Author: coffeeplease
Rating: YTEEN (references to “sleeping with”)
Category: AU, little angsty, little sappy
Spoiler Info: Everything up to Holy Night, and then it
veers into AU
Disclaimer: WB, NBC, John Wells, Aaron Sorkin....
owners. I just lease and try not to stain the carpet.
Lawsuits don’t look good on me.
E-mail address for feedback: jamhandy1@yahoo.com
Archiving permission: Sure, just tell me first
Notes: Feedback is a girl’s best friend, not diamonds.
Little vignette from an AU universe.
I never really knew my father. He brought a whole new
meaning to the word “absentee.” I know it was his job.
It wasn’t his fault. He would have been there if he
could. At least, that’s what he told me on the
telephone.
Guess it was kind of cool having a submarine officer
as a father. All the kids at school thought it was a
“Hunt for Red October” type-thing. When he came home,
he was always in uniform, shoes polished, shirt
starched. He’d kneel down and give me a hug, but he
was a complete stranger to me.
Not a complete stranger, let me rephrase that. He was
there for some things. Not my birth; they had been
called to the Persian Gulf. President Bartlet himself
called the sub to tell my father of my arrival. The
President lied and said that C.J. had been at my
mother’s side. But she wasn’t. My dad told me so.
He was there for my kindergarten graduation. Things
were very tense by then. My parents had tried to keep
me ignorant. Kids know more than they let on and I was
a perceptive youngster. My dad took me to the park a
lot during that time. He tried very hard to gloss over
certain things, to make things easier for me. It must
have been hard for him. He was part of the reason
there were so many problems.
But you can’t block out the fights that happen ten
feet away from your bedroom. My mother would beg my
father to keep his voice down. But I could hear his
slightly whiny tones as he went off about “Josh this”
and “Josh that.”
“Like you don’t have little flings all over the
globe,” my mother retorted.
“Josh isn’t a fling, Donna.” My father in no way
denied his infidelities and my mother didn’t deny
anything about Josh. They changed the subject so they
could argue technicalities, but it all boiled down to
the same thing.
I was told much later. My parents only married because
she was pregnant and he thought it was the right
things to do. He was big on that; the right thing, the
honorable thing. He’d try to teach me those values in
the brief times we saw each other. Some of it sunk in.
But I was far more interested in Mets scores.
My mother would never speak ill of my father. He was a
good man, she said after the divorce. It wasn’t
anyone’s fault. Of course, my father blamed someone,
that someone’s name being Josh Lyman. He would
badmouth Josh when he saw me, which was hardly ever
after the divorce. It killed me. It hurt much worse
than the actual divorce.
No child wants to hear his father talk trash about his
dad.
Dad was around all the time. He was there when I was
born. He held me as I took my first steps; there are
pictures. Pictures that my father would brandish as
proof that my dad was trying to steal away his family.
What steal? We were never really my father’s to begin
with.
I did call Josh “Daddy” mistakenly as a small child.
His eyes would become unbearably sad when I did. “I
wish,” he’d whisper and pull me in for a hug. He
didn’t need to wish, he was Daddy in every way that
counted. Read me bedtime stories. Taught me how to
throw a ball.
It made my father very angry and my young childhood
was punctured with whispered conversations and heated
fights. The worst was my fourth birthday, the last
year Bartlet was in office. My parents had not yet
divorced. My father was trying to be my dad, but I saw
him as a stranger. I couldn’t help it.
We were in the mural room opening presents. A Big Bird
stuffed animal from C.J. Books from Toby. My dad gave
me a mountain of presents, including a baseball glove,
a tricycle and a tiny backpack. Everyone had on big
smiles for me, but it was tense. Toby, C.J., Leo...
they all kept trading glances between my father and my
dad. When Abbey took a picture of me, my mother and my
dad and whispered, because she couldn’t help it, “the
happy family”, something inside my father snapped. My
father asked to speak to my dad outside.
Years later, Toby filled me in on some of the details.
He went out with them, acting as my dad’s wingman. My
father accused my dad of sleeping with his wife. My
dad had no recourse for that. He couldn’t deny it. He
could only say that he was taking care of his family.
“You mean my family,” my father yelled.
“No,” my dad said softy. “I mean my family.”
My father hit him. My dad refused to hit him back.
Toby pulled them apart. He told me that Josh couldn’t
hit my father back because my father was right. Josh
was sleeping with his wife and stealing his family.
But Josh was also not about to stop. He wasn’t going
anywhere. My father, however, left the next morning
for the next port of call and seethed on a nuclear sub
somewhere in the Pacific.
I wonder why it took so long for my parents to
divorce. I guess what happened is that my mother would
file and my father would refuse to sign the papers. Or
he would plead with her. Give her statistics on how
two-parent families were much better for children than
single mothers.
My mother was single all of two days after the divorce
finally went through. We packed up our little
apartment and moved to a much bigger townhouse, where
I already had a bedroom. My dad’s place. My father
would never go and see me there. I always had to meet
him somewhere else.
My mother married my dad and gave me a brother and a
sister. I never refer to them as “half-brother” or
“half-sister.” Eventually, we moved to a big house in
the suburbs. Life from then on was the normal family
life, with little ups and downs. Every so often, the
call would come in from the nuclear sub and I would be
forced by my mother and dad to talk to someone I
really didn’t know at all.