Dad, on the other hand, had never quite recovered. He’d struggled with depression and sometimes with drinking a little too much.
Juliet worried about him. So she called him every night on the way home from work. He claimed it gave him peace of mind to know she got home safe, but she suspected it helped soothe his loneliness a little.
So, as she waited at the stoplight, she fished the tattered earbuds from the drink holder, plugged them into her smartphone, and called her dad.
***
“Hey, pumpkin.”
His voice always soothed her, even through the fuzzy reception. She used to joke with him that he had an announcer’s voice: smooth, calm, deep, but not intimidating.
“You should go into radio,” she would joke with him, “whatever that is.” And he’d laugh, the joke recycled five hundred times, still somehow funny to both of them.
After the long week she’d had, she was glad to hear his voice.
“Hi, Dad.”
“How was your night? Glad to be done with work for the week?”
“I’m not done. I picked up one of Kendall’s shifts. She’s got a date, which she arranged like ten minutes ago.”
“Oh yeah?” He chuckled. “Is this the one you said likes older guys?”
“Why, Dad? You want me to set you up?”
The sound on the other end fuzzed out for a moment. The reception on this end of town was always garbage. “That sounds like a bad idea.”
“Trust me, it is. The guy she’s dating is your age, funny enough. But it won’t last.”
“It never does,” he said. That quiet sadness crept into his voice, and Juliet felt her heart dip to hear it. He was thinking about Mom again. She decided to change the subject.
“Hey, speaking of bad decisions, I got asked out on a date. Sort of. This customer gave me a card. A physical card.”
“Very retro in this new digital age,” he said, and she could see the wry grin on his face. “Are you going to go?”
“I don’t know. I might. Kendall says I should because he’s a horror fan too.”
“Oh, I see how it is,” he teased. “I’m getting replaced.”
She grinned. “No one could ever replace you, Dad,” she said tenderly.
She met only silence as her Neon chugged into Culver Park, home to Donner Bay’s factories and warehouses. A moment later, she heard the beeps that indicated the call had dropped.
“Fuck,” she muttered.
***
Juliet drove the last five minutes to Sunshine Row without calling him back. This had happened dozens of times, and they both knew the routine.
She parked her Neon in front of her apartment – the whole complex was a converted motel, and between the battered yellow sign that bore the building’s name and the ratty vehicles parked out front, she often felt like she was living in the beginning of a horror movie herself. If one of the neighbors turned out to be a serial killer, she wouldn’t even have drawn a breath in surprise.
Locking and bolting the door, she was immediately disappointed in the muggy heat of the apartment. The air conditioning in Sunshine Row was even more theoretical than at her workplace. She flicked on the fan and stripped out of her clothes, peeling off her tank top and then squirming out of her shorts. The air from the fan felt good on her skin.