Like Water by Rebecca Podos

Author:Rebecca Podos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

I’m sitting on the living room couch with Dad a week later while he flips slowly through this week’s menu and the order list for Silvia’s, fingers scrabbling at the pages. It’s a good day—his fancy rollator walker still stands against the wall beside his bed, unused, so it’s just these cushioned neoprene knee supports he wears. Meanwhile I’m sloppily folding a load of laundry, but most of me is still floating. I’m thinking about Leigh, feeling the ghost of her hands and the memory of her taste, cinnamon lip balm and Jarritos Limón soda. Both of our favorites, and one of the few things in New Mexico she’s admitted to missing when she left. A better taste by far than Jake’s winterfresh cigarette breath, though it never bothered me before.

I’m so zoned out, I jump when Dad fumbles and drops the ledger. “¡Puta madre!” Dad spits.

I cringe away, a reflex. It’s not his fault when he gets angry, and I know it’s worse for a lot of people with HD. That’s the disease; when the part of your brain that’s supposed to organize information starts to go, you can’t control how upset you get. But the reasons are real and purely his. He’s angry that he can’t cook, can’t drive, can’t take Mom dancing even though he never really liked dancing anyway. He’s angry when he can’t find the word he needs, even though he was never some great wordsmith. He’s angry because he doesn’t feel strong anymore.

And when I was a kid, he was strong. This one time—I don’t remember how old I was, maybe in third or fourth grade—he pretty much carried me all through Frijoles Canyon. We were doing this unit on local history in school, and for weekend homework we were supposed to visit a historical site so we could talk about it in front of the class on Monday. Except there was some crisis with the fridge at Silvia’s breaking down, and both he and Mom had to be in the restaurant. I sat in the office most of the day, choked up with disappointment, stupid kid tears blurring the cartoons my parents put on the little TV for me. It wasn’t even a big deal; they could’ve written a note to excuse me from my wildly unimportant class project. But instead, when Dad finally came to get me in the very late afternoon, he put me in his old brown Chevy we had to sell off when he stopped driving and said, “Feel like a trip?”

We motored up to Bandelier, this big national park about an hour and a half northwest of La Trampa, just south of Las Alamos. Later, it became a regular in the rotation of school field trips, but this was my first visit. Dad parked the truck outside the visitors’ center, already shuttered. Signs said the park was open dawn to dusk, but we were the only car in the lot, and “dusk” was bleeding into full blue night.

“Are we supposed to be here this late?” I asked.

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