Read Online We Live in Water by Jess Walter - Free Book Online Page B

deeply mired in one-star hassles (traffic snarls and Internet outages) that she was incapable of responding.
    Another possibility arose on the last day of November. I had just called in another phony customer complaint to Il Pattio (“The chicken breast was woefully undercooked; it had all the symptoms of salmonella.”) and driven back to the house I now shared with my dad. That’s when I found him on the kitchen floor, slumped in a corner, his artificial leg at an odd angle, fake foot still flat on the floor.
    He was in what doctors called a diabetic coma—an obvious result of his nonstop drinking. “You need to take better care of him,” the ER nurse said. But it wasn’t until I filled out the insurance paperwork that I understood exactly how I’d failed my dad. I copied his date of birth from his driver’s license: August 28, 1947. I knew his birthday, naturally, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.
    My father was a Virgo.
    IN THEIR glee to portray me as a bad employee, the suits failed to mention that on the very day my dad was fighting for his life in a hospital bed, I still reported to work. Of course, it was also that day, November 30, that my section editor responded to a complaint from the features syndicate, investigated, and called me into her office.
    In the frenzy of meetings and recriminations that followed, I somehow got one last altered horoscope into the paper. Again, I don’t mean to portray myself as some kind of primitive, moon-worshipping kook, but the next day, Virgos across Portland read a heartfelt plea: “ Five stars: you’ll get better. I’m sorry. ”
    DAD PULLED out of his hypoglycemic coma and returned home to live dryly, me at his side. I have purged his little house of alcohol. Dad drinks a lot of tomato juice now. Since I’m not working, we play game after game of cribbage, so much that I have begun to dream of myself as one of those pegs, making my way up and down the little board. I recently shared this dream with my court-ordered therapist. She wondered aloud if the dream had to do with my father’s peg leg. So I told Dad about my dream and he said that he sometimes dreams his missing leg is living in a trailer in Livingston, Montana. I’m thinking of asking him to come to counseling with me.
    And Tanya? Even after the Oregonian ran its “Public Apology to Our Readers,” full of righteous puffery about how I “acted maliciously and recklessly,” how I “broke the sacred trust between a newspaper and its readers,” I hoped Tanya would at least glean the depth of my feelings for her. But I never heard a word. My probation officer and therapist have insisted, rightly I suppose, that I leave Tanya alone, but this afternoon I went to the store to get more tomato juice for Dad and I found myself down the block from her building again.
    This time, however, it was different. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d begun to worry that my little prank had somehow caused her to get sick. And I take it as a positive sign that I didn’t want that for her. I really didn’t. I sat in my car down the street and gazed up to our third-floor corner window, just hoping to get a glimpse of her. It’s winter now and the early night sky was bruised and dusky. Our old condo was dark. It crossed my mind that maybe she had moved, and I have to say, I was okay with that. I had just reached down to start my car when I saw them walking up the sidewalk, a block from the condo. Tanya looked not only healthy, but beautiful. Happy. The big, dumb, sensitive, cheating chef was holding her hand. And I was happy for her. I really was. She laughed, and above them a streetlight winked at me and slowly came on.
    There was a line in the newspaper’s apology that stunned me, describing what I’d done as “a kind of public stalking.” I shook when I read that. I suppose it’s what Tanya thinks of me too. Maybe everyone. That I’m crazy. And maybe I am.
    But if you really want my side of the story,