I do what she says.  I am like a slave in this place.

Soon it's a chorus of various demands and agreements and one of us is always being let down by the other. Nothing intentional; I give her all a man can give and she wants this more than anything.

And then. Then.

I remember coming home one day, when I was still operating a somewhat retainable job at a library. I put my briefcase on the chair and looked at her, because she was standing silently in the kitchen. I wondered if someone had died or fallen gravely ill, the way she carried herself.

"What happened?" My voice wavers. I tried to control it, but as usual, I failed.

Her face breaks into a smile. The most beautiful, gentle, girlish of smiles I've ever seen appear on her face.

"I'm pregnant."  I stand still before it hits me and I’m rushing to hold her.

Somehow that begat this. It’s unbelievable now that the ball of pink squishy human turned into someone so beautiful and so refined. Someone that is now sitting next to me as I start the car- rather:  piece of junk - up. She doesn’t look at me, instead she stares out at the window at the rain coming down all around us.

“Can you turn the radio on?” It’s an exceedingly simple request that I don’t want to grant. No, I make her want to listen to the world all around us, with me. I want to start a conversation with her about her life. I want to apologize and I want her to understand, for once, as it were.

But, I turn the radio on. And it’s some shitty classic rock station, playing forgettable tunes from hair band days. Something, I can infer, she does not want to hear, even if I do secretly enjoy it.

“What do you want to listen to?” I smile meekly at her. Like I’m embarrassed.

“NPR?” I blink.

“Yes.” She sounds annoyed and haughty and I want to jump a little. I’m reminded of girls when I was a boy and still terrified of them. Scared shitless, really.

“Aren’t you a little young…” my voice drifts off. A car horn blares.

“I like keeping informed.” She twitches and still isn’t looking at me. Do I disgust her? I wouldn’t hold it against her. She then sighs, long and winded. “I’m on the speech and debate team. I work for the newspaper. I want to go to law school someday.”

“You have lofty goals,” I tell her, not sure of my own at her age. Did I have any?

“Lofty has bad implications.” And will she ever call me Dad on this car ride?

Traffic’s horrible. It keeps picking up and stopping. Picking up and stopping. Pedestrians still rush all around us, all these people we will never meet. Some of them have umbrellas and some of them are awkwardly holding newspapers over their heads to keep dry.

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way, though. I just meant high expectations.” My brow furrows, folds in against itself. I want to do this the right way.

It’s being silly, I suppose. In the length of one car ride, I’m not going to radically change her opinion of me. I’m not going to alter my own mistakes or what, maybe, Victoria has molded onto her. What she has told her, I can only imagine. Or rather not, why cause that kind of pain to myself?

“High expectations are the best expectations to have,” she yawns. When did she become such a little snob? 

“Well, there’s no use in shooting low. That’s just kind of cowardly.” And she again falls silent. Here I think, braving an elbow-sharp turn in the road:  when did I become such a marginal influence on her life?

Pushed to the corner, embracing the side.

“Yeah, cowardly,” she echoes me with a vein of coolness. I stiffen.

The newscaster’s stern voice carries over the air, a voice of worldliness and knowledge that she aspires to. I don’t listen to NPR that much so I can’t attach a name to a face.

“So how’s school?” I say, breaking any not-real silence. She looks down at her nailbeds like Victoria so often does; they’re pristine.

“Fine. I get all A’s.”

“And you’re obviously involved…?” She nods.

“Yeah. Mom thinks I do too much.” And finally! A confession! A secret between the two of us. I have to hide my face as I smile and stare into the unsmiling face of some street vendor, watching on from the outside.

“Well, she may have a point.”

“I don’t care. I like it.”

“Keeping busy’s healthy for you, then,” I admit, tasting the saltiness of my own two lips.

I think about how inactive I’ve been, how much I’ve let myself slump and slide down. Work used to be so important to me- the most important force pulsing through my life. This was something Vic would say to me:

“Your work is your life, Arthur. You don’t know anything else.” And then I would wince. She couldn’t cause me more pain even if she had reached out and slapped me with her bare skin.

I wondered if Charlie could hurt like that. Somewhere inside of me, I knew:  she could. She, after all, was just like a pocket version of her mother.

Meanwhile, I haven’t written anything in ages. I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, God knows. A half-written novel sits at my apartment, vacant and unstirred.

When is Arthur Cross going to make his follow-up? We’ve been waiting for years and ‘The Reduction of Millions’ is such a near classic…. Again, here I wince.

“Do you keep busy?”

“Sometimes.”  But what I should have said is: 

no. Not really.

We’re approaching the office. I can tell because the buildings are getting taller and more impersonal-looking. Not that there are any true skyscrapers in this dingy town, anyway. But. It bears saying.

“So I hear you have a boyfriend.” I say after the announcer on NPR has faded into a wave of ads. She nods, timidly.

“I do.”

“How long?”

“Four months.”

“Wow, that must be a century for you kids.” At this, she stares right at me (maybe to my soul) and scowls.

“Kids? I have you know, Dad, that Winston’s a really good guy and he doesn’t deserve any of the crap you probably want to give him. I mean, I don’t know why you’re allowed any input anyway.” She says all of this very fast. Rapidly, barely stopping to breathe. The strained ratatat of gunfire.

“Oh.”

“I’m going over to his house for dinner later,” she informs me without a pause or dull moment. “He has a large family.”

“Lots of siblings?” His parents couldn’t keep it in their pants? Were they Catholic?

“No, mostly extended.”

“That’s interesting.” I have a few siblings. I never talk to them, these days. Save occasional cards at Christmas or when a parent inevitably dies. Times like that makes me glad I only have one daughter. Even if she grows up a spoiled brat.

She is waiting for something, I realize. Hesitating for a moment or two.

“You can come, if you want.” My eyes nearly double in size. Why? Who knows. I just couldn’t believe. I had picked up her persona as hostile, not welcoming.

“Oh.” I’m still struggling to process the invite. I feel almost like it’s a set-up. And as soon as I question the ground below me…

“Never mind.” The only reaction of how hurt I am is my brows creasing. My stomach tightens. I think of whatever flowery cocktail Victoria will order at Chili’s tonight. Charlie doesn’t know me well enough to pick up on any physical signals, and for that, I am glad. I have not been enough of a presence in her life for her to see some angles.

The dentist’s office wouldn’t stick out otherwise if I didn’t have the address. I turn to her and smile, stopping in front of the building. It’s a weak smile, tiptoeing on things unsaid.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” I ask quietly.

“No, Dad. I think I’ve got this.” I twitch at her dismissal. But it’s not as brazen or as hurtful as it could have been.

We share a moment in space then. I reach for her hand and she lets my clammy old skin linger on her fresh, unblemished skin for an all too brief moment. I hope then her skin always remains that way although it can’t.

“Okay.” Why wouldn’t she? She’s almost an adult, just standing right on that cusp. One more push and she’s there. I don’t want to give that push; I won’t. Someone else will come around and will. Maybe this Winston?

I wonder about all the girls I drove there, in my time as a youth. I don’t dwell. Victoria’s name crosses my mind like a tumbleweed on a vacant desert.

I remember how she looked when she was young, too. When her hair just cupped her face in long, dark wisps. I remember her smiles when she was shy.

I watch Charlie go in.

“You’ll be back?” she says before leaving me totally. And it’s not totally- I have to be back in about an hour to chauffer her to Winston’s.

Until then, I will just drive my trash heap of a car around and remember things. Let them come back to me.

“So, Mr. Cross-“

“You should just call me Arthur.” A shudder sends through my body as I remember a similar-sounding Paul Simon song. The interviewer nods his distinguished head; he has that graying beard that makes him look like some ancient college professor.

“Okay then, Arthur.” I find myself twitching. A little eye spasm here. “What’s held up the process to your follow-up? You have some devoted fans, you know.”

I swallow the excess spit in my mouth. The burning lights of the studio blind me, in the meantime. It’s a radio interview, sure. But still. The conscientious listener will hear the fear gripping my voice.

“The creative process is one that’s difficult to define. I just got over a divorce, Don.”

“Oh! Well you never get over that.” And he laughs. “I have two ex-wives. One is in Mexico with half my money and the other is in California with my brother.”

“That’s a shame.” I say, but people like this are not real people. They are artificial substitutes for those with real beating hearts and real vibrant emotions. He just laughs again.

“Depends on who you ask!” I want to say:  the children?

“I’m hoping to have another book out within a year or so, but my mind feels clogged,” I say. “It’s like a drain that’s stuffed with hair.”

“What a pleasant image!”

I release my shoulders. I want to go home.

There is the next manuscript and I wonder if I want to just scrap it, throw it all to the wind and forget the plot, the characters, the structure. I want to pretend it never happened, like I want to do the majority of my life. Which is why I choose not to talk about it so much. We all have that choice.

I think it’s stopped raining out. There’s nothing falling on the roof of my car now and the pedestrians come across as less wary. Their umbrellas have folded in on each other. The general grayness remains, but, it’s not as dark as it was.

I have kept the news on, a reminder of Charlie. I think at that age I just wanted to listen to baseball games. Baseball games and bad classic rock that comes up on the lower dials now. The sort of guitar riffs that have worked themselves into the elbow corners of my memory, bringing up distant smells and sights when I hear them ringing.

When I’m not paying attention, that’s when it happens. Isn’t that just how it is?

It’s the car in front of me. It appears to be some dented old Chrysler. You think my car’s shit, I think my car’s shit, Charlie thinks my car is shit. But this dented Chrysler? Well, it’s really shit. And it stops, right into an oncoming the truck. The sound of metal twisting could you make your blood turn into ice. Forgive for sound melodramatic here, but it’s the gut sound of death coming at you. It’s the Grim Reaper making a charge for your soul.

I stop just narrowly, with no real choice in the matter. The steering wheel punches my chest and leaves me hollow. There’s going to be several bruises for weeks.

“Shit,” I mutter to myself, seeing smoke outside in front of me. The color nearly blends with the rain. Part of me feels compelled to go outside and see if everyone’s all right. But the scared part of me wins out, in the end.

The sounds of sirens and ambulances replace anything else I could hear. The news is gone. A vanishing act. The reminders of Charlie have disappeared as well.

I can’t get out of my car. I’m trapped. And so I shall remain that way. Until the friendly-faced policeman with his rounded knuckles taps on my window.

“You okay, son?” he says when I take my time rolling it down.

“Yeah.”

I’m just under a layer of shock.

I take the time to consider many things, waiting for the traffic debris to clear and the bodies to be hauled off. Foremost, I think of Charlie. I see her eyes. I hear her voice.

I’ll buy her flowers once it’s safe to drive again. I’ll go to her boyfriend’s house for dinner. And when I come home, I will write.