Dishes Best Served Cold

by David Estringel

The day my sister told me my father had cancer wasn’t very different from any other: I went to work early and left late; wolfed-down shitty take-out for lunch from some nearby “shit shack” in between patient crises; and smoked too much (‘til my lungs ached) during the car ride home, belching acid into my mouth from a gut that had seen much better days. The drive home from the psych hospital, where I had worked for too long, quickly became my favorite time of day, allowing me a chance to finally exhale and step away from the daily hell of doing something I was just good at but didn’t love. While the money was good—great, actually—it wasn’t enough to keep me from cringing every morning I got into my car to go to work. So goes living the life you ask for (not the one you wanted).

I believe I was halfway home when my sister called, which was odd since she never did (except when she wanted something). Niceties were exchanged, I assume (I am not a total asshole, after all), and then she tossed the grenade into my lap: “Dad has cancer.” A cold “Wow” escaped my lips, as I blindly searched my messenger bag for my pack of cigarettes; my eyes keenly fixed on the back bumper of the black Cadilac Escalade in front of me. Drug dealer, I thought to myself. I wasn’t glad he was sick. Again, I am not an asshole, but over the course of 30 years, the man had gone out of his way to make it clear that the family he left behind was not a priority, not even garnering an afterthought. I assume I expressed the concern a son should after hearing such an awful declaration, maybe offering up an “Oh, my God. What kind?” to save face, but she didn’t know.

Apparently, my father dropped the bomb on her during one of their regular phone conversations, which she always had to initiate. As indifferent about her as I can be, I gotta admire the woman’s tenacity. She’ll be damned if the old man ignored her. Slightly annoyed, I critiqued her lack of curiosity in the face of a looming family crisis. “So, you are meeting him for dinner tonight,” she then said. Absolutely, I was annoyed.

“Why would I do that?” I asked, blowing cigarette smoke out the driver’s side window. “We haven’t talked in—what—10 years? I can’t think of a worse idea.”

“He’s got cancer, Sean. He’s sick.”

“So you say.” Even though she was family (and we have basically seen each other at our worst), that was one of those moments where one’s next move would (pretty much) define one’s character going forward in the annals of family history. Regardless, I hadn’t forgotten the “radio silence” after he divorced my mother (God rest her soul) and started a new (supposedly improved) family with someone else, even though Lisa, my sister, evidently had. “And where will I be choking this food down, exactly?” I queried. I half-about expected The Pancake House to come out of her mouth, which is where my parents would always take me to tell me they were separating; I eventually began calling it “The Temple of Doom.” To this day, chicken fried steak never really quite hits the spot like it used to.

“Roadhouse Steakhouse. Just pick him up at his house and honk. He’ll be waiting.”

Great, I thought to myself. Now, sirloin is fucked.

**********

I drove up to his house—the lawn noticeably unkept, which was odd given his obsession with gardening. I punched the horn a couple of times and waited. Eventually, the front door opened, and he stepped out, leaning in to give his wife a kiss goodbye; she lingered in the doorway and gave me an obligatory wave, as he made his way to the car. He was thinner than I remember. Older, too. The man had sported salt-and-pepper hair ever since I could remember, but now he had gone totally grey, which aged him. He wore a crisp, white long-sleeved shirt and khakis—a far cry from the polyester, Sans-a-Belt slacks I had always seen him in way back when. Despite his wife’s stylizing, the clothes shockingly hung from his frail frame almost drowning him in folds of fabric. He got in the car and gave her a wave: I followed suit for the sake of not turning a partially selfless gesture into a blatant “fuck you” to all involved.

The ride to Roadhouse is a blur (not because my memory is shot but because whatever pleasantries were exchanged were likely disingenuous). Per usual, the restaurant was loud and every 10 minutes (or so) the waitstaff would pool at various locations, like blood clots, to sing Happy Birthday (“Yahoo!” and all) to someone itching for a free dessert. Not being much of a ‘small talker’ and an emotional eater, I downed three baskets of rolls, while recounting the highlights of the past decade (of which there were few) to catch the old man up. We didn’t have much in common, but the one thing we could connect on was work; I can’t remember a time when my father didn’t have more than two jobs. Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money and there were plenty of Christmases when there were no presents under the tree, but he tried his damnedest to keep things afloat, never complaining once (or at least not so anyone could hear).

“What are you doing these days?” he asked, grabbing the only roll left in the red, plastic basket on the table.

“Clinical Director at the psychiatric hospital just outside of town. Been there about…six months.” I stared at his face and searched for some semblance of interest (pride, maybe) and found none, just a pair of dulled, brown eyes. “It’s alright. Pays well.”

“Oh, the big hospital a mile or so from where I live.” He nodded and took another bite of his roll—a crumb of bread wedged in the right corner of his mouth. “What do you do there?”

Stymied by the question, I shifted in my seat, folded my hands on the table, and stared at him for a few seconds. “Clinical Director,” I repeated. Something was not right. Off. “I supervise the therapists and create the clinical programming for the hospital.” Again, I waited for some sign of life behind those deadened eyes, but one never came. “I’m a psychotherapist, Dad. Have been for six years, now. Remember? I’m sure Lisa mentioned it.” Still, nothing.

“Really? How did you get into that?” he asked, the soggy crumb punctuating every word.

My brow furrowed; I leaned in. “Dad, I’m a clinical social worker. That is what we do.”

“Oh, really? That’s good…That’s good.” He looked confused, cast his eyes down toward his hands. “I remember when I took over that elementary school…Parkview, I think it was, just before I retired. Thought I was done with being a principal, but it was in bad shape. Really bad shape. Their test scores were the lowest in the district and the State was going to close it down if things didn’t change fast.”

A bit annoyed with the non sequitur, I nodded and smiled, becoming increasingly amused by the fact that he somehow managed to turn a discussion about my career success into one about his own. “Wow,” I responded.

“I walked in my first day—just before classes started for the year--and the first thing I did was get all the staff together and told them what needed to change, how it needed to change, and by when it needed to change. If anyone didn’t like it, there was the door. What do you think happened?” he (and the crumb) asked.

“What?” I had heard this story before, but the man supposedly had cancer, so why not let him have a moment?

“Those test scores went up and the school was awarded ‘Exemplary’ status by the State. No one thought I could do it, but I did.” For a moment, he didn’t seem so old; he was the same man (and narcissist) I remembered him to be. “So, what are you doing these days?”

Thinking nothing else could throw me off at that point, it happened again. Luckily, the waitress came by our table to take our orders, which provided a brief pardon from my sister’s good intentions. My father ordered a house salad with French dressing on the side (some things never change) with extra crackers and a sweet tea. I opted for chicken fried steak, figuring the occasion called for it, and a Coke. “Is that all?” she asked. I looked at the crumb and then the waitress. “A gin and tonic. More gin than tonic, please.”

The waitress gave me a look, then at my dad, and gave me a smile as if to say, “Gotcha.”

**********

Halfway through my chicken fried steak and two repeats of his school transformation story, I decided to break the tension that hung over the table, like a pall and asked my father about his family. His oldest brother, Andy, was doing fine—perfect, in fact—and was happily retired. His other older brother, Patrick, had been recovering for a few months at home from a heart attack—a pretty serious one. Naturally, he gushed about how well my cousins, Michael and Robert—Patrick’s sons—were doing, detailing the careers they chose and how successful they were at them. I nodded and smiled, then took a long sip from the sweaty glass of gin and tonic on the table, irked by the fact that I had to remind the old man what my major was in college any time the topic came up (a fact made even more amusing when one takes into account that my Master of Social Work degree wasn’t the one he paid for).

“Those two are good boys. They visit Patrick every day. Make sure that his wife and he are doing okay. Yes, that is how children should be.”

“Well, yeah,” I responded, “Well, Patrick never left. Besides, I am sure the boys are still in the will.”

“What was that?”

“So, Lisa tells me you have cancer.” Why the hell not?

Still chewing a mouthful of salad (the crumb had since fallen and joined its crouton cousins for a reunion), he looked at me with a blank stare that bordered on hostility. “Everything is going to be fine.”

“From what I understand, you haven’t worked in a while. That’s not you, so things don’t seem very fine.”

My father shoveled another forkful of salad into his mouth. “I’m going to the doctor, and he’s highly recommended. It’ll be fine.”

“Well, what kind of cancer is it?” The smell of chicken fried steak (for some reason) was heavy in the air, making me nauseous. “What kind is it, Dad?”

“Prostate.” He looked at his hands again.

I became dizzy all of a sudden, and my lips felt cold. “Prostate,” I blurted. “How serious is it? What stage?”

“I don’t know. I was just told yesterday. They are running more tests. I go back tomorrow…I will be fine.”

The moment was surreal, like watching a mountain crumble before your very eyes. There was no love lost between him and I, but this was the man that I had idolized for the first 25 years of my life and was—unfortunately—a carbon copy of.  “Sounds serious. When were you planning on telling me? I mean, I have to hear this from Lisa?” It upset me that I was upset, that I cared that the distance that had been between us for years was there. The idea that the ‘shit’ between us was bigger than either of us, even bigger than prostate cancer was hard to swallow. “Are you scared?”

My father rubbed his hands together and then placed them in his lap, looked me in the eyes, and said, “No. I have God and faith that things will work out. I have a beautiful wife and the perfect daughter she gave me. I have a good life. I have no regrets.”

“I like to think that things work out…in the end,” I responded, tossing my Platinum American Express card on the table and grabbing my mobile phone. “Ready?”

**********

 The drive home from my father’s house seemed to take forever; too many thoughts and emotions clouded my mind, and I hadn’t drunk enough. I don’t know what I expected from it all. Our relationship hadn’t changed. How could it be when we never even spoke? I realized that some part of me still hoped to make my father proud, to earn his respect. Ironically, I had finally reached a place in my life where that could have been possible, but the old man was too demented to realize it. Worst of all, he still has no idea (or still doesn’t give a shit) about the wreckage he left behind after he discarded his first family for one that he felt he deserved. Part of me tried to convince myself that he didn’t know what he was saying, that senility (or maybe his cancer) had fucked with his brain, so he didn’t know what he was saying. That wasn’t it, though. His senility, his illness, owhatever it was had just made him honest, finally. No filter. No regrets.

I was a few streets away from home (but not far enough from the Roadhouse shit show) when Lisa called. “How did it go? Did you talk to him?” she eagerly inquired.

“It’s prostate cancer. He’s optimistic.” I remember hating her at that very moment for manipulating me into going and thinking how easy it was for her to orchestrate things from afar when I was the one that had to deal with the emotional shrapnel. “He says he’ll be fine.”

“Did he say anything else?” She hadn’t heard something she needed to hear.

I let out a long exhale and contemplated making her feel as bad as I did (at that moment) with a healthy dose of truth. “He’s thankful for his perfect daughters.”

I could hear her smiling through her tears.   

*Previously published by Cowboy Jamboree   

BIO: David Estringel is a Xicanx writer/poet with works published in literary publications like The Opiate, Literary Heist, Cephalorpress, DREICH, Sledgehammer Lit, Ethel, The Milk House, Beir Bua Journal, and Drunk Monkeys. His first collection of poetry and short fiction Indelible Fingerprints was published April 2019, followed Blood Honey and Cold Comfort House (2022), little punctures (2023), and Blind Turns in the Kitchen Sink (2023). David has also written six poetry chapbooks, Punctures, PeripherieS, Eating Pears on the Rooftop, Golden Calves, Sour Grapes, Blue, and Brujeria (coming soon from Anxiety Press). Connect with David on Twitter @The_Booky_Man and his website www.davidestringel.com.