Look Closer

“My father cheated on my mother,” I told you. “It destroyed her.”

That surprised you. You knew my father for a short time as your boss, not your immediate supervisor but the big boss, the name on the door, and you probably thought he was a nice enough guy. Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought he was an asshole. Either way, you didn’t know him know him.

Apparently, I didn’t, either. I thought I did. I wasn’t as close to him as I was to Mom. But I thought I knew him. I didn’t see until later how insecure he was, because he was in the same profession, generally speaking, as my mother, but she was smarter, she was better at it, she was more successful.

She taught constitutional law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country, the University of Chicago. And Dad was a scrapping, lowbrow attorney taking slip-and-falls and DUIs, whatever he could grab.

What he didn’t understand was that Mom didn’t care about that. She didn’t measure people that way. But Dad did. Probably a male thing.

Then Dad hit it big. When that kid he grew up with in Edison Park was working on a construction site, and the boom of a rig he was operating contacted a live overhead electrical power line, sending deadly streaks of electricity through his body and leaving him horribly scarred and disfigured, Dad got the case. A thirty-million-dollar settlement, a third for the Law Offices of Theodore Dobias, meaning nearly ten million in Dad’s pocket.

I thought that would validate him, make him feel like he was in the big leagues now, the equal or roughly the equal to Mom.

But apparently, he needed more. Now he was Mr. Big-Time, a big-shot lawyer with expensive suits and steak dinners and a Porsche, and he had to have a piece of arm candy on his side, too.

I confronted him, more than once, but Dad didn’t stop. He was in love, he said. And there were things that a young man like me might not be able to appreciate, which was code for, he still wanted to get his rocks off and it was hard with a woman bound to a wheelchair. Yeah, I was eighteen, not eight. I knew what he meant. But there were some other things that a boy like me could appreciate, like committing yourself to someone forever, even through something as tragic as her stroke, ESPECIALLY through something as tragic as her stroke.

Dad blew all the money on his newfound swanky lifestyle, making ridiculously bad investments that bombed, spending lavishly on his mistress. And then the money was gone.