My mother died eight years ago, and for the first three, my father wouldn’t so much as look at another woman.
Then, at sixty-eight, he finally started dating again. And I was happy for him. I really was. After watching him move through those first years like a man walking underwater, I wanted him to have something. Company. A reason to put on a nice shirt.
I was happy for him right up until I noticed the pattern.
Six women in eighteen months. Every single first date at the same Italian restaurant across town. And every single woman gone afterward. No second date. No explanation. Most of them wouldn’t even return his calls.
At first I thought maybe he was just rusty. It had been decades since he’d dated anyone. Maybe he talked too much about Mom, or not enough, or maybe he was one of those men who’d gotten strange and particular living alone. I’d ask him how it went and he’d say, “Oh, it was nice. She was a lovely woman.” And then I’d never hear that name again.
When the seventh woman canceled her plans to see him a second time, I’d had enough.
I didn’t tell him what I was doing. I just got in my car one evening and drove across town to that restaurant myself, because I was going to find out what my father was doing to scare all these women off if it was the last thing I did.
The place was warm and dim and smelled like garlic and old wood. Strings of little lights hung across the ceiling. It was the kind of restaurant that hadn’t changed its menu or its wallpaper in thirty years and was proud of it.
I showed the waitress a photo of my dad on my phone.
She recognized him instantly. Her whole face softened.
“Oh,” she said. “Tom.”
“You’ve served him before?”
Something shifted in her expression. Careful, now. “Several times.”
“Then please,” I said. “Tell me. What does he do to these women? Every woman he brings here disappears afterward and I can’t figure out why, and he won’t tell me anything.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, gently, “Your father? Nothing.”
That wasn’t the answer I’d braced for. I’d been ready to hear that he was rude, or cheap, or that he broke down crying, or told inappropriate stories. Nothing wasn’t on my list.
She glanced back toward the kitchen, then lowered her voice.
“It’s what happens when they ask for the check.”
She set down the menus she’d been carrying and led me across the room to a corner booth, a little apart from everything else.
“Your father always sits here,” she said. “Same table. Same chair. Every time.”
Then she pointed at the wall behind the booth.
The whole wall was covered in framed photographs from the restaurant’s opening night, back in 1987. Dozens of people smiling under those same strings of lights, holding up glasses, frozen mid-laugh. A little museum of one good night from almost forty years ago.
And there, near the middle, was a photograph that didn’t match the rest. Newer frame. Dad had added it himself at some point, I could tell. In it, three young people stood together, impossibly young, grinning at whoever held the camera.
Dad was near the back, maybe thirty years old, with hair. Mom was beside him, and my chest went tight just seeing her that young, that alive.
And on Mom’s other side stood a third young woman.
Her face had been scratched almost completely away.
Not smudged. Not faded. Scratched. Someone had taken something sharp and dug it across her face over and over until there was almost nothing left but pale gouges in the photo paper.
My stomach turned over.
“Who is she?” I asked.
