In high school John
Lucky and Tony Premo effortlessly established their reputations as assholes. When
they weren’t drunk or stoned, they drove like idiots, shop-lifted at Walmart and
menaced their girlfriends. Lucky was pretty sure the only reason they graduated
was that their teachers couldn’t stand to have them around anymore.
His daughter,
sixteen-year-old Serena Lucky, had no idea just how big an asshole he had been.
And he intended to keep it that way. Because even though she wasn’t any more of
a star pupil than he had been, she was a good girl--gentle and sweet, the kind
of girl he and Pro would have tormented in high school.
On top of that,
Lucky figured that, in spite of the ways he had fucked up and the ways his family
had fucked him up, he’d done okay. He’d gone to community college and become an
X-ray technician. He’d married MaryRose, who got pregnant and didn’t tell him until
it was too late. They stayed together till Serena was seven. Eventually, he
even became a pretty good father.
The first few
years after the divorce he saw Serena only when he wanted to and on his terms.
He’d take her to movies so they wouldn’t have to talk. Or they’d watch TV. For
a while he dated somebody with a daughter the same age. The two girls would
play together, leaving Lucky and his girlfriend free of parenting
responsibilities for a few hours.
But when Serena
was ten, MaryRose re-married. She told Lucky ‘joint custody’ had to start meaning
something now. He really was supposed
to take Serena half-time.
He explained to
MaryRose that he’d never wanted to be a father, wasn’t a good father, that he’d
fight her in court.
MaryRose didn’t
care. She told him he’d have to step up to the plate.
He
would have to give up the high life, she said. Good-bye parties. Good-bye, girls.
What she didn’t know was that the parties were few and the girls--well, mostly the
girls were on stage at a strip club so there was little hope of one of them ever
waking him with a morning blow job or bringing him a plate of scrambled eggs in
bed.
Sure,
he could probably have bought a blowjob. But he didn’t have the money or the
heart for it. As for breakfast, you got good value at Friendly’s.
Once Serena was
living with him more-or-less half-time, he realized that you got good value at
Friendly’s for dinner, too. Kid’s meals. They were cheap and came with an ice
cream sundae at the end. He’d never need to learn to cook.
This was at the
beginning of real ‘joint custody,’ when he was looking for simple solutions.
Over time he
discovered that fatherhood was not an exact science. Given his high school
science grades, this might have been good news. Unfortunately, fatherhood was
more like English class where the only thing you could count on was being both
bored and confused at the same time.
