Free The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg

until now, he had been able to say that to her his entire life, and whether she
     agreed or not, he was going to take that action. Now the dynamic had changed. He needed
     her—what did he need her for, exactly? He needed her so that he could stay connected
     to his family. He needed her to speak well of him to Benny, so that he could see his
     grandchildren again. And, even though he shouldn’t have to explain himself to anyone,
     even though he was the father and she was the child and she should just listen to
     him, he needed to know she didn’t hate him so that he could sleep at night. Because
     lately he had been taking an Ambien or two before bedtime, and even sometimes mixing
     it with scotch, and who knew what would be next? For a while he blamed his insomnia
     on his new bedding. The sheets weren’t soft, the mattress too stiff. He was running
     out of things to blame it on, and he could not, he would not, blame it on himself.
    They met for dinner, at a middling Thai restaurant near the train station, where his
     daughter, a thin girl (maybe too thin for her own good after a tubby childhood), a
     moody girl, a smart girl, began to rattle off his failures.
    “She is dying , literally killing herself, and you have just abandoned her as if your life together,
     and her life in general, is of no consequence.”
    She had her mother’s eyes, he noticed for the millionth time, black little balls of
     fury. Seeing the familiar, seeing her eyes, it had touched him; it had been sixty-plus
     days since he had seen anyone he was related to.
    “What about my life?” he said. He resisted pounding his fist on the table, though
     he felt as if some sort of extra punctuation was required to make his point, and a
     nice, solid physical gesture sometimes seemed right. Once he had punched a hole in
     the wall of the garage after an argument with Edie. But that was years ago, when he
     still fought with her, when she could still incite him to give a shit about winning.
     “Doesn’t my life have value? Don’t I deserve to be happy?”
    “Of course you deserve to be happy,” she said; and he thought maybe she might be softening,
     but it was hard to tell with her. “We all deserve to be happy.” Was that almost a
     smile? But then it was gone. “This is life, though, and—I can’t even believe I have
     to say this to you, because you are the father and I am the child and I feel like
     you should know how this works.” She seemed nauseated. She practically gagged, then
     restrained herself. “You deserve to be happy, yes. But life is not always easy! And
     when the going gets tough and the chips are down—I know you do not need to hear all
     these clichés to get the point—you need to stand up for the people in your life, and
     that especially includes the woman you’ve been married to for forty years. She’s your
     wife, Dad! Your wife!”
    He had never had dinner with his daughter before, he suddenly realized. Not one-on-one.
     She had her tête-à-têtes with her mother every few months or so. But it would never
     have occurred to him before this moment to pick up the phone and call her and ask
     her out to dinner. (Did he even call her? He wasn’t sure. It seemed like it had been
     a lifetime of his wife making the calls and then handing the phone to him at the tail
     end of the conversation, he making a few gruff comments about his job, she pretending
     to care, the two of them forgetting about their exchange the instant it was over.
     His wife would let him know when there was something he should be worried about.)
     He supposed this was it, for the rest of his life. Dinner in a series of dingy but
     serviceable ethnic restaurants, beneath a giant framed print of a waterfall cascading
     into a beach, the bottom of the photo stained slightly by some sort of red sauce.
    “Here’s the question, Dad, and this is the biggie,” she said. She ran her fingers
     up her sinewy arms, stroking a thin but solid blue