Dance Like There's No Tomorrow by Evelyn Leite

Author:Evelyn Leite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: family dysfunction, addictions, family issues, family patterns, family adversities
Publisher: Evelyn Leite

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Chapter Fourteen

Sinking

Dad is sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands when I get home from school for lunch. I tiptoe around him and put my finger to my lips when the other kids come in. When Mom comes in she goes to Dad and puts her hands on his shoulders. “It’ll be all right, Lon. We’ll get by. You’ll get another job.”

We kids eat in silence and leave for school as soon as possible. Dad must have gotten fired. That night I ask Mom, “What’s wrong?” and she confirms my suspicion.

“Yes, Dad got fired.”

It’s strange having Dad home to make breakfast. He has the radio on full blast listening to Paul Harvey on WNAX. I even kind of like old Paul myself, but not the agriculture news, cattle prices, obituaries, or world news. I don’t much care about the price of wheat or corn. I don’t care what President Eisenhower is doing. I don’t want breakfast either. It’s all I can do to drag myself out of bed.

Dad’s home looking like a whipped puppy every day, every night, and at noon when we come for lunch. I feel sorry for him until he takes it upon himself to monitor all my activities.

“You are disgrace to this family,” he tells me. “Running day and night with that wild bunch of girls.”

He doesn’t know that I’m the ringleader of this “wild bunch of girls.”

“Are you even going to school?”

I think I liked it better when he was never home.

Dad starts following me to school. He doesn’t know I see him ducking behind a car or a building when I turn to look.

“Why is your dad following us?” Marcie asks.

I shake my head. I don’t want it to be true, but now that’s she’s noticed, I have to come up with some explanation. “I guess because he’s not going out and drinking anymore, he has nothing else to do.”

I am completely embarrassed by Dad getting fired. It’s never discussed at our house and I’m sure not going to say anything to Marcie, but this has to stop.

“By the way,” Marcie says offhandedly, “when I drove mom to the airport last week at four-thirty in the morning, I saw your dad walking down the street with Melva. They had just come out of Melva’s apartment.”

My dad was walking down the street with the town whore at four thirty in the morning! I swallow the bile in my throat and say, “Oh yeah, they are friends. It doesn’t mean anything.”

She changes the subject just as we walk in the door at school.

When I get home after going first to Dan’s Café and drinking a coke, then walking Marcie home, Dad’s waiting for me.

“School gets out at four o’clock. Where have you been?”

“I stopped for a coke and I walked Marcie home.”

“You’re lying,” he yells, “you got some pimply-faced guy out there you’re shacking up with?”

Even if I do the right thing he calls it the wrong thing.

“You’re wrong.

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