Daddy Dearest

Chapter Fifty-Six

Waverly

Meeting Melody’s uncle was unsettling. I had never met anyone with such a magnetic presence. Yes, he’s a good-looking man, but there’s just something about him that awoke… a voice within me, someone I hadn’t heard from in so long. It was a voice reminding me I was a woman, not just a mother and wife.

        In some shape or form, I’ve been a mother for twenty-two years. Ever since I started my internship at the behavioral mental health in Syracuse, I’ve taken care of people. Gretchen jokingly calls me a martyr.

        "And I want to remind you, dear, that martyrs are usually burned at the stake or nailed to a wooden cross,” she would say with her usual acerbic wit. “Your world doesn’t need to revolve around your husband and kids.”

   “It’s easy for you to say,” I’d respond with an eyeroll. “You made the wise decision to be alone.”

        Gretchen dates both sexes, but none of her relationships ever last longer than a month. She tells me it’s because she’s selfish, and people tend to have expectations after a while. She doesn’t want to be accountable to anyone but herself.

        "You could use some selfishness yourself, lady,” she’d tell me over a glass of red wine. “You’ll get premature wrinkles worrying over your immature man-child husband and litter of kids. Let Ben take care of his own drunk ass. The twins are practically grown. Please don’t tell me you’ll be waiting till Madi leaves the house for college before you divorce Benjamin.”

        I haven’t thought of leaving Ben in a while. He’d been a model husband these past six years and drank a lot less than he used to. He was trying to be a better partner and father, just like he swore to me he would, while I was in hospital after giving birth to Madi. He held our precious bundle in his arms and looked down at me with tears in his eyes.

        "I love you, Wave,” he’d said. “I promise I will take better care of you and our children.”

        After Harry died, he was sunk in depression for a while. He’d spend all of his time in his attic office, drinking and smoking the nights away. He left me alone, and I was both mother and father to two eleven-year-olds and a five-year-old while I was pregnant with Madi.

        My husband was prone to bouts of depression and debilitating anxiety that could last several months. During these episodes, he would retreat into his office and tune everyone out.

        Sometimes, I do wonder what it would be like if I divorced him and took the kids with me. I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but the last couple of months had been difficult and instead of bringing us together, Ben had been withdrawn and quiet. Physically, he was there for me and the children, but I could sense that he wasn’t all there emotionally, like he had once again sequestered himself on that damn Soul Mountain.

        It was a book he’d read several times and I’ve noticed that he had a tendency to go back to it whenever he was feeling restless and lost. I knew he was no longer happy with his position at Sacred Heart because he was stagnating, and a brilliant mind like his needed to be constantly stimulated.

        It makes me wish Harry was still alive.

        Harry would know what to do in this situation. He was a decisive and straightforward man who always had a plan with several contingencies. While Ben was brilliant, Harry was the one who pushed him and helped shape his career. Harry was a man on the move. Ben used to say that he was like a shark who couldn’t sit idle or he’d drown.

        But he had his depressive episodes, too. For most of my life, I was caught between two very different, yet similarly intelligent men who directed the flow of my life. Harry has been dead for almost seven years, and yet he lingers like a ghost, haunting me, my husband, and our marriage.