Roberto Ontiveros
Roberto Ontiveros
Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, and journalist. Some of his work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Baffler, AGNI and the Believer. His debut collection, The Fight for Space, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and his second book, Assisted Living, was published by Corona/Samizdat Press, which will release two novels, Secret Animals and The Order of the Alibi, in a single volume.
The Vow For Now
As my father embarked on the last affair he would ever have, he took to calling me his boy on the phone. Dad had always just called me “son” but now I was his “boy.”
I had been living with Jena on and off for seven years. Dad had cancer for five of those years. It was Christmas time and I was thinking of popping the question, like I had, for the last three winters, been thinking about popping the question, only this year I was starting to feel this kind of last chance anxiety to get married, as if everything – my chance at even being convincing enough say “I do” before a crowd that had every reason to suspect I did not – was curling up and blackening off to fall away for a solstice surprise. And maybe this frozen panic was because my dad was sick and maybe it was because I was at the end of my early thirties. Jena wasn’t begging me to go legal with our love. So maybe it was also precisely because matrimony was a kind of non-issue to her that it was starting to weigh on me like an alien pressure, with rules and strictures I did not get and was helpless before. Whatever the pressure, it was really just my pressure. Jena was cool with how we were, and my dad didn’t care if I tied the knot and leapt on toward legacy, and my mom was all about caring for my dad right now; his infidelities in the end mattered nothing, and she had stopped even hinting about wanting grand babies.
Everyone was just keeping quiet about Dad’s cheating. If you don’t speak ill of the dead then you really shut your trap about the obviously dying. But nobody had to tell me anything because I knew the signs that Dad was stepping out. Dad was wearing his younger man clothes, which he had put aside in the closet for me, but tweed and turtlenecks and bark brown Florsheim shoes were never my thing. Dad, opting to never get on chemo, was growing his hair out. Dad was in his very late fifties but his hair was still blacker than mine. Mom always dyed her hair so I never knew until she told me that there was nothing unusual going on with the grey at my temples, that the streaks of sophistication were a familial trait.
Dad called at 7 p.m. when I was about to go on a walk with Jena. Jena and I did that back then, before our marriage and our eventual divorce, we walked and we talked and imagined living in a new town getting to know new people, “couple friends”-type people and thinking over and thinking aloud as we walked about who we still knew that might qualify for this, because we were dropping friends fast in the spinning out of our maturity, and we needed to think of property in terms of nearby schools and chums in terms of networking or godparent material, to think as if we already had a kid, because we really wanted a kid with each other even more than we wanted to even be married.
“How’s my boy?” Dad asked me all over happy but forgivable because he was sick and dying you could really forgive him everything at this point because the days of bad dad bitching were over.
“Your boy? Who? The one you never acknowledge? The one you left in Germany when you were stationed over there for three grand years?” I always joked with him like this because I wasn’t really raised with a lot of love talk, not from Dad, so when it starts up now at the end, I get odd feelings and have to mock out a deflection, plus Dad used to tell me about a girl named Mara that he claimed he had impregnated right before he headed back to the states and met my mom, right before he made her his wife and then made me and then made his way to becoming manager of a big deal carpet distribution warehouse before making his way through two decades of steady unemployment, which was never so bad since my mom started bringing in steady cash by running a flower shop that was supposed to only be her part-time dream job until Dad dropped out of the workforce and stressing out over Valentine’s day sales just became her reality.
“Here, your mother wants to talk to you.”
But Mom sounded like she didn’t really want to talk. “Hi, son. What’s going on with you and Jena?” Mom asked.
“Hi nothing. Jena and I are coming up on a new year of the same old. What’s happening with you guys?”
“Dad wanted to call and he gave me the phone so I could tell you that we might be splitting up,” Mom said.
Parents break up. I don’t know any that have stayed together but I was thirty-three and this seemed insane to me and all wrong and maybe even brought on by an in-your-face dementia coddled by pain meds. “Dad’s sick Mom. What the hell could he have done that was so bad?”
“Your father wants the break and it’s more than a break. Your father wants to end it. He has met someone, someone that came in at the flower shop, this insane woman who takes pills and they even share the pills now, pills to help him sleep, and she can have him I said, so now he is packing,” Mom explained.
“Let me talk to him,” I said, all calm like a genius son who could be counted on to be the steady guy before his father’s expiration. But when Dad got on I just screamed: “Are you fucking crazy old man? You have stage four and there is no five and you are on dialysis and here I am about to ask Jena to be my one and only forever and you are pulling this!”
His silence sounded like shame. But then he spoke. “I haven’t seen Tilla since your mother found out about us. I thought I was okay to just not see her but she came by the store the other day and … we’re starting to miss each other.”
I shook my head in angry juts and Jena came into the living room to show her concern. She probably thought Dad had died, but then I said, “Dad, look, you don’t have to leave her, you don’t have to leave Mom, just shut the hell up about it. Haven’t you ever cheated before? I know you have so just shut the hell up about it, okay? Do you get me? Just shut the hell up!”
Jena heard this and made a quizzed out face wherein she expressed the comic hope that I was exaggerating for effect or marshaling heavy metaphor to act like the big man now that my old man was on the way out.
He didn’t say anything but he did hand the phone back to my mother who explained to me that Dad had walked off to go outside. She was looking at him as he got into the car and closed the door but did not drive, just sat there. She cried a little. I convinced her that the meds he was on were making Dad loopy and epiphanic.
“Okay, he is coming back in. I need to open the door for him,” Mom said.
“Okay, so call me back.”
Jena and I walked. I walked faster than her as if to get the walk all over with, the winter mouth steam rising up like clouds for cartoon words I would not offer the unreal world I found myself animating. She didn’t ask me anything and when we got back in. I just walked off on my own to get to the gas station to buy beer and be alone and come back and drink in silence for an hour before turning on the TV.
I asked Jena to marry me a week later. I had no ring. I had no magic words. We had been living together on and off for seven years and if we weren’t going to get married now then we should separate and I did not want to separate.
Everyone thought it was about goddamn time. Her rockabilly cousins played our wedding song. Her retired real estate pushing pop got a quickie internet license to marry us out by this gazebo where we used to spend our Saturday nights when we were hitting our first love, staring out at the night with a telescope and having our mid-20’s love time with a basket of grapes and cheese and bread and wine and chocolate, and then going over to her place to make out and act like characters on Friends or Dawson’s Creek , or any of those shows that I made fun of my contemporaries for watching but now streamed and watched all alone to rekindle and marvel at what existed in my periphery during my young manhood. My boss was the only person from work that showed. My mother made the flower arrangements. Jena’s niece was the flower girl.
My dad brought a date who stayed in her car the whole time, staring out at the ceremony and smiling as we took our vows.
When I was dancing with Jena to a two-step treatment of Mack the Knife, my dad tapped my shoulder to cut in and I smiled and bowed out and walked over to my mother who was sitting by herself at the table with a bottle of water, her hand over a sequin handbag that matched her mauve dress and matched the maudlin flowers that made seasonal sense with a wedding that took place in early December.
I kissed Mom on the cheek and walked over to the car where my father’s girlfriend sat parked, patient and smiling. She was younger than Dad and younger than my mom but maybe just ten years older than me. I tapped on the glass and she looked up with still wide eyes and a dipsy diplomatic smile and lowered the car window.
“Can I get you anything? You must be hungry? Would you like something to drink?” I asked and no one listening would have been able to tell if I was kidding or being kind or cruel to this uninvited and inebriated character who was not quite crashing my nuptials. I just sounded like a waiter working at my own wedding.
Tilla raised an open bottle of wine which I had the distinct feeling she had planned on offering as a gift and took a swing.
“You’re not driving him home,” I said. “My mom is. There are a dozen hands to shake at the end of this and Mom is driving him home.”
The woman shook her head.
“He must have looked something like you,” she said.
“Ha. No, and really no. I look like my mom, and my mom’s dad, and even her dad’s mom – I’ve seen the black and whites – but I do not look like my dad.”
“You have the same eyes and you have the same way you stand,” my father’s girlfriend said, adding, “I never saw your father when he was not sick.”
Tilla put out her hand as if to touch my face but then let her fingers fall over her eyes and spoke. “Your father…he can’t ever disappoint me, you know. I can’t feel sorry for him the way your mother does. The man I know has always been sick.”
I looked over at my bride and my father. The dance was over and there were people clapping, and some mic feedback which meant there was maybe going to be a toast or an announcement. I started walking closer and closer to the dance deck where the music picked up again and had become faster, and more people were dancing, so I could not see through the clapping and howls of joy what was going on with my bride. But I started to walk over to the floor like a man who knew the score, because this was a wedding and wedding guests want to see the wedding couple, and maybe Jena was getting ready to toss the bouquet my mother had made which meant that soon after I was going to have to throw her garter belt out towards a crowd of men that would all be making a big comic show to pretend they did not want to make a grab for it, but in the end some man would.