about. Their husbands? Kids? Dissatisfactions? It wasn’t that I thought of her as old and her life narrow, just that she was a world apart from me.
“I did ride early this morning, my only fun activity all weekend.” I stretched out my legs, trying to relax, to quell my impatience.
“Where did you go?” The question was perfunctory; she was stalling so that Eric would appear and we could sit down together. Sean was out of town. “We rode out the Bolinas Ridge, Pine Mountain, the usual. Really, Mom, I need to eat.”
“So do I,” said my father, coming into the kitchen, the sound of a basketball game trailing him. He opened the fridge, his belly sinking over his waistband as he bent to pull a beer from the fridge door.
At least it was beer, not whiskey. I wondered what time he’d started drinking.
“We’re waiting for Eric,” my mother said as she opened the pot on the stove and stirred the chili. Eric loved her chili. I was less enthusiastic.
“Wasn’t he supposed to be here an hour ago, two hours ago?” He popped open the beer and watched her as he took a sip.
“Yes, but he’s late as usual.” She tried to be light about it, though I knew Eric’s tardiness drove her as crazy as it did the rest of us. My mother was the classic codependent, a role perfected throughout her years of marriage to my father. She covered for Eric, adjusting her schedule to fit his, making excuses for him, just as she’d always covered for my father.
He took a step toward the TV. “Did your mother tell you he got stopped for another DUI?” There was disgust in his voice.
“No,” I said, turning to my mother. “But he doesn’t even have a license anymore.”
“That’s right. They held him in jail. They wouldn’t release him until your mother posted bond and he signed a paper saying he’d seek help. Go to rehab.”
“Can they do that?”
“Don’t know if they can, but they did. May just be an attempt to scare him into sobriety. He said he went to AA last week.” He took another sip.
I caught myself counting his sips; it was bad enough counting bottles. “Alcohol isn’t his problem. It’s the drugs.” I turned to my mother, who was probably better informed, “So what’s happening with the rehab?”
“He has to go to court first,” she said.
“I’ve washed my hands of him,” my father said as he headed back toward the crowd roaring from the TV. Someone had made a great play. “Five more minutes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked my mother.
“I thought I’d let him tell you. We don’t know what’s happening. When his court date is. How we’re going to pay for rehab.”
“The court doesn’t take any financial responsibility if they tell him that going to rehab is his punishment? So how will he pay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s eat, Mom,” I said, taking shallow bowls out of the cupboard and sticking them in the warm oven. “It’s pointless to arrange our lives around Eric. And anyway, how would he get here? He shouldn’t drive.”
“Yes,” she said, defeated. “You should have picked him up.”
I took a deep breath. We all felt defeated around Eric. His addictions, his self-annihilation so clear, so brutal. Like a train without brakes careening down a track.
My dad, though, my dad. I felt defeated around him too, but for different reasons. Eric’s violent swings were hard enough to deal with, but I felt more helpless in the face of my father’s quiet self-destruction. He didn’t get belligerent, but morose, sinking into weepy depressions. Not talking to my mother, who tried to draw him out by cooking elaborate meals, pampering him. At least he’d never gotten a DUI. He was more sensible in his addiction. Unlike many drunks, he willingly turned his car keys over when he’d had too much.
“Can you put the cornbread on the table?” my mother said, breaking my reverie.
I cut three large pieces and put them on the plate she handed me.
“Four,” my mother said, “Four pieces.”
But that hopeful action didn’t prove to be enough to draw Eric to us.
“DESSERT?” my mother asked.
My father knocked back the last of his beer. “What do you have?”
“Chocolate cake.”
It was my favorite, rich and chocolaty, the second piece better than the first. Her making it more than compensated for her cooking chili for Eric. If only she’d told me what was for dessert before I’d taken my second helping of chili.
“So what have you been working on?” my father asked.
My mother and I looked at each other. “The Chinese porcelain exhibit,” I said, trying to keep the irritation from my voice. He’d asked the same question the previous week and the week before.
“Oh, right. I heard something on the radio about a stolen head that your museum bought.”
“No, we did not buy a stolen head. One of our trustees bought a head, which might or might not be stolen. We’re trying to authenticate it.” Damn Philen. My father had heard what I’d expected the average person would hear, that the museum was responsible.
“How do you do that, dear?” my mother asked me, trying to deflect the rising confrontation as she watched me watch him pull another beer from the fridge. A beer to have with his chocolate cake.
“Style, wear to the object, research.” I took a deep breath and turned my attention to my mother. If I didn’t watch his drinking, I might not be irritated. “I visited a book dealer here in Berkeley this afternoon. He bought the book collection that belonged to the previous owner. I wanted to see if there were notations in any of the books.”
I took a sip of tea and plunged my fork back into the cake.
“Were there?” She was determined to keep the conversation going.
“No, though there were a number of pages in the books I looked at, a few of which I bought, marked with Post-its, all of which appeared to relate to the head. They were in sections of books about the Baphuon period or in the plates illustrating Baphuon sculptures.” That wasn’t a lie. I just didn’t mention that I had found papers stuffed into one of the books. Tom Sharpen’s barely legible and incoherent notes explaining why he thought the head P.P. had purchased was a fake and what that meant to him.
“Why did he sell it?” my father asked.
I didn’t look up, but I felt his eyes on me. “What?”
“Why did this person sell this head and sell all his books?”
I didn’t want the conversation to take this course.
“He died. His family sold everything.” I brought another bite to
