Dad's True Lies, Part 1
My father's other lives
Alive Hospice, 2023
The last time I saw my father, he was in a hospital bed in a warmly lit room in a hospice in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It was 2 am on August 21, 2023. He was dead. His death certificate would later list the cause as rectal cancer.
With his booming tenor voice, razor-sharp mind, and forceful, intense personality, my father—Bobby Richard Huff, born in Franklin, Tennessee, in June 1936—had never been so quiet in life. Now, he didn’t look like he’d ever been alive at all. He was a detailed wax facsimile of a man, his mouth hanging slack, his bright green eyes closed, and his curly, still mostly rust-red, wiry hair slightly ruffled. Utterly still.
I loved my father. I was glad I could be with him at the end, but as I stood there preparing to leave so attendants could take him to the funeral home, I wished I’d been anywhere else, as I knew seeing him that way would be permanently seared into my brain.
Yet, for a moment, I was rooted in place.
I don’t know what went through my father’s mind in his final days. He was asleep most of the time, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was in a half-dozing state of inarticulate pain, waiting for a new dose of morphine to kick in. At one point, however, maybe 12 hours before he died, he appeared to be fully awake. When I spoke to him, he didn’t acknowledge me. He leaned to one side and slowly looked up at the ceiling. For a moment, his face held both wonder and fear. Then he subsided into unconsciousness again.
I want to think he saw my mother Margaret, who’d died on January 29 that year. Or my sister Sherry, who passed away at 58 in 2016. Maybe even my brother David, who committed suicide in 2000. Everyone was waiting to welcome him into whatever was on the other side.
I hang onto that because it makes me feel better, given how much I miss them all.
But the question that lingers and troubles me now is whether he saw someone else altogether—someone I had never met in life, as far as I know—who occupied Dad’s thoughts in his final months.
My parents married in 1956 when Mom was 19, and Dad was 20. They separated only once, in 1985, over an affair Dad had with a co-worker. The separation was relatively brief, though traumatic enough for the two youngest kids still living at home at the time, my sister Rhonda and I. Still, they recovered and remained side-by-side till the end, Dad holding Mom’s hand as she passed away.
I know he loved Mom with as much of himself as he could muster. My mother was a beautiful, tall, yet delicate woman with subtle, dry wit, and she was far more intelligent than Dad likely realized when they met. No one ever understood him as well as she did.
In a journal I found after he died, Dad wrote that Mom’s death marked the end of the “best part” of his life. I believe that. Yet I know he also loved others and that the stories of those loves paint a far more vivid, sometimes perplexing portrait of my father than I ever imagined.
All these things, all that he was, all that I knew about Dad rushed through my mind at that last moment. Then, I couldn’t bear to be alone with the dead any longer. I went to him, kissed the top of his head, and left the room. I walked down the silent hallway to the exit and into the humid night. A train horn echoed in the distance. I got in Dad’s car and drove the 13 miles back to the house he’d shared with Mom in Smyrna, Tennessee.
About a mile from the house, I turned off the main road and onto a side road that passed by a hospital. It was the hospital where my oldest sister had died, and both my parents learned they didn’t have long to live. The hospital side of the street was brightly lit. The other side was a large, empty lot full of waist-high grass. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced over to see a young deer running along the hospital side of the road. I slowed to pace it, then stopped in the middle of the street.
The deer bounded through the headlights and across the road, leaping into the field. I rolled down the window to watch it disappear into the deeper darkness.
Bennigan’s, 1985
Dad and I drove in silence. We passed under Briley Parkway and then under a railroad bridge. We passed Mom’s favorite H.G. Hill grocery store on the corner of Murfreesboro Pike and Thompson Lane.
Mine was the silence of a shocked and angry 17-year-old boy. At the time, I thought Dad’s silence was guilty. But I’ve never really been sure—Dad’s moments of conscience were sometimes hard to distinguish from his moments of calculation.
I was mad because Mom had left after learning he was having an affair with a younger woman, a colleague at the construction company where he worked. I was angry at both my parents in that searing yet vague way only a teenager can feel: this churning mass of indiscriminate anger that, at the time, was beginning to curdle into depression.
I understood Mom’s response. Of course, she left. There would be moments in the years to come, even once they were much older, settled, and comfortable with each other, when I wished they’d stayed apart and divorced. That might have broken Mom’s heart, or it might have freed her in myriad ways. I’m unsure how my father would’ve handled it.
Despite understanding Mom, I felt abandoned. He and I didn’t exactly have a cold relationship. But at that point, it wasn’t much of anything. I could tell he was profoundly uncomfortable with me—his youngest kid by seven years—being in the theater and interested in the arts in general. Mainly because, in Dad’s mind, no one from our side of the tracks would ever make a living at bullshit like that. Even when I was in my thirties, he would say I should’ve sued my high school teachers for encouraging those interests—even though by then, I’d been a professional performer since my early 20s.
We were heading to a Bennigan’s Restaurant, located at 975 Murfreesboro Pike, so that he could talk to me about everything. I didn’t have an appetite or feel much like talking to him. I remember feeling queasy and awkward. Talking to my father was only easy if you were ready to let him plow through his monologues before responding, and by 17, I’d lost some patience with his motormouth ways.
If you’re a South Park fan, you’ve heard of Bennigan’s. It was an Irish-themed, prototypical 80s fern bar: low light, dark wood, vaguely antiquated decorations, signage fonts, and, yes, ferns. We liked the place as a family, and I’d taken dates to the one on Murfreesboro Pike, but this was the first time I’d ever gone to eat dinner with just my father. He immediately ordered a beer and said I could have one if I wanted, seemingly forgetting I wasn’t 18 yet, much less 21. He probably had forgotten—just the year before, he’d gotten me a hunting license and bumped up my age by two years. I just ordered water.
I don’t know what your mom told you.
She said you were seeing another woman.
That’s true.
(I’m recreating the conversation from memory, so it’s unlikely to be accurate, hence italics rather than quotation marks.)
It is?
Yes. But it wasn’t just one woman. There was someone before the lady your mom knows about.
I clearly remember my reaction to this. I need to go to the bathroom.
In the bathroom, I took stock of my state of mind. Could I deal with this at all? I wasn’t sure. Then, as I sat there, I realized a profound curiosity was overriding my anger and resentment. I like to think I was an okay person as a teen, but perhaps I did have too much of my father in me, for I also clearly remember thinking I wanted him to tell me everything in case I ever needed it to get my way.
I grew up fast on that warm, early spring day in Nashville, sitting in a bathroom stall in a fern bar with a nervous stomach.
I went back to the table, picked at the appetizer, and drank my water. Okay, I said, go ahead.
I had no idea what to expect. The co-worker made sense. Logistically—working with him in a Nashville office, late nights when developing projects or putting together bids for new work—emotionally, even physically. I had seen her at a distance, and she was attractive. I judged him for it and still judge him today after learning more about her. But I already knew it was the kind of affair people often had—tawdry, everyday stuff. My Mom deserved a man who treated her so much better than the man across from me. He’d had the kind of affair that, as my mother’s son, I could easily look down on.
What he told me next was nothing like that. He told a story that stretched from Nashville to Boston to Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. It involved possible mob connections and industrial spies. That night, over his several beers and the burgers we ate, he only gave me a thumbnail sketch, but I would learn details much later that renewed my shock and dismay.
Writing off what he told me as some fantasy designed to puff himself up wasn't hard. I did exactly that to live with the story: I concluded it was an ego-salving fiction my father concocted to maintain some weird measure of awe in his youngest kid’s mind. It illustrates our dynamic if I note that when the movie Big Fish—about a colorful father whose tall tales drive a wedge between him and his journalist son—came out, I identified strongly with the skeptical son.
Until the weeks after Mom died of heart failure while holding his hand in January 2023, that was how I looked at the strange romance I first learned about in a fucking Bennigan’s: an elaborate, elegant lie wrapped around some grubby truth. After all, Dad had always been a compelling, colorful storyteller, and he had admitted to embellishing some things to make them funnier or more interesting.
The story he told me in Bennigan’s that day was all true. And when he ended the affair he first told me about that day, someone put a hit out on my mother.