They buried her father at noon, at five she found his journals, and in the time it took her to read one-and-a-half pages, the world turned upside down; he thought she was “a failure.”

Every child, no matter how old, wants to know their father loves them and Tessa Curzio – thirty-six, writer, ex-rocker, spiritual seeker, and third daughter in a family of eight complicated people – is no exception. But just as her twitchy life was finally getting settled, and the hope to know her enigmatic father moved within reach, the one-two punch of his death and posthumous denunciation proves an existential knockout.

She tries to “just let it go,” as her sisters suggest, but the weight of hurt and confusion cracks her resolve. First to go is the good man in her life who loves her but can’t fathom her crisis. Next, work loses its luster. From there, friendships strain, bad behavior ensues, new men entreat, and family drama spikes, all leading to her little-known aunt, a nun and therapist, who strong-arms Tessa onto a journey of discovery and reinvention.

As journeys go it’s not always pretty or particularly wise, but somewhere along the way truth is found – good, solid truth that allows Tessa to embrace not only a more authentic view of herself, but of the flawed and ultimately loving man who was her father, opening her heart, once again, to the hope of solid ground and love, sweet love.

AFTER THE SUCKER PUNCH (87,335 words, literary/commercial fiction), explores the universal theme of father/daughter relationships through the politics of family, faith, cults, creativity, new love and old, and the struggle to define oneself against the inexplicable perceptions of a deceased parent. Told with both humor and drama, it’s a story wrapped in contemporary culture but with a very classic heart.

My writing credentials include one screenplay (To Cross the Rubicon) produced earlier in my career, and two others awarded by the Hollywood Gateway Screenwriting Competition (The Last Woman on Earth; Gina Dreams); another (The Theory of Almost Everything) was just awarded as a Top-35 finalist in the 2012 Final Draft Big Break Contest. I write a monthly column for the award-winning Northern California newspaper, The Ferndale Enterprise, (column reprints can be found here); dispense with “sass and sensibility” on my blog, Rock+Paper+Music, cover politics and current events as a writer/editor at Addicting Info, and have an opinion column at The Huffington Post.com/Lorraine-Devon-Wilke; I additionally appear as a frequent guest on HuffPost Live. I’m currently working on a second novel, as well as developing a non-fiction project on the topic of brain injury. For further details, feel free to stop by my site at www.lorrainedevonwilke.com.

AFTER THE SUCKER PUNCH

First three chapters:

One

      One is obligated by moral duty to love one’s child. One is not obligated to like them. A conundrum when it comes to my fourth, my third daughter, Teresa – or Tessa, as she insists we call her now.

            Recently I searched through my journals of the past several years looking for an entry about her but could find nothing. Perhaps that’s not so strange; she has been an enigma to me since she finished high school. As I look back, it seems her senior year was the pinnacle of her life…from that point on little has happened to bear out this great promise.

      Convinced of her own abilities, which do seem apparent or, at the very least, measurable, she decided to try for a job in the movies, TV or perhaps the recording business out in Hollywood. She insisted that if after two years she had gotten nowhere she would try something else. Well, it’s been more than three years and she has nothing to show for it but some amateur acting classes and self-produced performances. In September she will be twenty-six.

      So what’s the problem with Teresa? For sure, I don’t know. She is a great disappointment. Not simply because she’s failed up to now, but that endowed with so much talent she hasn’t employed it for anything useful –- and she doesn’t show signs of improving.

   January 15, 2002 – the journal of Leo Curzio

#

            On a day when all she wanted to do was mourn the father so often longed for and buried just hours before, Tessa Curzio sat on the bed in which she was surely conceived and felt posthumously sucker punched. She looked down at the eleven-year-old journal splayed across her lap and realized it truly was a Pandora’s box come to life, a dubious gift from a dead man who had little to say in life but clearly plenty upon departure. She snapped it shut and threw it across the room with enough force to shatter her mother’s purple vanity lamp.

A clock that followed to the floor doggedly kept ticking time. 5:17 pm.

It was the beginning of the next uncomfortable phase of her life.

Two

            Because no tantrum could go unnoticed in this house, the door flew open and oldest sister Michaela, tight chignon and Talbot classics all in place, swept in with a frown and a large tray of hors d’oeuvres. Only four years apart, she and Tessa were opposite in so many critical ways they struggled to be even marginal friends, a status they’d admirably put aside to “rise above” during this challenging weekend. Noting the purple shards on the Oriental she’d vacuumed earlier that morning, Michaela stifled a retort only when she caught the look on Tessa’s face.

“Oh, honey, I know, I know,” she whispered, miscalculating the motive behind the lamp’s demise. She left her tray on the dresser and came to Tessa with sympathetic arms. “It’s so hard to lose him…I know.”

With Michaela patting her rigid shoulder for what seemed far too long without comment from somebody, Tessa finally took a deep breath. “Um, Mickie…thanks, but I think I just need to be alone for a while, okay?”

Michaela, relieved, pulled quickly away. “Absolutely, take your time. Just do me a favor and clean up the lamp before you come down. Mom doesn’t need anything else to be upset about today.” Rising from the bed, her eyes caught sight of the box of journals Tessa had pulled out from underneath; the tone shift was sharp and immediate. “Wow, really? Well, don’t let her know you’re already rifling through Dad’s stuff. She’d actually like to look through everything first, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Tessa shot her a withering glare. “It’s just some…books.” A swift jerk of her ankle kicked the box back under the bed. Michaela picked up her tray and, with an icy shot back, swept out as she’d swept in.

Tessa had found the box of mildewed date books at the behest of second eldest sister, Suzanna, a sibling of a totally different color and an ass-kicker whom Tessa adored. Suzanna was the agent provocateur of the family, a role sparked decades earlier by their parents’ enflamed response to her ill-conceived, if accidental, premarital pregnancy (a blessed event that jumped her wedding by less than a month). The word “whore” was invoked, her divorce a year later was “God’s retribution,” and Suzanna was never able to forgive them for all of it, even years later when they offered awkward apologies about dogma and overreaction. Revenge was exacted by her phenomenal success in business, far exceeding that of her father’s, and by raising a lovely boy who was well adjusted despite the early fetal month of bastardhood.

Now, in her self-assigned mission to keep the family legacy honest, she made it her business to dispel rose-colored revisionism wherever it cropped up. And last night, exasperated by an uncharacteristic bout of Daddy-idealizing on Tessa’s part, she’d suggested her little sister find the box of journals he so copiously recorded and read at least one of them, “particularly 2002” with its insights about Tessa specifically. “You need some perspective,” Suzanna had ominously declared.

So Tessa dutifully looked and regretfully found the box under the bed. Apparently there were other boxes somewhere, no one knew where, but this one held at least nine or ten years’ worth of minutia spilled onto the pages of yearly date books given to employees of the bookbinding company where Leo had spent the bulk of his adult working life. Date books meant for appointments and note keeping but utilized by Leo for his journalistic ramblings over the last forty-five years. As instructed, she found 2002, which now lay on the floor amidst dust and broken glass.

Suddenly exhausted, Tessa curled up in the perfumed sleep habitat of parents who now seemed intangible, realizing, after many years of wondering, that she finally knew what her father thought of her. Interesting how a dead man could so easily suck breath from a living solar plexus, like the mythical cat and the unsuspecting baby.

A quick rap on the door snapped her reverie. She sat up, fluffed her hair and trilled, “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Tess. What are you doing? Got someone in there with you?” Ronnie, Tessa’s younger brother and closest sibling, was already slurring as he cracked the door, his face goofy with a grin. “Are you having sex on Mom and Dad’s bed to assuage your fear of death?”

Tessa couldn’t help but smile. There was just something about Ronnie. “Go away, idiot.”

“Okay, sis, I got it…you’re processing your grief by rolling in Dad’s sheets. Gross but strangely titillating.”

“Ronnie!”

“Hey, who am I to judge? Don’t take too long, whatever you’re doing. Mom’s tilting and Michaela’s about to snap. It could get ugly.”

As the door clicked shut and he stumbled back down the hall, Tessa stifled her annoyance at the second interruption of the hour, realizing, mostly, that she didn’t want to go back down there…down into the swirling eddy of sobbing, dramatic folk seeping slowly into the small Chicago brownstone to mourn a man who now felt like an imperfect stranger. The rising cacophony was unavoidable, however, signaling the arrival of aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, siblings, surely a priest or two. No choice but to postpone internal combustion for a more solitary time.

Straightening the bed she was perversely pleased to see mascara streaked across her father’s starched pillowcase. That would have annoyed him. She went to the vanity and sat down. Examining herself in the mirror she noted the smeared eye-makeup lent a sort of punky irreverence that seemed to fit her new assignation as Failed Daughter. She left it.

She picked up the family portrait that held center stage in this private corner of her mother’s world. It had always been one of her favorites, all of them lined up in order: oldest brother Duncan on the left, then Michaela, Suzanna, Tessa, Ronnie and baby of the family, Bella. Mother Audrey stood on one end, arm around eighteen-year-old Duncan, her chin raised in Joan Crawfordian aplomb with eyes sharp and a smile as wide as the sky. Father Leo stood on the other end, Bella leaning slightly into his side, his handsome face set in a cool, inscrutable smile. Michaela and Suzanna were tall, mature young women gazing calmly at the camera, while Tessa and Ronnie appeared to be giggling at some private joke. It was a perfect image, an exact distillation of her family, and she couldn’t help but smile as she put it back under the amber lights.

She retrieved the assaulted journal from the floor, opened the pages once more to Leo’s crinkly handwriting: “She is a great disappointment. Not simply because she’s failed up to now, but that endowed with so much talent she hasn’t used it for anything useful.”

At least he said she had talent.

Three

            Chaos reigned downstairs. Children, large and small, ran about screaming and laughing as if this were a birthday party. People were crammed into every corner of the house and the ambiance was oddly electric, as if they were all waiting for a rock star that would never show up. Mounds of food covered the table, Leo’s favorite Sinatra music loudly soundtracked the event, and a significant crowd huddled around the weeping Audrey who, despite honest grief, was reveling in the white-hot focus of her nascent widowhood. Michaela and Suzanna whisked about making sure everyone was taken care of, while Duncan, now the “man of the house” as Audrey had anointed him last night, held court in the dining room, expounding on his father’s virtues to a rapt circle of church groupies. Youngest sister Bella, red-eyed and reverted to “baby girl” status, tucked into her mother’s side, while Ronnie slumped in a corner chair taking it all in with cynically dry eyes. He was the only one who noticed Tessa coming down the stairs with a look on her face that signaled the plates had shifted. She squeezed into the chair with him and he gave her a blurry once-over.

“Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you wanna throw up.”

“I was reading.”

A long pause until it struck him. “Is that what you were doing up there? You found the box?”

“Yep.”

“You read 2002?”

“The first page.”

“Damn, let’s get you a drink.”

“It’ll give me a headache.”

“Aw, sissy, don’t you have one already?” He put his arm around her and squeezed. The shot of empathy threatened to unleash a crying jag or some other unseemly bout of hysteria that would bring down the house. She thought better of it. At that moment Michaela approached, again with the hors d’oeuvres tray.

“Is that thing attached to your arm?” Ronnie asked as he stuffed a crostini into his mouth.

“Somebody’s got to help around here, Ronald, you might want to try it. Hungry, Tess?” Tessa’s grimace said no. Michaela reached down and patted her shoulder, still convinced of their shared grief. “We all miss him, Tessa, it’s just going to take time.”

Ronnie lurched from the chair, stomping off to the bar set up on the breakfront. Michaela looked after him, bewildered. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s…turmoiled.”

“More like loaded. Little shit. Have you talked to Mom yet?”

“What do you mean, yet? Of course I’ve talked to her. ”

“I mean, since we got back here.”

“No. Why?”

“She’s on her fourth drink, carrying on that it wasn’t a stroke.”

“Oh, really? What was it then?” This was not a new conversation.

“Well, let’s see…‘the doctors don’t know what they’re talking about, the last prescription probably poisoned him, maybe we should sue’…you know the drill. I wish Duncan had been quicker to put out that fire.”

Their brother Duncan was a highly successful product liability attorney who’d made a name and several million in a case that involved a child’s death caused by a drug later recalled by the FDA. He had become somewhat of a celebrity and certainly an expert, garnering a pulpit style that often edged toward high-pitched pontification. There was talk of politics and much consensus that he was a bold and righteous crusader. Tessa thought he might just be an ambitious prick but that was probably sour grapes. Duncan’s financial and general life success stirred bona fide envy in her, as did his inexplicably close relationship with the father who seemed far less interested in her. Her current annoyance had to do with his receptiveness to certain church folk who’d ridiculously queried, “What really happened to Leo?” As if some grand conspiracy was at work rather than a simple, unfortunate stroke. Duncan’s brief consideration lent it weight, which seemed foolish in light of Audrey’s predilection for drama, and though he ultimately quashed the theory, the damage had been done and Audrey was rolling.

Tessa looked over at Duncan, now on a jag in the adjoining room, and sighed. “He can’t help himself. Ask a question, get a speech. And what’s wrong with dying of a stroke anyway? Is there some shame in that? Would he be any less dead?”

“She’d prefer he not be dead at all,” Michaela remarked, not without sympathy.

“She’d prefer he not be so mundanely dead. A faulty drug, some exotic disease, anything to get the sainted man one more paragraph in the obits. He’d still be dead so what the hell difference does it make?”

Michaela threw her a sharp look. “A little harsh, don’t you think?”

“Sorry.” Tessa sank deeper into the chair. “I’m not enjoying much of this hoopla.”

“Our father just died, hoopla is required.”

Suzanna approached with a drink and a scowl. “I may embrace the family legacy and become a drunk.”

“Why?” Michaela snorted. “Out of Oxy?”

“Now don’t be a bitch, Michaela. I only indulge when there’s opportunity to enjoy the buzz. Suffice it to say, I’m drug-free at the moment.” She plunked down in the chair across from Tessa. “She just asked me for the tenth time if I’d thanked her lately.”

“For giving you a perfect father?” Michaela knew the thread. “I got that a few times myself.”

“She better not ask me,” Tessa growled.

Both girls looked at her with surprise; Suzanna took the bait. “Are your teeth actually grinding?” Before Tessa could answer Suzanna squealed, “Oh my God, you found the box! Did you find 2002?”

“What are you talking about?” Michaela had missed that particular conversation.

“The journals, Dad’s journals. After that ridiculous wake with Duncan’s homage to our sainted father and all the rest of that hearts and flowers bullshit, I figured Tessa could use a reality check. She’d never read any of his journals so it seemed an opportune time.”

“My God, Suzanna, can’t you even let your little sister grieve without pulling her down into your muck?” Michaela was genuinely horrified.

“Have you ever read any of them, Mickie?”

“No, and I don’t intend to. Sneaking into private journals after a man dies is pretty close to unconscionable in my book, but maybe that’s just me.”

“Don’t be an ass. He wanted us to read them.”

“Really, Suzanna? And who told you that?”

“He did! On the cover page, read it! It says, ‘I want my children to know me better than I knew my own father, these journals are my gift to them.’”

“Why do I find that hard to believe?” Michaela snapped.

“Because you’re a denier. I can show you, for God’s sake. Stop chasing the good daughter award for five minutes and I’ll show you.”

Michaela picked up her tray and huffed off.

Suzanna looked at Tessa and rolled her eyes. When no reaction was forthcoming she put her drink down and took Tessa’s hand. “Is this going to completely screw with your head?”

“What, Dad dying?”

“No, the journal.”

“I don’t know. It could, I guess. I hope not.” A pause. “Probably.”

“Then I’m sorry I suggested it.”

“Yeah…me, too.”

“Well, and Dad dying is a bit of a mind fuck.”

“Yeah…a bit.”

A quick smile, then Suzanna squeezed Tessa’s hand. They got up and walked into the fray.

(To be continued…)