Edward Adrift

daddy’s nineteen seventy-two model,” she tells me—and thus doesn’t even have a CD player, much less an adaptor that will play songs from my bitchin’ iPhone. As we work our way through Denver, Sheila Renfro sings along with Merle Haggard on an old-time countrymusic station. Sheila Renfro seemingly has good taste in country music. She prefers the era before Garth Brooks ruined it.
    “Why do you keep such an old vehicle?” I ask her. “If you had an adaptor, we could be listening to R.E.M. right now.”
    “It’s my daddy’s. I don’t have him anymore, because he’s in the ground with my mother. So I have his Suburban. Besides, I like this music.”
    This seems to be a plausible answer, so I don’t intend to ask another question. Sheila Renfro looks in the rearview mirror and makes eye contact with me.
    “My daddy bought this before he and Mom started thinking about a family,” she says. “Daddy always wanted a big family, with lots of kids. That’s why they built the motel. It was the kind of place where you could raise a family and bring them into a business.”
    She stops talking. I want to ask her questions, but I get the sense that she’s not done, so I wait.
    “But Mom found out that she couldn’t have kids—”
    “But—”
    “At least, that’s what the doctors told her. When she got pregnant with me, I guess it surprised everyone. When I was born, though, she nearly bled to death, and the doctors were saying, ‘OK, you got your miracle baby, so now, no more.’”
    “You’re a miracle baby!” I say. This makes me indescribably happy.
    “I guess. Daddy just couldn’t bear to part with the Suburban, even though it was way more truck than we ever needed. It’s like it reminded him of what he dreamed about but couldn’t do.”
    “He said that?”
    “Well, no, not like that. But the way he’d talk about things, I’d kind of know. You know, Edward, I wasn’t very popular in school.I didn’t have a lot of friends, or any, sometimes. That’s hard on a kid. My daddy was my best friend.”
    Sheila Renfro’s story makes me as sad as it does happy. First, it
is
a sad story. Even if she was a miracle baby, her mother and father clearly wanted more children. It’s also sad on a personal level. Sheila Renfro had a relationship with her father while he was alive that I’ve been forced to try to find with mine since he’s been dead. I know for a fact that once my parents found out that there was something different about me—I’m speaking here of my developmental disorder and my obsessive-compulsive tendencies—they decided that they didn’t want any more children. This is not conjecture. My father told me this during the height of the “Garth Brooks incident,” when he and I were fighting all the time. He was drunk; he had been drinking all day. He came into my bedroom after one of our battles and said, “You’re such a fucking idiot, boy. I wish you’d never been born so you wouldn’t fuck everything up.”
    That devastated me. First, I’m not a fucking idiot. I have a developmental disorder, but I’m not stupid. Second, it upset my mother terribly. It’s the first and only time I ever saw her really stand up to my father. She told him that he was a cruel and awful man and that he should apologize to me. He never did, at least not while he was alive. Four days later he bought the house where I now live, and I was made to leave my parents’ home and begin seeing Dr. Buckley. I was thirty-one years old, so maybe it was time. I think my parents wanted to keep me close to protect me; that’s what Dr. Buckley said when she diagnosed me. But as my condition worsened, my father came to resent me (and I came to dislike him). I was certainly happier on Clark Avenue than I was in my parents’ house, but it was hard to forget what my father said to me in those last days at his house. The truth is, I’ve neverforgotten it. From time to time, my mother tried to explain my father’s behavior when he was mean to me, telling me that he was struggling at his job on the county commission and that he was under a lot of stress. I think she gave him too much credit, and to be fair, my mother would agree with that. After my father died, and after she saw the way he controlled me through Jay L. Lamb, she made a break with him. She scarcely talks about him anymore.
    I don’t like remembering that story about my father, and I don’t like telling it. I’ve never told anyone except Dr.