Daddy Left Me Alone With God

Excerpt

I sat on the edge of a bed in a cheap Los Angeles hotel, two thousand seven hundred miles away from my home in Philadelphia, armed with the uneasy realization that in a couple of hours my life might be changed forever.

And what was my biggest concern?

How did I look and what should I wear.

Shallow wench.

Disgusted with myself, I got up and paced back and forth all agitated until finally settling on a black t-shirt, tight faded jeans, and stiletto heeled boots.

Perfect. From a few feet away, I could pass for thirty.

Make that thirty-five.

Oh, alright. Thirty-seven.

In candlelight.

Hey, the venue would be dark so I would be fine.

Yeah, right. Like I really believed that. And fine was not a word in my vocabulary.

I was in California because my eighteen-year-old daughter, Gracie, and seventeen-year-old son, Dylan, were bassist and drummer respectively for The Phil Klein Rock and Roll School All-Stars. Through a genius business move on Phil’s part, twelve of his best kids were invited to play on The Jagged Edge Tour with major rock acts on a twenty-one day jaunt across America. It took a lengthy and heated discussion with my husband where he vacillated between asking “Are you insane?” to begrudgingly admitting that I had a point before eventually, half-heartedly agreeing to the idea of me tagging along as their chaperone .

“I hope you know what you are doing, Annie,” he sighed. “Gracie isn’t exactly going to be thrilled by this news.”

Well, my husband called that one right. My daughter’s boyfriend, Michael, was also part of Phil’s All-Star team and she considered the tour a glorified romantic tryst until I announced my plans. Like her dad, she tried desperately to talk me out of it, but got nowhere. I might have imagined myself to be a cool and collected hipster, but in truth I was a neurotic who worried non-stop about her children from the minute they were born. This was not only going to be their first lengthy time away from home, the conditions were extenuating. While the headliners on the Jagged Edge Tour would be boarding private planes or limos to get from destination to destination, Rock School would be roughing it on the road by bus. To add to the fun, the routing was all skewed so there would be a few nights where we’d have no hotel or showers, at the mercy of one sole Porta-Potty.

But, it wasn’t just fear that fueled my decision. There was another reason for me to be on that tour…one much more complex and diabolical.
I checked myself out in the mirror again and applied a thick layer of lipstick, decided the result resembled a botched collagen injection, then wiped it all off with a tissue which I tossed in hoop shot fashion toward the trashcan It ended up on the carpet, nowhere close. I rolled my eyes and bent down to pick it up, praying I wouldn’t throw my back out.

Middle age really sucked. I had a hard time even saying those words let alone realizing they referred to me.

My husband wasn’t a bit concerned with getting older. He laughingly made jokes about how his receding hairline and love of fried foods had morphed him into Homer Simpson. Whatever. He still looked good to me.
I just didn’t know if I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

We were drifting apart and I couldn’t even pinpoint a specific reason—on some days, I blamed it on the fact that circumstances had forced us into an early marriage and we grew up in different directions; on other days I was positive I was a stark raving menopausal lunatic and whatever problems we had were in my head only, all my fault, and would end once my raging hormones quieted down. But, there were other things, minor ripples in our relationship, which gave me pause. It made me sad that he was a brilliant musician who no longer played his guitar, preferring to sit mindlessly in front of the television instead. It was painful to listen to him rage against anything modern, technology or otherwise, while I not only embraced new trends, I was under the delusional impression that I remained an innovator.

Yeah, an innovator who needed bifocals to read a menu and a gynecologist who gave her an evil smirk while he scribbled out a prescription for a colonoscopy when he looked at her date of birth.

Okay, I could deal with the physical stuff. The hardest thing to take was whenever I attempted to have a conversation with my kids about anything even remotely interesting, they acted as if I were invisible.

How did that happen? I was part of the baby boomer generation who were never supposed to grow old, wasn’t I?

No, I was part of the generation who hoped they died before they got old. Only what a huge crock that turned out to be. I neither wanted to die nor grow old, but there was nothing I could do to stop either.

Well, I wouldn’t get any older if I died, but still.

I took a deep breath and stared at the travel clock ticking on the nightstand. Six PM. Sound check was almost over and Gracie and Dylan would be wondering where I was. They probably wanted to grab a light dinner before the show. Okay then. It was time to face the music.

The irony of that phrase was not lost on me and I laughed, or should I say cackled, out loud.

Oh, I was a monster. I deserved to be given a life sentence chained to a chair and forced to watch the twenty-four hour Martha Stewart Show network.

Because when I told my family I was on the tour to chaperone, it wasn’t quite the whole story, which is where the complex and diabolical stuff came in.

Headlining Jagged Edge was the great love of my life, the almost laughably stereotypical man I let get away.

I would be seeing him that night for the first time in almost thirty years. My kids were one of his opening acts, which he had no way of knowing because they were billed as the Phil Klein Rock School All-Stars. Even if that weren’t the case, they had unrecognizable surnames so there would be no way in hell he’d be able to put two and two together.

I trembled at the thought of his initial reaction. Would he be thrilled or simply shocked? He probably thought I dropped off the face of the earth in 1977.

I didn’t want to think about the possibility that he might not remember me at all.