Mom had no social life after the divorce and never dated, but Dad always had some woman moving in or out of his condo. (“Natasha” was just the latest, with the least legal documentation.) They were usually young, with kids of their own, and arrived with some sad story of having been down and out. Most of them had gotten pregnant young and never obtained high school diplomas. My dad never bothered getting the divorce from my mom finalized. He hated to give all that money to the lawyers.

One weekend he came back to his place with his pickup truck loaded with clothes and furniture. I was hanging out at his condo, and he introduced me to April, a “lovely lady” as he called her. She may have been sweet, but lovely? I didn’t know. Her teeth looked like a horse had kicked her in the face. That bothered my dad, and he shuttled her to an orthodontist pronto. April had a fourteen-year-old son, Jeremy. Neither one of them ever spoke much to me. Jeremy had some sort of hearing disability. He wore big hearing aids in both ears, and trying to have a conversation with him was painful. April never talked about her first marriage to “that SOB” as my dad had described him. When my mom would get really mad at me for “smarting off,” she’d make me spend the weekends at my dad’s house, where April would cook something for dinner that tasted like prison food, and my dad would tell stories about himself in which he was invariably the hero. Jeremy had a room near the laundry, and the guest room where I bunked was right next to his. At night I was lulled to sleep by Jeremy’s grunts and cries as he furiously masturbated in bed. With his giant hearing aids sitting on his nightstand, he had no idea how loud he was.

I’d lie in bed, staring up at the ceiling and counting the days until I finished high school and could be someone else and live somewhere else.

SIX

SIX

I drove home. I’d left my cell phone off during lunch and saw now that Dave had called twice. It was getting late, and I know he was home preparing for our Sopranos dinner and worriedly wondering where I’d run off to. I was thinking of Ina’s suggestion that maybe he’d been off doing something nice or even matrimonial last night. I felt stuck because there was no way to confront him with the receipt without letting him know that I’d been looking through his stuff.

As I was stopped in traffic on Franklin, my phone rang again. It was Dave for a third time.

“Hey, baby . . .”

“Heyyy,” I answered back.

“Where’d you go? I thought you were going to hang out till tonight.”