Who I was Supposed to Be by Susan Perabo

Author:Susan Perabo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

When I woke up in the morning she was already gone to work. I looked in on my father and saw him asleep on his stomach, his bruised face buried in the pillow. I put on a torn black undershirt and my sunglasses, then went out into the living room to get one of my mother’s cigarettes. The plates were still on the table, the spaghetti hard and stuck to them. The empty jug of wine was lying on its side against my plate. I took a cigarette out of an open pack on the kitchen counter and went into the bathroom and swung the door partway closed, so I could hear my father if he called for me. I lit the cigarette and blew the smoke at my reflection.

“Another fuckin’ hangover,” I said. “Another fuckin’ bottle of whiskey floating around in there.”

My father stumbled through the door, pushed past me and knelt down and threw up a chunk of something into the toilet. I stood over him and put the cigarette behind my back. “God,” I said, when he looked up at me, and a puff of smoke came out of my mouth.

“Eddie,” my dad said. He wiped his mouth clean with a piece of toilet paper and rubbed his hands over his face, trying to peel the hangover off. “Eddie, what the hell are you doing?” His hair was mussed and his undershirt was wrinkled.

“Nothing,” I said through the smoke. “Standin’ here.”

He got up and went back out of the bathroom. I flushed the cigarette and looked at the guy in the mirror for some pointers, but the guy in the mirror never had a father he’d had to explain things to, so he didn’t have a thing to say.

My father came back into the bathroom with the rest of the pack of cigarettes and his prescription sunglasses. He picked up mine off the sink and fit them onto my head. Then he put his on, the one lens covering all but a thin circle of the patch over his left eye. He lit a cigarette and handed it to me, then lit one for himself. We looked into the mirror at each other.

“Hey,” I said. I giggled, trying to be the guy but being me because I was embarrassed.

“Hey, yourself,” he said. He looked as mean as any guy I’d ever seen. “Giggling like a goddamn girl. Who the fuck are you?”

I stopped smiling. “You got some balls talking to me like that,” I said. “Who the fuck are you?”

He didn’t answer. Everything was quiet. There was smoke trailing out from my father’s broken nose, and he licked his dry stitched lips until they were wet. He had a slight smirk on his face. Through the fog we scrutinized the guys in the mirror.

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