My parents met the night my mother shaved her wrists. I can't say 'slashed' or 'cut' or anything that indicates sincerity. My mother was a serial suicide-attempter; but my father didn't know that when he found her wailing outside of Johnny's Burger Barn where he had pulled his rig in to get a quick sandwich before continuing on to the slaughter house in Enid with his load of Herefords. His version goes something like this: "I was on my way out with my sack of french fries and a cheeseburger when I heard the most pitiful sound coming from the side of the building. I thought somebody must have run over a cat and left it to die. I was of the mind to get the tire tool from under my seat and put the poor thing out of its misery when I saw your mother, her arms stuck out in front of her, her wrists turned outward as proof of her pain and I dropped my sack and ran to her."

        My father is an impulsive man. He is not inclined to think through a situation or reflect on anyone's intentions afterwards. He lives life that way to this day. A knee-jerk kind of guy. It is because of that impulse that I exist, for which I should be grateful and I am, most of the time. However, I did inherit my mother's melancholy that sometimes causes me to fantasize about my father walking on by, getting in his truck, taking those steers to their final destination as he munched on one of their distant cousins, forgetting all about the sounds of the wounded animal outside of Johnny's.

        My mother's version was a little different. "It was your father's greatest moment of chivalry, his most glowing hour. As I stood in that dark, rain-drenched parking lot, heartbroken by the worthless night manager who had taken advantage of my trusting nature, I was determined to end my pain by taking my life. My screams were not from the injury to my wrists, but from the cruel trickery of Fate that the potato peeler I had taken from the Burger Barn kitchen was too dull to do the job. Then, your father appeared in what looked like a halo. I thought he was an angel with the gleam of his rig lights outlining his frame as he ran, yes, literally galloped to my rescue. I fainted in his arms. When I awoke in the cab of his truck, with the smell of onions and grease all around us, like frankincense and myrrh, the mooing of cattle from the back, I couldn't help but ask if there was no room in the inn."

        My mother tended to be theatrical, which makes me skeptical of some of her details. But where the stories blend together, I believe therein lies the truth. I asked her once at this point in her story if she thought she had been kidnapped. After all, that's what I would think.

        "No. I knew this stranger was in some way sent to keep me from harming myself further. That, I was sure of. Besides, the truck was not moving and the neon lights of Johnny's were flashing before me, assuring me of where I was. I asked him to take me away from that place. I told him, briefly, that I had no one who cared for me anywhere and I couldn't stand to stay here one more day. If he left me there, I would complete the job I had begun with the potato peeler."

        My father says, "Your mother went on and on and on about the guy who ran the night shift at that burger place. She said he had promised she would be promoted to assistant manager, but instead, he promoted some cute blonde that he had hired less than two months before. I opened a couple of beers and handed your mom one and then she told me that she lived with a wicked uncle, a drunk, who took her money for rent while constantly threatening to throw her out. It was a sad story and I felt sorry for her, but I had to get those steers to Enid, so I offered her another beer and some french fries and told her I'd drop her off if she needed a ride someplace. She asked me where I was going. I told her Enid. She said, 'Could you drop me there? In Enid? I have a cousin who lives there. She might be able to help me out.' I fell for it and we took off down the road. I was young. I'd see through a story like that today."

        So he claims, but I have my doubts. My dad buys lotto tickets every week, mails in his publisher's clearing house entries, purchasing magazines he never reads because he thinks it increases his chances. He wears a St. Christopher medal, although he is not religious, only superstitious. At any rate, he drove my mother to Enid and when they arrived, she confessed she had no cousin, no friends, no acquaintances in the whole town and then with tears and more threats of suicide, she collapsed on his shoulder (her version), his lap, (his version) and I moved one step closer to creation.

        Their marriage, which transpired after my conception, lasted eighteen months. Because my father is the tenderhearted type, he continued to take care of my mother beyond the terms outlined by the judge. He wanted us to live in a decent house, which he purchased and made payments on, staying with us when he was in town, unless my mother had a friend present. On those occasions, he would take me with him to a movie and dinner and sometimes to a motel where we would swim in the pool and eat breakfast out the next morning before he deposited me back with my mother. Their relationship over the years evolved into a strange type of almost sibling-like connectiveness. My dad could be counted on to respond to all her suicidal phone calls late at night when some new devious man took advantage of her trusting nature. It was my mother's theme song.

        "Why?" I asked my dad as we sat together years later in a hospital waiting room. My mother was dying. She was strapped in a hospital bed with tubes in her arms and nose from a disease that loomed over her more and more each day until I was certain she was already buried under its shadow despite the shallow breaths and faint pulse monitored closely by the hospital staff and recorded on her hospital chart as evidence that she was still alive.

        "It's strange," my dad said. "I just never felt that I should desert her, even after you were grown. It was as though finding her that night at Johnny's Burger Barn was my mission and I never got a signal that my mission was complete. Not even now." My father paused as though the reality of my mother's passing was finally becoming real to him.

        "And Cathy doesn't resent her?" I asked him about my stepmother, whom I barely knew and rarely saw.

        "She resents the part she knows. But she doesn't know everything. She doesn't need to. Nobody has a right to know everything about somebody else's life, regardless how close they are."

        "Not even their own kids?" I asked, half-kidding.

        "Not even their own kids. Whatever you may think you know about your mother and me is only part of the story." He stood up and walked into my mother's room leaving me alone, on purpose, I felt. It was as though my father wanted me to know that he needed to be with my mother by himself, without their daughter witnessing every moment of their good-bye. I did not follow him in, but allowed myself to prepare mentally for my own letting go. My mother had threatened so many times to leave us that as it was finally happening, there was a sense of deja'vu draped over the entire experience. I accepted throughout the years that she couldn't help screaming, 'Wolf!' with a potato peeler and again, with a bottle of Sominex, and later, with her car running in the garage with less than a couple of gallons of gas, the garage door cracked and my father already called, eventually working her way up to an unloaded gun. I think it was the only way my mother knew to be assured that someone loved her.

        I dug my nails into my palms as my own act of self-destruction. It wasn't very theatrical and it didn't show me if anybody, anywhere cared, but the pain momentarily took precedence over my thoughts and stopped me from snowballing into a heap of tears that everyone, including my father, would misinterpret. I would wait to break until I was alone. Totally alone.

        Perhaps that is the main difference between my mother and myself. She continued to believe in miracles all her life, depending on white knights to show up in the nick of time with broad shoulders and tender hearts. She believed that love was to be used as a balm for a wounded heart, to soothe us from the torture we create for ourselves.

        I already am convinced that even if I could find my way to Johnny's Burger Barn and I stood there in the parking lot every night for a month, nobody would ever show up, silhouetted by divine or semi-truck lights, to rescue me from myself. I guess some women are predestined to be rescue-material, creating heroes out of ordinary tender-hearted, impulsive souls; others are not. I know which group I fall in.

        But that is something I will never tell anyone, especially not my father, my mother's hero. He could never thank her enough for bestowing such an honor on him, despite the fact that he couldn't live with that identity full-time. Of course, they were having too much fun in those roles to admit they were roles. That would have ruined everything. Without their make-believe, what would they have had, besides ordinary jobs, ordinary lovers, ordinary lives? They kept their game to themselves, a private affair, hidden away from their day-to-day lovers or spouses with whom they shared the less dramatic details of existence. When my mother was gone, my father sat beside me and cried. I put my arm around him and patted him tenderly, unable to grieve with him for our losses were so different.

        Later, when I called my mother's last companion to notify him that she had passed, I didn't mention that my father had been with her. Perhaps it was some small form of deception to allow him to believe that he was the only man in my mother's life at that time, but my father's role was so ethereal that the omission of his presence seemed sandwiched between honesty and dishonesty, with equal weight on either side. I thought of my father telling me that nobody needed to know every detail about another's life and I figured, maybe in this instance, he was right.

        I don't know what my father said when he went home to Cathy that night, if anything. She most likely would have misinterpreted his actions and I know my father didn't need the drama of having to defend himself. The facts were unalterable; but his motives and intent would forever dangle between them for future discussion. Even if he needed to talk about it, I imagine that he kept silent: one final heroic act.

        My mother is gone now, and my father calls me from time to time, checking in with his favorite girl, he says. He wants to make sure everything is okay. No problems? Okay. I sense he is always disappointed with my response, but I am cursed with self-reliance, an affliction my father doesn't know how to fix.

        I confess that I am unable to fully understand my parents' relationship. Most of the time, I don't understand my own relationships, falling in and out of other people's lives, wondering if I will ever see them again, or if I even want to. Constantly at a loss to define love, I continue trying to collect data that will outline that mindless emotion that surges and wanes unpredictably. What comes to me at these times is the memory of my father holding my mother's hand after she had been pronounced officially dead and the tubes were removed from her lifeless body. The strength of my father completely vanished in that hour. His tears, his silence, his head falling on my shoulder as though he were my child makes me want to believe that whatever began over thirty years ago, in the parking lot of Johnny's Burger Barn, must surely have been something akin to love.

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