If he lost

On a chilly, windless evening in December, a speeding sedan lost control and skidded across two icy lanes of traffic, ramming into a highway median and killing the lone driver inside. That night, a young waitress at the local diner came home early from her evening shift to bear the horrible news, and an eleven-year-old girl was left fatherless.

When the paramedics finally freed his body from the heap of crushed metal, his arms were folded tightly across his chest, clutching a thick brown envelope. Inside that envelope was $20,000 in cash.

That man, my father, never told anybody about that $20,000. The authorities asked a litany of questions and we responded in terse, unsatisfactory sentences. We had just as many questions as them. Days later, my mother deposited all but a few thousand of it into a savings account. Six years later, it unceremoniously covered my college tuition.

My father had bright, blue eyes and a lopsided smile. He had an easy manner of talking, like he was ready to break into laughter at any moment. Growing up, he was my best friend.

Upon leaving this world, my father left behind a closet-full of band T-shirts, his cherished vinyl record collection, his acoustic guitar, a study piled with books. But he sure as hell didn’t mean to leave me that $20,000.

Truth was, Dad was an obsessive gambler. He won that money the previous night betting at the roulette table, and he was on his way back to the casino when he crashed. That’s where the story ended at least, until I found his little black notebook.

--

A year after the night, I broke. I stormed into his study, tearing across the room like a pit bull, leaving thick dust clouds and scattered paper trails in my midst. Mom and I hadn’t entered it since the week it happened. Upon seeing the piles of his textbooks stacked high upon his desk, I flung them across the room, inflicting a senseless damage to the work he would never revisit.

I discovered it in a tiny compartment under his desk drawer. With both hands I cradled the notebook in my lap, thumbing the elastic closure binding its cover. Flipping it open, I burst into tears at the sight of my own clumsy, childish handwriting scrawled across the pages.

It was our story book. He had probably bought it as a diary for himself, but somehow I had gotten my little hands on it and scribbled down whatever popped into my head. In any case, from then on, it became a collection of vignettes and daily journals that I would write for him and cheerfully read out each time. I had all but forgotten about it by the time I reached middle school.

July 20, 2004:

Today Daddy and I went to the park. Then we got ice cream because it was hot outside. He got chocolot and I got vanilla. Then it melted and got all over my shoes. My Daddy is the best daddy in the world.

March 28, 2006:

Yesterday was Daddy and Mommy’s anni-ver-sary. We went to a fancy hotel and I ate soooo much. And Mommy looked so pretty, Daddy kept staring at her the whole dinner!

January 3, 2009:

Dad and I decided to set New Year’s resolutions this year! One of us is trying to lose 15 pounds and the other is learning how to put on makeup. I bet you can’t guess whose resolution is whose!

I arrived at the last entry in the notebook, dated December 8, 2010. The small, precise handwriting was undeniably my father’s, the note devastatingly brief.

Daddy won $20,000 tonight. He’s not proud of how he got it, but he’s driving straight to the bank with it tomorrow, where it’ll go towards your college education. He won’t dare spend a cent.

I cried out. Of course, he broke his promise. He snuck out the next day without even saying goodbye, let alone where he was headed. Sitting in the kitchen doing my math homework at the time, the last sound I heard from him was the slam of the front door. Most likely, he had driven off intending in his mind to visit the bank and all too predictably, almost mechanically, he rerouted course for the casino. His fatal, final decision.

Staring at that last entry, I was suddenly transported back in time to the moments before he left. A million diverging realities were born in those moments, each of them infinitely superior to the one I was now living.

December 9, 2010:

“Hey Dad!” I yell just as he’s putting on his hat to leave. “Can you help me with this math problem?”

No problem sweetheart, he says. It’s just a system of equations you got here. He helps me complete the substitution. A Bill Evans solo is playing on the record player – his favorite. I see him smile, setting his coat down on the chair beside me as he decides to stay a little longer.

December 9, 2010:

“Hey Dad!” I call across the kitchen. “Wanna order pizza tonight?”

His eyes light up with excitement. “Honey, if I ever say no to that question. Please smack me in the head!”

“Will do!” I say, the phone to dial. I catch him trying to hide the envelope under the counter.

“What’s in the box?” I tease.

“First, it’s not a box. Second, if I tell you, you must first agree to not spend a single penny of it on me. Okay?”

“You mean there’s money in there?!”

He chuckled awkwardly. “Yeah. I’ve got a little confession to make…”

--

We’re sitting at the kitchen table, several years after the night. I watch my mother flip through the pages of the little black book, nearly filled now with different variations of my father’s last day.

“Judy, you can’t keep doing this to yourself.”

“But Mom, doesn’t it burn you up inside, realizing there are so many ways it could have gone differently? So many ways it could have gone better?”

My mother sighed and gazed out the window. She put her elbows on the table and ran her hands through her hair.

“Your father… he was doomed from the start. If it wasn’t the crash that killed him, it would have been something else. He was always getting himself into trouble and especially when he won. As soon as he saw any light of day, any chance of escaping his predicament, he’d only dig his hole deeper.”

I stared at the floor and said nothing. She closed the book, frowning.

“He was a man with an uncanny ability to destroy the things he loved. There is – there was no scenario where someone could have saved him, let alone himself.”

--

I thought about what my mother said for a long time. I realized that she was deeply wrong in one respect. He didn’t destroy the relationship he had with me. He was a good father in so many ways, excepting that one, terrible flaw. She was right about one thing, though: winning only worsened the problem. I knew that none of those stories were realistic, that in every world in which my father won that $20,000, he would have continued down that same destructive path that led to his death.

In the book's final entry, my father doesn’t win the $20,000 that night. Ashamed and exhausted, he creeps in through the front door at midnight and hangs up his coat. I poke my head out from behind the stairwell, grinning at him. “Hey little mouse,” he says with a tired smile.

And I run up and jump into his arms, overjoyed.