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payments he can’t meet. It’s less important to stay current with
them, since there’s nothing they can attach if he doesn’t, but staying current
with the retirement home is key. If he falls too far behind he’ll be asked to
leave, and his only option then will be a Medicare facility, which wouldn’t
have the wide green lawns, nice artwork, and afternoon teas he has now. I
don’t care about any of that, Dar. I’d be happy in just a little room. As long
as it’s clean. And has the Golf Channel . I’ve come to enjoy the Golf
Channel quite a bit.
    “What kind
of loser asks an old man for money?” asks Miranda.
    “He didn’t
ask. My father offered.”
     “I should
get his number.” This is from Janice, the group’s most hardcore sufferer. Her
husband sleeps with any woman who will have him, and apparently many will. He
always returns, and she always takes him back.
    “What does
he say when you ask him to stop?” the woman in green wants to know.
    “Nothing.”
    Because
you never asked him to stop. You can’t even bring yourself to remind him that
he owes you money for the retirement home bill.
    “Sounds
like my daughter,” says Ralph. “Just looks away and pretends not to hear.”
    Nods of
sympathy all around.
    Janice’s
cell phone rings. She grabs it from her battered vinyl handbag, stares at the
caller’s number, then silences it. No one asks if it’s her husband. Everyone
knows it is. He calls with an excuse, a lie, a story, to say he’s working late.
All eyes are on her now. Everyone feels her pain. As she returns the phone to
her bag you see that the laces of her athletic shoes are mismatched. One is
silver, the other white.
    Leonard
concludes by asking everyone to reflect on the limited ability to control
another person. Living with destructive behavior can turn us into control
freaks, he says. To regain your balance, you’ll have to find a way to accept
what you can and cannot change.
    This is
where you’re way ahead. You’ve known forever that there’s no changing your
father. Who he is was determined years before you were even born.
     
    ***
     
    Your mother always blamed
him on the war. Your father was an ordinary person with an extraordinary
ability to recognize complex patterns. This was not a skill he knew he
possessed before a military analyst discovered it. How the discovery was made
you’re not exactly sure. Some aptitude test, probably, which quickly eliminated
the possibility of active combat and moved him right into code-breaking. After
the war, rather than make a full-time career in military intelligence, he
became a professor of history. His time was divided between known events and
secret ones. How he reconciled these two worlds you don’t know, except by what
he said and what he didn’t. He was open about his life in the university, winning
grants, beating out colleagues for promotion, but on the military life he
continued to lead when called upon he was, by necessity, absolutely silent.
    The
balance he struck didn’t work for your mother. She needed all of him, not part,
and left after twenty years of marriage.
    She was
soon replaced with a second wife who had no interest at all in your father’s
secret world. You were replaced with a stepdaughter—Leslie. You grew up, got
married, lived your life. You had regular contact with your father, cordial and
impersonal correspondence, brief well-managed visits. You always wanted more.
There was never enough real interest in who you were, as if your father could
have been sitting across from anyone, instead of his only child. How that hurt!
How hard to keep that hurt secret—your own secret—your own dual life.
    Not long
ago the second wife died. Your father paid you another visit. Although it had
only been about a year since you’d seen him, you thought how much older he’d
become, how frail. For a moment your heart went out to him, the lonely widower.
You prepared a nice dinner, and got a bottle of Johnny Walker Red,