layla

Brett comes home and the roles are once again reversed. This time he’s ignoring me. Although not in the usual way. He’s not playing deaf—he’s pissed. He stalks around the apartment and everything he does is punctuated with a loud bang. He tosses off his shoes—bang. He hangs his jacket up and slams the closet door. He goes into the bathroom and slams that one, too.

“Great game,” I say, when he finally comes out.

“Yeah? What was the final score?”

“Thirty-seven to fifteen?” I say, my pitch just slightly raised, which might suggest I wasn’t positive, but I did check before I got home. Still, the way he hurled the question at me, I feel panicky and wonder if there was an extra field goal or something.

“You don’t have to come to the games if you don’t want to,” he says.

Instantly I feel like crap. I do want to go to the games. I want to support him, at least. I’ve always supported him. It just didn’t feel like he cared either way anymore. But apparently he does.

“I’m so sorry, babe,” I say, and mean it with all my heart. “Brooke was itching to take off and I didn’t think you’d notice and I haven’t seen her in a while and we wanted to catch up and—”

“It’s okay,” he says, taking in how awful I feel. “It just bummed me out.”

“I’m sorry,” I reply, and then smile as I walk to him. “How can I possibly make it up to you?”

He meets me halfway, and I know I’m forgiven. Sure, we may have hit a rocky patch lately, but when we do connect—when we’re on the same page—it’s paradise. We both know that.

I knew I loved Brett the first time he took me to my dad’s grave. I didn’t know where we were going when he kidnapped me after school that rainy Friday, and I wasn’t in the mood to go anywhere, let alone somewhere against my will and with no clue as to where we’d end up. We were too young for him to be proposing but not too young for him to try his hand at romance in an outdoor, public (albeit remote) place. This was before my mom passed away, so when we got to the graveyard I was certain he’d taken his quest to obtain my virginity to a whole new level.

“A graveyard? Seriously?” I spouted, hand on one hip, mouth pursed in a smirk, one eyebrow cocked.

Brett reached his hand out and softly touched my sure-of-itself eyebrow with a finger, guiding it back down to its natural position. “Yes, a graveyard,” he said, and he kicked dirt from the front of a worn-away headstone.

“Not on your twisted life, pal,” I said, but before I could get the words out I noticed something in his face. He was serious, and we weren’t there to have sex. He held his hand out for me to take, which I did.

Brett inhaled a deep breath and then nodded toward the headstone. “Layla, I’d like you to meet the deceased Nick Brennan. Er, Foxx.”

I stood there for a moment in shock. The back of my throat started to feel like it was coated with a layer of cotton candy. I swallowed a few times to make it go away, but each time it became more difficult. Had my father died? Nobody had told me? It would be fitting, since he’d left me out of the loop on everything else that had happened since 1988 when I’d last seen him.

“I don’t understand,” I said, as I started to tremble.

“No, no …” Brett rushed reassuringly, taking me in his arms and holding me close. “He’s not really dead.”

My wayward eyebrow poked back up. “Brett, what in the name of …?”

“Your dad’s a shit. I say we bury him.”

Nine words. Uttered as though he were telling me what time it was. That’s all he said. But what I heard was this:

“That poor excuse for a father has caused you so much pain, it’s criminal—whether you want to admit it or not. I know you go to the mailbox every time your birthday nears, or during Christmas or Easter or any other time a father should acknowledge his only daughter, and I watch you flip the mailbox open and shut it just as fast. You always get this little smile when it’s empty. Every time, you shrug and get this smile on your face that I imagine is you saying, Oh, well … maybe next year, but that smile breaks my fucking heart. Because I know what’s underneath. And I wish I could make a card appear in the mailbox, or a heart appear where that gaping hole is in your father’s chest. But I can’t … and it doesn’t. So I say we bury the fucker. I say we pronounce him dead, and from this day forward he is. A dead father has got to be less painful than one who’s alive and doesn’t appreciate or even recognize that he has a daughter.”

They say women develop faster than men. So do our interpersonal skills. Mostly. So you might guess I was reading into it. But I don’t think so. Those nine words meant the world to me.

I wept. It was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. I wept over the loss of my father—probably for the first time—and I simultaneously shed happy tears over finding someone who cared enough about me to do such a thing. Brett had found a headstone that was so weatherworn it had no legible name, and he’d claimed it for me, for my life ahead. He encouraged me to talk to my father—or to the stone, at least—and to tell him how I felt. Then, once every year on the same day, he promised to bring me back to visit and “catch my father up” on what he’d missed.

Brett was a winner. He was the real deal. And it was that first visit to my father’s “grave” when the little cartoon birds swooped off the Disney celluloid, singing, chirping, and stitching my damaged heart back together with multicolored ribbons borne in their beaks. I never looked at another boy through high school.

After that, it was off to college together—to a school I wouldn’t even have put on my list had it not been his first choice (I figured I’d go to veterinary school right after, so where I did my under-grad wasn’t really all that important)—and a lifelong commitment to the eternal goof that he would quickly become (still somehow managing to be a successful goof). I haven’t ever regretted it, really, though he’s given me reasons to a few times.

I’ll never forget his twenty-first birthday. He drank too much—and by “too much,” I mean it was a miracle he wasn’t hospitalized with alcohol poisoning in addition to severe lacerations. He’d attempted to open a beer bottle with his eye socket: a neat bar trick, except in this case the bottle cap proved more resilient than the skin protecting his orbital bone. Particularly funny, though he’d never admit it, the cap had been a twist-off. In fact, the entire incident was transformed in the retelling into a bar fight. No word as to whether the bottle also sought first aid.

The kicker was that Brett’s two roommates heard me screaming, thought we were arguing, didn’t want to get involved, and stayed out the whole night at a friend’s. Brett and I stumbled back into his place at about seven forty-five a.m., while Matt and Corey, aka Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, staggered in at eight. I was starving after staying up the whole night in the ER, so before I’d even changed my blood-splattered shirt I made myself a bowl of cereal and wound up dozing off, still seated upright with the spoon in my hand. When Matt walked into the kitchen and saw me—eyes closed, blood everywhere—he assumed that Brett had stabbed me, and immediately started hatching an escape plan. He sprinted out the front door, stole a ladder from the next house over, and climbed up to Brett’s bedroom window, shouting at the top of his lungs for Brett to “Grab the necessities and get the fuck out before someone calls the fuzz!”

Without addressing what he apparently thought of me, leaving me for dead as he did, Matt’s use of the word “fuzz” should tell you just all you need to know about Brett’s choice of friends. I woke up to the commotion, went to see what was going on, and saw Brett—half out the window, panicked, not even knowing why—with Matt screaming for him to hurry because I was awake (and apparently alive), and Corey blurting something about having a cousin in Mexico.

Yes, I married him nonetheless. We don’t talk to Matt much anymore, though.