One Last Thing

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    My Dad lost his job on one of those rare sunny days in the middle of autumn.

    He was a broker for a real estate agency, and, I guess, not a very good one. I was eleven at the time and too young to remember the details, or the politics behind the decision to let him go—something about a bad business partner and an unhappy client and an even more unhappy boss.

    But I remember the aftermath: my Dad's seething anger, my Mom's suffocating stiffness on the matter, the tense silence that enveloped the dinner table every night as we scraped forks against our plates. Not too long after the incident he got another job at a smaller agency, but nothing was really the same after that.

    My Dad always believed that he was meant for something more. For what, I never knew, and I don't think he did either. It was always more of a concept, too abstract to be anything more than wishful thinking.  He'd talk about writing a book, or starting his own company, or becoming an investor, and I'd listen to every single one of his dreams on our car rides to school.

    Once or twice, he'd joke about how if only he could get out of our quaint suburbs, make it to the Big Apple, he'd have a shot at making it big—that if he hadn't met my mom, maybe he'd already be as successful as he wanted. I never thought much of it, since those comments were always followed with a laugh and a hand on my head as he told me that he wouldn't trade that now for the world. Wouldn't trade me, or Mom, or Tucker. And I believed him.

    But then he lost his job—the one thing that made him at least something, even if he couldn't be anything more—and everything changed.

    It happened slowly, so slowly I didn't realize things weren't at all how they used to be until I woke up one morning and my entire world had shifted.

    At first, after he'd gotten his new job, he grew quiet. That quietness translated into constant fatigue as he became too tired–or too miserable—to do anything more than work and come home.  And then over time, his despondency turned into bitterness, and then eventually anger.

    Suddenly, his backbiting comments about being trapped at home, unable to reach his full potential, wasn't a joke. It got to the point where he started to blame my mother for all of his shortcomings, and then he started blaming her for everything else. Why he wasn't happy or successful, why he'd lost his job, why his coffee was cold, why kids in third-world countries were starving—it all somehow led back to her.

    They would argue at night. I would hear them through my door, in the sanctity of my bed—my Mom's shouts, my Dad's snappy retorts, her cries. Sometimes, when it got really ugly, a soft knock would come from my door and Tucker would be there, holding his stuffed Buzz Light pillow, his eyes wide and afraid.

    I would let him in, and he'd crawl into bed with me. I'd prop my laptop on my blankets and play Napoleon Dynamite with the volume fully up, and we would curl up under the covers and watch, pretending we couldn't still hear our parents falling out of love in the room over. I remember laying there with Tucker's head on my shoulder and thinking nothing could be worse.

    And then we found out my Dad was gambling.

    I was thirteen when it started, fifteen when my Mom pieced it together and his secret was out. He'd been coming home noticeably late for about a year at that point, first by an hour and missing dinner, then in the middle of the night. That was around the time he and my Mom's arguments got really serious and Tucker started coming to my room.

    My Mom thought my Dad was having an affair. It made sense, all the late nights, the excuses (a "confidential" meeting he called it), the times he'd come home drunk. Until one day, when checking our joint savings account, she discovered ten-thousand dollars had disappeared.