Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner Page A

overhead, and I could see a sprinkling of white flakes—dandruff, or dried mousse—at her hairline. “All I know is that there’s been an accident.”
    “What...” My mouth felt frozen. I wished she had caught me and Tricia; that would have been a million times better than this. “What happened?”
    I remembered the way she rolled her lips over each other, her lipstick making a faint smacking sound. Later, I’d found out that my father’d had his midterm performance review the previousafternoon and gone to a bar directly after. How, at closing time, the bartender had tried to take his keys away and my father had refused. How he’d driven his little VW Rabbit through a stop sign and hit a car with a young woman behind the wheel and her three-year-old in the backseat. How both of them, mother and child, were in the hospital, both of them expected to make a full recovery, although the toddler had been touch-and-go at first. How my father had been drunk at the time of the accident, with a blood alcohol level almost double the legal limit, and how he was in the hospital and under arrest. The police, I learned later, had come by the house first thing in the morning; they’d brought my mother to see him and she’d left without leaving a note.
    I thought a lot about it later: why Mrs. Carasick hadn’t been kinder; whether I’d misremembered; or if she’d actually been gloating when she’d given me the news. Years later, I’d imagine looking up her address, knocking on her door, and standing there with my hair loose over my shoulders and telling her what a bitch she’d been, that I was a fourteen-year-old, a girl who had no idea that her father had had a drinking problem.
    Afterward, I could see the signs—the way he’d always had a beer as soon as he walked through the door after school, the wine with dinner, the tumbler full of whiskey and ice by his hand when he’d grade papers; the way he’d go out to play poker Friday nights and, how on Saturday mornings, my mother would make me and Greg talk in whispers and walk barefoot. Shh, my mother would tell us, shooing us into the kitchen, away from the closed bedroom door. Your dad’s had a hard week.
    The weekend after I’d met Jared Baker of the Princeton Fertility Clinic, I made my monthly trip home. I left at four, after my last class on Friday, stopping at the Wawa, the convenience store at the edge of campus where students could buy cheap hot dogs and hoagies after a night of drinking. I filled my thermoswith hot coffee and bought a ticket for the Dinky, the little train that ran from campus to Princeton Junction. At Princeton Junction I’d catch a New Jersey Transit train to Philadelphia. In Philly, I’d walk from Suburban Station to the bus terminal and buy a bottle of water and a roast pork sandwich at the Reading Terminal Market, standing in line with rough-handed construction workers and puffy-faced nurses on their way to work, and catch the Greyhound home.
    When I got to Pittsburgh early the next morning, my mother was waiting for me at the station, the sounds of NPR filling the car. NPR was my father’s station—my mother favored country music and AM call-in shows. All those years later, after his hospitalization, his trips through detox and rehab, his trial for driving under the influence and attempted vehicular manslaughter and the six months he’d eventually spent in jail, she still listened to his radio stations, still kept one of his coats in the closet and cooked his favorite things for dinner, as if, someday, he’d walk back through the door, the same man she’d fallen in love with.
    It would never happen. My father had lived at home briefly after he’d been paroled. Then the drinking had started again. My mother had given him a version of the speech it was rumored Laura Bush once delivered to her not-yet-presidential husband—“It’s me or Jack Daniel’s”—and kicked him out. My father had rented a studio apartment and, once that