A Wild Surmise

The Last Breakup

214 The Last Breakup Maybe if she hadn’t dyed her hair purple and if she had gone to class when I dropped her off each day, then maybe she wouldn’t have gotten a heroin habit and completely crashed your car. If she hadn’t gone to jail and if you hadn’t had to call your ex-husband to meet you at the lock-up, and if I had been the one in family therapy with you at the hospital instead of him those three months of weekly sessions, then maybe you would have seen her talk to me the way she talked in the car on the way to school, her hair glossy as a grackle, back-combed on the top, nape shaved, a perfectly crafted punked-out geisha teen. If you had seen her talk to me then you would have known I was her family, and not like the one your mother had in mind when she said “you need a man to take care of you.” If you didn’t take that advice so to heart, then you could have heard your daughter talk to me about me moving in with you, 215 and if she hadn’t painted her bedroom black and ruined the apartment so that your lease was broken and you had to move, maybe you wouldn’t have said she had to live with her dad and his so-called bitch who smoked dope all day. If she didn’t find heroin then maybe she wouldn’t have felt superior to that stoner step-mom and had to run away again because there was no home with you to go to. If she had had a home maybe she wouldn’t have needed a motorcycle to make you mad at her some more and you find my defense of her tedious, and if I would have been a man I would have told you to “calm down” and you would have believed me. Instead you said you had to find a man and be normal again and you wanted me to make that all right, but by then I was so bereft, as if my chest had been unbuttoned in a blizzard, I couldn’t say that it was fine for you to leave me, 216 to believe that admonition of that mother of yours whose boyfriend was “hit” by the mob. If you had just let me attend family counseling and if you had heard your daughter talk to me, I think we had a home to make. I did. ...