Spin Cycle

TWO

• II - THE CALL •

       ON TUESDAY MORNING, Addison gets The Call - the one she's been waiting on for months.

       Her Dad's dying.

       Lets rephrase: He's been dying for a while - that's what happens when you have ALS - the slow wilt, the eventual decline, the ultimate inability to do anything, like fucking swallow or put on socks. This is just The End. The Final Supper. The time for praying at the edge of the bed and long talks of the afterlife and the pseudo comfort of 'he'll be in a better place when he's gone'.

       It's been two years since Addison's seen him, dropping him off at the front gates of the palliative care home, assuring visits she knew she'd never make. She'd kissed his scraggly cheek and whispered an anemic I love you and then that was it, the final parting, like divergent tides that never managed to find a midpoint, always passing but never meeting. Now it's cards on birthdays and letters at Christmas and not much else in the way of communication.

       They've never been good at that. Communicating, she means. Not after her mother died. Maybe it's Addison's fault, for resenting him - for knowing too much in the way of his devils - or maybe it's his, for giving her secrets to know in the first place.

        Secrets - there had always been so many of them between them, like self constructed enigmas, each clamoring to solve the other over beef bolognese as though they were stuck in a never-ending game of battleship. As though winning could only be accomplished by stripping the other of their pride, leaving them naked and vulnerable and pathetic in a pool of their own leaked out guts.

       Exploding ships in the night.

       She remembers watching television with him one day, in the eleventh grade, before he knew of Claudia Mercer and before they both understood she would never be the holy daughter he'd nurtured her to become - that that sort of person wasn't the one coded in her DNA. It was the last conversation they'd had before The Call - before her failed atonement and the loss of all left that was devout inside of her.

       Before the glass wall shattered.

       She'd looked to him across the living room and asked, "Am I a good person?"

        "Of course," he'd said.

       "Even if people say I've done bad things?"

       She remembers his stare, molten lava, and that slicked back haircut - the way the light shone off it. "We've all done bad things."

       "Unforgivable things?"

       A reached out hand, then, "Nothing's unforgivable, Addison."

       It was the last time she'd ever heard him say her name like that, in that blue television light - like she was still something worth saving, something that could be saved. A wounded animal whimpering in the darkness, begging this mock hunter to slit its throat now, knowing its fate is already inevitable - wanting to end all the fucking suffering.

       Nothing's unforgivable.

• • •

       She swings open the door of Chez Piggy and gets whacked by the aroma of bacon fat.