Then Came You

We had lunch together in the place’s cafeteria, a loud, lowceilinged room that reminded me of a school, with posters on the walls (covered in AA slogans, instead of warnings about Stranger Danger or invitations to the Summer Reading Program), flimsy paper napkins and square cartons of milk. The food, too, seemed intended for children: mac and cheese served on segmented plastic trays; cheap metal spoons and forks, no knives. I’d chattered about my job, turning my pig of a boss into a charming character, telling my dad about the three meals a day they had delivered and leaving out the part about how we got free food because our corporate masters didn’t want us taking longer than twenty minutes for breakfast or lunch. I made much of the Friday-night happy hours, where the analysts would gather in an Irish pub around the corner from our office, a place so generic it could have been plucked from a mall in Minneapolis. In truth, these were grim affairs, marked by too many drinks and ill- advised hookups, and they rarely began before eleven p.m. because all of us worked so late.

“Proud of you,” my father muttered, forking noodles into his mouth. His hands shook as he scooted his tray closer. At twelve-thirty, a counselor wearing lots of turquoise jewelry stopped by the table. “Time to say goodbye now,” she announced. I tried as hard as I could not to look relieved as I walked out into the sunshine.

On the bus ride back to the Port Authority, I’d done my best to reassure myself that it would all work out. Willow Crest had the highest success rate of any place my father could have gone. Besides, he wasn’t a typical addict. He was intelligent; he had people who loved him. People who needed him. Me.

Kimmie sighed in her sleep. Her face was still flushed, her hair a tousled, fragrant mess. I put my hand on her shoulder, shivery with delight. Over our first months in the city, Kimmie and I had spent all of our free time together, reading New York magazine and picking out a restaurant we wanted to try or a play we wanted to see. I was in charge of transportation, using subway and bus maps to figure out the fastest and most economical route, while Kimmie scoured the Internet for coupons and discounts and last-minute tickets, doing such a good job of it that one day, I joked, the performers would pay us for attending their plays, and the waiters would leave tips on our table.

All through July, we’d traded pieces of our history. Kimmie’s parents, Korean immigrants who’d met in an English as a Second Language class in 1975, ran a dry-cleaning shop in Boston. They’d papered Kimmie’s bedroom walls with pictures of every Asian woman who’d succeeded in any field in America. “Michelle Kwan, Sandra Oh, Julie Chen, Margaret Cho, girl in my high school who went to Harvard,” Kimmie had recited as we’d walked to a bookstore in the West Village.

“Margaret Cho the comedian? Isn’t she kind of X-rated?”

“They don’t care. All they know is that she makes a lot of money.” Kimmie and her parents and her sister had lived in an apartment above the dry-cleaning shop that was always steamy and smelled like chemicals, but she’d never worked there. Her parents had decided early on that she’d never set foot in the family business, that she and her sister, Lisa, four years younger, were meant for better things. It had just taken them a while to determine which things those would be.

“We both had skating lessons,” Kimmie began, lifting one slim finger.

“How’d that work?”

She giggled, shaking her head, long black hair brushing her shoulders. “I used to ditch and go to the movies. Then — oh, let’s see. Special science enrichment classes, in case I turned out to be gifted in science…”

“Which you are,” I pointed out. Kimmie had been a Presidential Scholar and a Westinghouse Science finalist. After graduating from Princeton with highest honors, she’d enrolled at Columbia, where she planned on getting a master’s degree in biochemistry before heading south to Johns Hopkins for an MD/PhD.

She shrugged off my compliment. “Not as gifted as they thought I’d be.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Another shrug. “They were disappointed that I wasn’t more musical. That it didn’t come more naturally. My mother had been a violinist. Before they came here.” I knew, because she’d told me already that Lisa was a gifted cellist, a senior in high school currently deciding between Juilliard and Harvard. I knew, also, that Kimmie believed (correctly, I thought) that Lisa was their favorite, that even with a summa from Princeton and three more prestigious degrees to come, they still regarded Kimmie as a bit of a letdown. Nor had they been thrilled when she’d brought Chet home. He was Christian, and that was important to them, but they’d expected her to marry a Korean boy, preferably one whose parents they knew.

“What about you?” Kimmie asked me as we lay spooned against each other on her futon, with her air conditioner humming in the window.

“What about me?”

“Are your parents proud?”

I didn’t answer right away. My father had been proud, of course. He’d graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, the first in his family to go to college, the first not to work in a factory or on a farm. He’d been the one to fuel my dreams of the Ivy League, describing the schools, their history, their grandeur, the brilliant, world- changing graduates they’d produced. It was the photographs of Princeton that made up my mind — a girl, her long hair in a ponytail, perched on a window seat in a dorm room that had a fireplace. I was enchanted by everything I saw — her shiny hair, the dark wood of the window seat, the many-paned window, the fire crackling away.

My grades and test scores were solid, but I knew that it was my essay that had gotten me into Princeton. “The Addict’s Daughter,” I’d called it, and I’d told myself that only a handful of people would ever read it, and my father wouldn’t be one of them.

Parents aren’t supposed to have favorites, I’d written, and probably children shouldn’t, either, but my father and I have always shared a special bond. The first thing I can remember is the two of us reading together—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I’d read a page, he’d help me sound out the hard words, and then we’d go to the kitchen to make his coffee and my hot chocolate. My father taught English to eighth-graders. He loved being a teacher, and his students loved him, and I felt lucky to have as much of his time as I did.

When I was a freshman in high school, he was arrested for drunk driving after he ran a stop sign and smashed into a car carrying a woman and her young son. It came unexpectedly, at least from my perspective. Maybe there’d been signs, but at fourteen all I knew was that one day he was fine and the next day he was in the hospital, in detox, and then, a year later, he was in jail. One day he was a respected, beloved, award-winning teacher, and the next he was in the newspapers, a punch line, a cautionary tale, a joke.

Hospitalization and medicine and therapy gave him back some semblance of normal. . but then he got laid off, and lost his insurance, and began to drink again, and to substitute street drugs for the prescription medication, chasing the peace the meds had given him, that feeling of returning to himself. Now my father doesn’t work at all. He lives with a girlfriend, in Section 8 housing, his life a patchwork of stopgap measures and self- medication.

I’d closed the essay by explaining that I wanted to study public policy and political science, to change the laws so that nobody fell through a flawed system’s cracks again. That had been a lie. I liked the idea of working in government, but the truth was that I needed money to help him — to pay for rehab, or a deposit on an apartment, or whatever training he’d need to get his teaching certificate back. That meant majoring in economics instead of English or political science; it meant taking a junior analyst’s job instead of an entry-level position in an NGO or a think tank. Maybe someday, when I’d paid off my loans and my father was well again, I could do what I’d told those admissions offices I would — get a master’s in public policy, do some good in the world. But until then. . I sighed. On the futon, Kimmie snuggled against me, then kissed my cheek.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“My dad,” I said, with my eyes squeezed shut. “My job.” I could still picture the Steinman Cox recruiters: the man in a beautifully tailored navy suit and a woman whose shoes I’d seen at Saks and whose dress I recognized from Vogue. They’d talked about opportunities and advancement, about London and Paris and Japan. Their brochures were impeccable, their website, a beautiful enticement, filled with shots of attractive young people of many races and cultures talking enthusiastically about everything they’d learned and achieved. Of course, nobody had posted a picture of an overheated office with flickering fluorescent lights, or mentioned that I’d be working in a tiny cube, in close quarters with men who were always shouting, that the walls retained the acrid smell of body odor and fish from the sushi lunches. Nobody said that eighty-hour workweeks were common, and hundred-hour weeks not unheard of when you were working on an active deal, or that your travel would take you to places like Akron and Duluth, where you’d be responsible for things as mundane as hotel and dinner reservations and making sure the Town Cars arrived on time. . and finding the closest strip club, should your boss be the