Read Online Look at You Now by Liz Pryor - Free Book Online

on time, Liz. Have you ever been to a social worker before?”
    â€œNo.” I looked around the office and saw the empty chair my mom had sat in a few days earlier, when she dropped me off, which felt like a lifetime ago. Ms. Graham kept talking.
    â€œWe’re just going to talk. I’m here to help you along if you have anything on your mind.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œI spoke with your mother this morning and told her about your fainting spell. She was very concerned but I assured her you and the baby are doing fine now. How are you feeling?”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œShe said she’d let your father know and keep him informed.”
    I looked out the little window in her office. “No, she won’t.”
    â€œShe said she would.”
    â€œBut she won’t.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œThey don’t speak.”
    â€œI see. Why is that?”
    I paused. “They hate each other.”
    â€œThat’s an awfully strong term.”
    â€œI know.”
    I didn’t want to get into it with Ms. Graham, but the simple truth was that my father had asked my mother for a divorce the day before I got home from camp that summer, just after we moved to the new house. That was when she walked for two days. Some months later my parents divorced. And after that my dad married a woman who used to work for him. From then on, for the last five years, my parents hadn’t spoken. It was a radically difficult time for all of us. I was waiting for things between my parents to calm down, for our lives to become easier, or find some new version of normal. But nothing ever really changed. Nothing between them, or around them, got easier. What I felt like was that I couldn’t love my dad when I was around my mom, and I couldn’t love my mom when I was around my dad. The two people who had been sitting in the same place in my heart my whole life were now forcing me to hold them in two different places.
    â€œAre they divorced?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThat’s hard.”
    â€œYeah, hard for my mom.”
    Our mom was completely shattered when our dad left—not the regular kind of shattered, brutally shattered from head to toe. Like someone-stuck-a-hand-down-her-throat-pulled-her-heart-out-and-threw-it-against-a-moving-train shattered. And that was only the beginning. I’d been slowly learning some truths about life over the past few years. I knew that one brief moment at anygiven time could destroy how a person exists in the world. Almost like the earth stops rotating just for a second, and the force of the stop pulls everything that’s good away . . . and some people never find their way back. My brothers and sisters and I were right there watching when the earth stopped rotating for our mom. She loved our father; she loved him so much she waited for years for him to come back. She quit smoking—“gave it up to God,” she said—so that he might bring our dad home, but Lee never came back. It’s a rare anguish for a child to watch the person they love the most in the world suffer so profoundly, especially when there’s no way to help. I listened to my mom’s sadness through the walls of my bedroom almost every night before I went to sleep, for years after Lee left. Some nights it made me so sad I wept along with her from my own bed.
    Ms. Graham looked at me a long time and then asked, “Was the divorce hard for you?”
    â€œKind of . . . Yes. I miss my dad.”
    â€œHow often do you see him?”
    â€œNot very much.”
    â€œYour parents don’t speak at all?”
    â€œNo, they don’t. But a few days ago they had to.”
    â€¢ • • •
    Lee’s classic wooden schooner, the Malabar X , built in 1930, moved our dad to a place I only saw when we were sailing. It was like a peek at the underbelly of his soul, where joy, and ease, and purpose all came together at the same