Homewrecker

05 - 𝓹𝓮𝓻𝓯𝓮𝓬𝓽

When I first started playing lacrosse, during my second practice of the season, I was pushed from behind me by Luna Harren when the ball flew over my head and I fell against the turf, knocking the wind out of my lungs in a sputtering fit of coughs and gasps. The coach had to stop the practice for a moment because she thought I was actually hurt, just to realize that I only lost my breath. I trudged back to the bench, embarrassed, and I sat there for the rest of the practice, still not totally able to breathe like I used to.

That was what it was like, seeing David Soliday there, for the first time in more than ten years.

There weren't many stories my mother told me of him, but the ones she did were worn and weathered, like old pages of a book thumbed through countless times before. She was a waitress at a little diner on the edge of town, and the pictures she showed me told me she probably had a messy ponytail of brunette hair before she started dyeing it, beat up Adidas sneakers, and the same shade of cherry red lipstick she always wore when he came in one day.

He sat at a booth even though he was alone, she said, and ordered a slice of apple pie as it was nearing midnight. She was waiting for him to finish so she could leave and take her tips back to her studio apartment above the Chinese restaurant, and eventually after she approached his table for the fifth or sixth time and asked if he needed anything else, he caught on. He asked if she wanted him to leave, and I assumed my mom's customer service skills needed some refining still because she told him yeah, she was.

But he wasn't offended, never complained to a manager, and instead, laughed. She never really told me what happened next, but somehow, she ended up sitting across from him. Then, a few minutes later, she grabbed her tips and he grabbed her coat, and they left together, driving around the snow-covered town for hours, just talking she said.

After that night, he kept coming back to the restaurant and that was the only way she knew to find him, and he would sit at the same booth every night until midnight when her shift ended. Sometimes they would walk around town, go through a drive-thru and eat in his car, listen to music turned on low.

Then one night, she brought him back to her apartment. They put on a movie, and somewhere between that and the end credits, he told her he was married. He said it was rough, but he had kids, two. My mom never told me the next part, but I thought she got scared. She found something she wanted to cling to, someone she wanted, and a few months later, when she went to tell him that she was pregnant, he told her he was staying with his wife.

He never paid child support, she told me, even though he came from money and made enough for himself and the family she always resented. It was something she brought up every time she never had enough of her itself—like when she had to take some groceries off her bill before paying, or even the night she drove me to the ATM a few weeks ago, crying she was sorry in between—and he never came around.

He never called or emailed, never asked to see me. I used to wait for birthday cards in the mail, sitting outside in front of the mailbox the days before and after, just in case it got lost somewhere. I always knew he had other kids, which was more confusing than if he had none at all. Then I would've known he just didn't want any, but to know that he did, and he picked and chose which ones to love, it stung more that way.

I only remember meeting him once, when I was seven years old. It was nearing the end of summer and getting close to my birthday. That was the first year I decided I would wait at the mailbox before my birthday in case he liked to do things that way, early, ahead of time in case there was a mix up somewhere. We had a little apartment then, but it looked more like a house than an apartment really, like a bunch of narrow houses crammed together into one building.