The Breakup Doctor by Phoebe Fox

talk to my father than my mom. I watched every expression that flitted across my mother’s face for a clue to her reaction, tailoring my conversation according to her frown, a nod, the light of approval in her eyes. With my father I simply sat and let my mouth follow wherever my mind wandered, talking to Daddy’s back while he murmured just enough noises to let me know he was listening.
    I found myself rattling off everything that had happened—the reaction to the column, my bulging roster of new clients, and the radio show. I even idly mentioned Stu’s idea to create an office out of the guest areas of my house.
    â€œHey! I’m proud of you!” my dad jumped in. “I tell everyone my girl knows which end of a drill is up. How ’bout I come over there and lend a hand till we get the job done?”
    I thought about it. Maybe Dad and I could do it on the cheap, and with an office in my home I’d be back in practice in no time. Plus I’d be able to keep an eye on Dad meanwhile. It was actually a really workable solution.
    â€œReally? You wouldn’t mind?” I ran my palm along a cabinet door awaiting staining. It was silky-smooth from hundreds of patient passes with a sander. “That would be fantastic, Dad. You just reignited my entire career.”
    He made a dismissive noise and gave a partial shrug without disturbing the geometric precision of his brush line. “It’s nothing. My girl’s an entrepreneur—a parent’s proud of something like that.”
    The words hung in the air between us, and I wondered if my dad was thinking the same thing I was—that only one parent was around to be proud.
    â€œI’m going to start cooking, Dad,” I said, getting up off the stool. “I’ll call you in time to wash up.”
    He’d tuned me out before I was even out of the garage, utterly absorbed again in his project for my mother.
    As I started putting dinner together in their gutted wreck of a kitchen, for just a shiver of a second I sympathized with my mom. Dad was a craftsman—when he did a job, he not only did it right; he did it artistically. Like the butter-smooth cabinet I’d run my hand over in the garage, everything he ever did, he did meticulously. When he finished a job, it looked as though it had cost a fortune. But he’d been promising her the refinished cabinets for months, and meanwhile my mom had been living in a kitchen that looked like a hurricane had swirled through.
    I stopped in the middle of rubbing fresh rosemary underneath the skin of the chicken, frozen with a thought. Did that have something to do with her departure? In every way Dad’s philosophy was, “It takes as long as it takes to get it right.” Mom was more of the “Get it done” school of thought. If Dad was a Renaissance man, Mom was the Industrial Revolution.
    The thing was, while I could appreciate my dad’s thoroughness and care with his projects, I was a lot more like my mom. Now that I lived in a half-finished renovation “before” of my own, I could understand how the disarray took a toll on your psyche. Living in a state of “almost there” and “not quite done” and “still in progress” made you feel like your whole life was on hold, waiting...always waiting to be “finished.”
    I pulled my hand out, realizing it was just resting between the clammy chicken meat and its pebbly skin. I grimaced and turned to the sink to wash the stickiness away, my momentary empathy for my mother swirling down the drain with the fatty bits of chicken.

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    Over dinner I worked hard to keep the conversation lively, but my mother was as fully present in her absence as she ever was sitting at her end of the table. My dad’s eyes drifted to her empty chair too often despite his pasted-on smile, and looked like swallowing was an effort. I knew that my laughter was too sharp, too loud, like