How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) by Ann Hood Read Free Book Online Page A

gone by. Even though he wasn’t on TV so much anymore, his cell phone was always ringing and he was always e-mailing editors from his BlackBerry. He was famous. He was in demand. And even though I missed him like crazy, from my point of view, my father was anything but foolish.
    I almost forgot I was listening in on their phone conversation. Then I heard my father saying, “First of all, Madeline doesn’t even want to go.”
    â€œYou mean second of all,” Mom said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œFirst of all was I hadn’t asked your permission,” she said. “Second of all, Madeline doesn’t want to go. And Ican save you third of all because Cody doesn’t want to go, either.”
    â€œSo you go and the kids will spend the summer here with us.”
    I held my breath. It was only three in the afternoon, but already the sky was dark, threatening still more of the cold rain that had marked most of January. In New York City, gray skies looked romantic. Here, they only looked dull.
    â€œYou know,” Mom said, “I started to build a playhouse for the kids last fall. I thought I could finish it, but it was harder than I expected. I had to keep redoing it.”
    â€œAlice,” Dad said, and I could hear the dread in his voice. My mother could very quickly deteriorate into an ex-wife from soap operas, all tears and accusations. “Don’t.”
    â€œWhat I am trying to say is, I make plans and I work on them until I get them right.”
    â€œOkay,” he said carefully.
    â€œAnd I’m planning this trip and we’re all going. All three of us. You can see them before and you can see them after. But for one month this summer those kids are mine.”
    Silence. Silence for so long that I had to check to makesure we were all still connected. We were. New York City in summer, I knew, was hot and humid and the subway smelled like pee. But I didn’t care. When you are part of a family, things like that don’t really matter. Just when I started imagining it, how I could forget about my mother and Cody and disappear into my father’s family, into New York City, my father spoke. His voice cutting into my daydream startled me so much, I almost screamed.
    â€œThis is an ongoing dialogue,” he said. “The trip, the details, all of it.”
    â€œWe leave June twentieth,” my mother said, and let the date sit there between them, stretching across Connecticut right into my father’s loft in Tribeca. She waited, then said in a dewy voice, a voice I’d come to hate because it was supposed to make everybody pity her, “I guess that date doesn’t mean a thing to you anymore.”
    June twentieth would have been their fifteenth wedding anniversary. I still remembered that date, so I knew he had to remember it, too, the way my mother would get all dressed up fancy and spray on too much Chanel Number 5. She’d wear lipstick, too, and mascara. Ava Pomme worethose things all the time, but my mother never did. Except on their anniversary. She’d let me take a pair of new stockings out of the funny silver plastic egg they came in and unroll them for her. We’d wait by the door for my father to come in and act like he’d forgotten. “Oh,” he’d say, “is dinner formal tonight?” Until finally he’d produce a dozen long-stem roses and they would kiss all romantic like two people in love.
    My throat started to get funny. It’s weird when your parents aren’t in love anymore. It doesn’t make sense. “It’s complicated,” both of them say whenever I ask them about this. For my whole life, until the divorce, almost nothing was complicated. Now everything was.
    â€œDoes it mean anything, Scott?” Mom asked, her voice all soft.
    Some teeny part of me thought that maybe that question would change everything. Of course Dad remembered that he was the guy in that wedding picture with