Chapter 19 - The Ben White Parking Lot
The night air was cold enough to turn my breath into small puffs of white smoke as I walked out of the heavy glass doors of the Barton Springs condo building. Across the street, the dark silhouette of the live oaks swayed against the starless Austin sky.
Parked illegally in the loading zone by the side entrance was a dented, white Ford F-150 with a magnetic company logo on the door—*Apex Plumbing & Drain, Buda, TX*.
Dad was sitting in the driver’s seat, the window rolled down two inches, a half-burned cigarette smoldering in the ashtray between the seats. He looked older than forty-two now; his hair was dusted with gray at the temples, his flannel shirt wrinkled and stained with PVC primer near the cuffs.
I stopped three feet from the passenger door. I didn't get in. I kept my hands tucked deep inside the pockets of my denim jacket, my fingers closed around the edges of the red journal.
"You shouldn't be parked here, Dad," I said. "The management will have this truck towed by midnight."
Dad looked over through the glass. His eyes were bloodshot, the skin around them sagging with an exhaustion that sleep couldn't fix. He reached across the console and pushed the passenger door open with a dull, heavy click.
"I know," he said, his voice raspy. "I got a ticket yesterday over on Lamar. Twenty-four dollars. Seems like every time I stop my truck in this city now, someone’s there to charge me for it."
"You're not supposed to be here," I repeated, though my voice wasn't as sharp as I wanted it to be.
"I didn't come to ask for money, Lily," he said, staring down at the steering wheel where his knuckles were white against the rubber grip. "Sarah told me you found the red book."
"Yeah."
"Your mother... she kept that from the very beginning," he said, clearing his throat with that wet, ugly sound I had heard a hundred times in the kitchen on Slaughter Lane. "She knew before I did that we were living a lie. I wanted to be someone else, Lily. I wanted to be the guy who drove a Lexus and lived in a brick house with a manicured lawn so nobody would look at me and remember my dad working three jobs at the Goodyear plant in Waco."
"Mom wasn't ashamed of Waco," I said quietly.
"I know," Dad whispered. "She loved your grandmother’s house in Corpus more than anything in the world. And I traded it for a subdivision that's currently being repossessed by a bank in Dallas."
He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a small, folded piece of lined notebook paper, and laid it on the passenger seat.
"Karen’s lawyer sent this to my motel this morning," he said. "It’s a quitclaim deed for some property her parents bought her in San Marcos back before we met. She wants me to sign off on her legal fees so she can move back to Dallas with her sister. She says if I sign it, she won't pursue me for back alimony on the Lexus lease."
I looked at the white paper through the open door.
"Are you going to sign it?" I asked.
Dad looked up, his eyes meeting mine for the first time in months. There was no anger in them anymore. No defensive bluster. Just the hollow, terrifying emptiness of a man who had looked into the mirror and realized there was nothing left behind his reflection.
May you like
"I don't know," Dad said. "I don't even own a pen that works anymore."
***
