A Job Changed Everything - CNF #142

I'm eight years old once more, standing in our kitchen doorway at six o'clock in the morning, watching my father put coffee in the same chipped coffee mug he'd used since I could remember.

Except that's not the way it is. He wasn't drinking coffee at the time. He was drinking beer. Coors Light, to be precise. I can still see the silver cans lined up on the counter like little soldiers. So why do I remember coffee?

Maybe it's because that is what came next. The coffee, I mean. When he started waking up early for work rather than crashing onto the couch with his mouth wide open, snoring like a broken radiator. When he started setting his alarm at 5:30 AM and actually getting up when it rang, instead of throwing it around the room and having Mom "turn that goddamn thing off."

I think it was a Tuesday that I first realized. Or maybe a Wednesday. Certainly a school day because I remember being scared of being late again. I went down expecting the usual mess; Mom frantically packing my lunch while Dad slept it off somewhere, the kitchen reeking of stale cigarette smoke.

But there he was. At the kitchen table, dressed to the nines in his khakis and button-down shirt and his hair combed, drinking coffee out of that same cracked mug. He looked up as I entered, and seemed alert and awake, very unusual. Like someone had flicked the switch and turned the lights on behind his eyes.

"Hey, kid," he said to me, and his voice was different too; Not slurred or rough with sleep and hangover. Just ordinary. Like other people's fathers.

I must have stared at him for a minute before Mom came out from the living room, and she was staring too. Like we'd seen a ghost, except the ghost was just my father, surprisingly sober at 6:30 in the morning.

"Dad?" I called out, as though it was a question.

"Yeah?"

"Are you sick?"

He laughed. "No, I'm okay. I got a job, remember? I told you about it last week."

Had he told me? Maybe. I'd tuned out his promises by then. There'd been so many jobs he was going to get, so many fresh starts, so many times he was going to "turn things around." I'd gotten used to letting his words flow past me like background music.

But this wasn't the same. He was in actual work boots and his shirt was tucked in. He'd also shaved.

"I clock in at seven," he said, draining his coffee. "Have to be on time the first day."

Mom was in the doorway, grasping a dish towel as if she'd lost sight of its purpose. I saw her weighing whether to believe what her eyes told her. We'd been betrayed before. So many times.

"I'll scramble you some eggs," she said at last, but her voice was guarded.

"Eaten already," he said, getting up and rinsing his mug in the sink. The sink where beer bottles with no one left to drink from resided. "Toast and orange juice."

He kissed the top of my head as he left the house, and I caught a whiff of him; aftershave, naturally. Old Spice, I'd guess. When did I last smell something on him besides cigarettes and liquor? I couldn't remember.

"See you tonight," he said to Mom, and she nodded but I could see she was holding her breath. So was I.

That first week, I was holding off, waiting for the other shoe to drop. For him to stumble home drunk again, or not come home at all. For the yelling to start up again, for Mom to resume weeping into her coffee cup. But day by day, he came back home at 5:30, tired but sober.

I remember one evening, I suppose it was a week or so into it, I was doing homework at the kitchen table when he sat down across from me. He didn't say anything for a while, just sat there as I struggled with long division.

"You know," he said eventually, "I wasn't always like that."

I looked up from my math. "Like what?"

"The way I was. Before." He was picking at a loose thread on his work shirt. "I used to be better."

I didn't know what to respond to that. I never had any idea that he was any different from the way he was. As long as I could remember, he'd been the man who made promises he was unable to keep, who made every dinner at my family house a potential minefield.

"I'm sorry," he said to me, and his voice was so deep that I barely heard it. "For everything. For frightening you and your mom in your own house."

Were we frightened? I guess we were. I'd become so used to sneaking around that I'd forgotten what it felt like to be simply present in a room with him in a normal way.

"It's okay," I told him, but even while I did, I knew it wasn't. Not really. There are some things that you can't just say sorry for.

He nodded like he knew that too. "I know it's not okay. But I'm trying to do better now."

And the thing is, he was. He really was. Week after week, month after month. He just kept coming back. Kept getting up in the morning, kept walking in the door sober.

But I didn't believe it. Not completely. Even now, 14 years later, half of me still waits for him to fall back in. Waits for the call that he's fallen into his old habit again, that it was all just a longer swindle than usual.

He never did lapse, though. Never went back to the liquor. Never went back to the man who scared us. He just. changed. Quietly. Without so much as a word of explanation aside from "I got a job."

I think that's the one thing I still can't wrap my head around. How easy it was, in the end. How there was no rock bottom, no intervention, no dramatic moment. Just a job. Just the everyday human need to be somewhere, at some time, to be needed, to count.

I still don't know whether or not I ever actually forgave him and I still don't know whether or not I should have. I do know that the man who raised me from age eight onward was a whole different person from the man who came first.

Even if it occurs more gradually than it needs to. Even if it comes too late for some things to be undone. Even if we never quite succeed in believing it possible. I believe that what the vast majority of people need is the chance to become different and better.