After work, my dad used to lie for hours in the tub. We were forbidden to ask why.
Channel: Scary Stories
Date: 2023-04-12

After work, my dad used to lie for hours in the tub. We were forbidden to ask why.

If you lived in Oakland in the 90s, you probably heard of the Grind, even if it was just in whispers. Outside of straight up selling drugs, it was the best way to make a steady income for people like my dad, who’d done time when I was a baby and couldn’t get most jobs.

Ever since he’d gotten out, Dad had tried to stay on the straight and narrow, shunning old friends, keeping liquor out of the house. Work had always been a challenge though. Most places where he could get a job only paid the minimum, and half of those tried to short his hours.

We’d been going through a particularly rough patch (nothing in the fridge, scary letters from the power company and the landlord starting to pile up) when an old prison buddy got Dad a trial day at the Grind.

My mom was against it. She’d heard too many stories. The way guys came out of work bleary-eyed and quiet. Most of them started drinking the minute they got home and didn’t stop until it was time to clock in the next day.

My dad shrugged. If there was one thing he was good at, it was taking punishment. He’d been doing it his whole life for free. Might as well get paid for it. And the money was crazy, $25 an hour to start, going up to almost double that for the best people.

I still remember his first day there. I was in sixth grade, and I spent the whole day staring out the window in a daze, wondering what Dad was up to? Would he come back home the same guy he’d always been, or would he be like the ones in the rumors, the walking ghosts? Anxiety ate at my guts. I couldn’t eat at lunch. Just before school let out, I ran to the bathroom and puked my guts out.

At home, my mom fussed over mac and cheese–my dad’s favorite. She must have opened the oven door a dozen times. My younger sister, May, just ran around the house singing TLC songs, totally oblivious.

Then, around 7:15, we heard keys jangling in the front door and my dad walked in. He was wearing a big smile, and his arms were full of gifts. He had hit the mall on the way home. He handed May hers first. It was one of the *Now! That’s What I Call Music* compilation CDs, which was really a gift to all of us. She’d been playing her old one non-stop for the last six months, and the whole household had memorized every song.

Next, he plucked a shoebox out of the bottom of a bag and handed it to me. I opened it to reveal a pair of Air Jordans–real ones. It took me a whole minute to realize they were actually mine, the right size and everything. It didn’t even occur to me to put them on my feet until my dad suggested it, a big smile on his face.

“Darius, can we really afford all this?” my mother asked.

“You won’t believe it, but they gave me a signing bonus,” my dad said. “You ever hear of something like that? A *signing bonus?* Things are going to be different for us now.”

And he was right. Life got better a little at a time. Soon, there were no more letters from the landlord, no threatening messages from lenders on the answering machine. More days then not, I’d get home from school to smell meat cooking on the stovetop, my mother happily humming some old Motown song as she cooked.

Sometimes, though, at night, I’d hear my parents talking through the thin wall that separated our bedrooms. I’d catch these little snippets of conversations that set me on edge.

*“...it’s okay, baby. I can take anything they dish out. They’re not allowed to touch me. Big bonus for me if they do. I just tune it all out. Pretend I’m Ali out there, dodging punches with a smile on my face. The bosses love the way I smile. Say they’ve never seen anything like me…”*

Yet despite my father’s reassurances, I knew the job got to him sometimes. There were days when he’d show up at the door looking glassy eyed and head right to the bath without much more than a quick hello, and my mom would tell me and May to play quietly while my dad soaked in there.

And other times, my dad would *seem* fine and then fly off the handle at the littlest thing. Like in seventh grade, my report card came back almost all A’s with just a single B in algebra. And then suddenly my dad spiked his coffee cup on the kitchen floor, shattering shards everywhere, and screamed that he wasn’t working this hard to see how only son pulls B’s in math, and did I want to end up working at the Grind like him?

Tearfully, I promised I’d never bring home another B again, and I kept my word.

Maybe things would have been fine if my mom hadn’t gotten sick. I was in ninth grade when she found a lump on her left breast. She caught it early, thank god, before it spread much. It was treatable, but expensive.

That night, I heard my parents talking through the wall again, their voices hushed and serious.

*“We’ll find a way to make it work,” my mother said. “We’ll cut back on other stuff. Fewer new clothes. Run the AC a little less.”*

*“It’s not enough,” my dad said. “You know that. Level Two isn’t as b