I didn’t throw them away. I started to. I tossed the bottle of champagne and glasses into an empty garbage bag but, instead of heading to the garbage bin, I took it to my room and placed it inside my closet. I didn’t want to forget. I wanted to look at it every day to remind myself what and who my father was.
The day I found that bottle, the day I realized my father was never going to stop cheating—thatwas the day that Ted Dobias died.
The night he was found with a knife in his stomach, floating in his pool, was just the moment he stopped breathing.
27
Monday, September 12, 2022
You knew something was wrong tonight. I’d tried to play it off. I greeted you the same way I always did, clutching you in my arms, kissing you in that way we kiss, lifting you off your feet.
But afterward, you could tell. You prodded me. And I’ve made this vow, Lauren, as I’ve said before on these pages, that I will not lie to you, I will not hide from you. So I told you.
“My father cheated on my mother,” I told you. “It destroyed her.”
That surprised you. You knew my father for a short time as your boss, not your immediate supervisor but the big boss, the name on the door, and you probably thought he was a nice enough guy. Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought he was an asshole. Either way, you didn’tknowhim know him.
Apparently, I didn’t, either. I thought I did. I wasn’t as close to him as I was to Mom. But I thought I knew him. I didn’t see until later how insecure he was, because he was in the same profession, generally speaking, as my mother, but she was smarter, she was better at it, she was more successful.
She taught constitutional law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country, the University of Chicago. And Dad was a scrapping, lowbrow attorney taking slip-and-falls and DUIs, whatever he could grab.
What he didn’t understand was that Mom didn’t care about that. She didn’t measure people that way. But Dad did. Probably a male thing.
Then Dad hit it big. When that kid he grew up with in Edison Park was working on a construction site, and the boom of a rig he was operating contacted a live overhead electrical power line, sending deadly streaks of electricity through his body and leaving him horribly scarred and disfigured, Dad got the case. A thirty-million-dollar settlement, a third for the Law Offices of Theodore Dobias, meaning nearly ten million in Dad’s pocket.
I thought that would validate him, make him feel like he was in the big leagues now, the equal or roughly the equal to Mom.
But apparently, he needed more. Now he was Mr. Big-Time, a big-shot lawyer with expensive suits and steak dinners and a Porsche, and he had to have a piece of arm candy on his side, too.
I confronted him, more than once, but Dad didn’t stop. He was in love, he said. And there were things that a young man like me might not be able to appreciate, which was code for, he still wanted to get his rocks off and it was hard with a woman bound to a wheelchair. Yeah, I was eighteen, not eight. I knew what he meant. But there were some other things that a boy like mecouldappreciate, likecommitting yourself to someone forever, even through something as tragic as her stroke, ESPECIALLY through something as tragic as her stroke.
Dad blew all the money on his newfound swanky lifestyle, making ridiculously bad investments that bombed, spending lavishly on his mistress. And then the money was gone.
Mom was home, requiring extensive care, and Dad was without money to pay for a caregiver.
After the money was gone, Mom learned the truth. Dad confessed to her. She wasn’t the same after her stroke, but there was enough of her left for me to see how much it crushed her to know that her husband had strayed from her.
And I’ll never know this for certain, because my mother was far too proud a woman to ever say it, but I think she knew that I knew, too, and never told her. I can’t even fathom the humiliation she must have felt, the utter devastation.
My mother killed herself because she had nothing left of the life she thought she’d had. She was married to a man she no longer recognized, who no longer loved her.
And now... what am I doing?
I’m cheating on my wife.
I have become the man I despise.
28
Christian
I don’t need to know much about Vicky’s husband, Simon. I probably don’t need to know anything other than he’s loaded, and his wife is going to take his money and give it to me. But a little due diligence never hurts.
I didn’t expect this.
Born and raised in Grace Park. Check. Childhood, nothing of interest. Went to Hilltop Elementary, Grace Park Middle School, Grace Consolidated High School. Valedictorian, okay, and apparently quite the cross-country and track star. He finished second in state his junior year in cross-country and broke the school’s record for the two-mile in track. Good for Simon.
But this is more interesting. Simon graduated Grace Consolidated High School in May of 2003. But he didn’t graduate from the University of Chicago undergrad until May of 2010.