Comedy by Elizabeth Weinstein

1. Mexican Lunch

Adelaide and her family were sitting in a tiny lunch place in Mexico, just over the Arizona border, where her 77-year-old father, Sheldon, lived with his third (and final) wife. 

They had all just eaten plates of little shrimp tacos and cabbage salad, when the waitress appeared to ask if they’d like dessert. 

“Quieren flan? For dessert? Our flan is very good,” said the waitress. “Por postre.” She addressed the two teenage girls, Adelaide and her husband Charlie’s daughters, who’d been urged to speak their high school Spanish to her during the meal, and didn’t.

 “Muy deliciosa,” said Sheldon, looking at the waitress hopefully, his eyes on her round bottom, her tight jeans. “But no, gracias.”

Adelaide loved flan; was her father too cheap to buy dessert? They could have managed it, relaxing over dessert and coffee. And it wasn’t every day they could eat flan in a café in Mexico—well, she and Charlie and the girls, anyway, living in Syracuse. 

Her disappointment was interrupted by the ringing of her phone on the table. It was her mother, back East. 

“I’m sorry to disturb you on your vacation with your father, but—”

“It’s okay. What’s wrong?” 

She thought they’d want to know. An old family friend had died.

The friend was a woman Sheldon had dated in college. They had stayed friends for a while, but over the years she had become closer to Adelaide’s mother, Jeanne, than to Sheldon and had sided with her in the divorce. “I don’t need to be scolded by my old girlfriends,” Sheldon had said. And that was the last time her name had ever been mentioned between them until now.

Adelaide repeated the gist of the news aloud and hung up, nodding her head at her father: Okay, you’re right. No dessert.

 “Too full!” said Sheldon’s wife to the waitress, gesturing at her stomach, unnecessarily. She would stay to settle the bill, while the rest of them stood and filed out. They must all have looked so hugely tall and pale next to the restaurant’s usual clientele, local people on their lunch break.

Her father wanted to know more about their friend’s death. Adelaide walked with him to the pebbly, unpaved parking area in back of the café. Sheldon was tall, though no longer loose-jointed enough to be called lanky, his long spine stiffening. Traversing the uneven ground to the car had not been easy for him but she had resisted the impulse to take his free arm. He was still handsome, with his head of curling grey-blond hair, blue eyes, and a suggestive raising of his eyes and wry smile he liked to use with women.

Sheldon’s long arm reached out towards the hood of the car for balance, his stiff fingers grabbing the edge of the roof rack.

“Did she have cancer?” he said.

“Yes,” said Adelaide. She waited a beat for her father’s trademark sigh, and there it was: the heavy exaggerated exhale. It was resignation confirmed and emphasized, bad news always expected, and always internalized. The death of his old girlfriend—even one he hadn’t seen in years, was one more thing confirming the rottenness of the world.

“But you don’t, Dad,” she said. 

“Not yet,” said Sheldon. He didn’t laugh, though Adelaide did—one sharp bark, irresistible—because it was the stuff of comedy, this visible and articulated suffering, the center of its black heart. 

Adelaide got another call that night during dinner on the patio. It was the man she wanted to sleep with, from her office. Her husband looked up when her phone rang. Adelaide glanced at the number and stood up.

“Just one moment,” she said, as much to her family assembled at the table as to the man on the phone.

“When are you coming home?” said the man, though she’d told him when, had even texted the information to him. “I miss you.”

How dare he call when she was on vacation with her family? Adelaide walked out beyond the patio with her stepmother’s big pots of arugula, rosemary, and cilantro, out into the scrubby desert grass and sedge beyond, where no one could hear except startled iguanas and unseen coyotes. Her father’s wife had no children: her cats and plants, and certainly Sheldon, benefitting from her attention.  

“I’m going to hang up on you,” Adelaide said. The man she wanted to sleep with laughed at her—not an ugly laugh, just a chuckle, keeping her on the phone by saying that he enjoyed that term, hang up, because nowadays it was inaccurate. He was younger than she, thirty-five to her forty-five, crucial years during which people had lost the ability to slam a phone down on its receiver. 

She had met him in the English department, where he had tenure already, set for life at thirty-five. She was an adjunct and would remain an adjunct, no matter what. Even if she slept with him. They hadn’t even been naked together yet, but already he made references to living with her; he spoke of meeting her teenagers, of being considerate of their feelings, and of Charlie’s, when a theoretical upheaval and rearrangement of their lives would take place. He already called it “our relationship.” He carelessly sent her emails and text messages, brought her croissants on the mornings she taught, said how he liked her thick brown hair when she put it up “like a librarian.” Skittishly, giddily, she enjoyed it all, the compliments, the pastries, all the ways her body and mind prepared to receive him.

But only for a few minutes. These crazy feelings came and went in short waves, when they were out for lunch or in his office (she didn’t have one, but moved her stuff from office to office of whoever was on sabbatical). Or his car. “We need to take your car when we go out for coffee,” she’d said early on and had frowned at his response—“coffee? A euphemism?”—thinking it juvenile. He knew what she meant. His car was smaller and messier than hers, with its single man’s detritus of unopened junk mail, books and shoes, an abandoned gym bag. But she couldn’t risk the possibility of his leaving behind his papers or his smell. Her nose would be full of his smell each time or maybe it was both of their smells together—what did lust smell like?—but in the heat of conversation and kissing, she would forget she was smelling it. She couldn’t risk forgetting, the possibility of its lingering hours later when she picked up her daughters from school.

Now, outside, the smell of grilled meat penetrated the desert chill. Adelaide hunched over her phone, feeling an electric, silent connection. A promise. She told this man she wanted to sleep with that he was a romantic and hung up before he could protest that no, he was a Victorian. Actually, he could teach anything, all of literature was his specialty; he was very smart. He’d written a book, The Lure of Masculinity in Victorian Literary Culture, would write many more, whether he was with her or without her. She returned to the table, where Sheldon and his wife were carrying on gaily with the girls. Charlie glanced up at her and then resumed attacking his grilled steak with a sharp knife. 

On the airplane back to New York, she and Charlie sat together, Charlie in the window seat, and she beside him in the middle, the girls several rows in front of them. She could see Robin’s shining blond head and Laura’s dark ponytail. Both girls were wearing headphones and were reading, and in time would share whatever food they’d disappeared to buy in the airport before they all boarded the plane. 

Charlie didn’t speak, but Charlie often didn’t speak. Nor would he eat on the plane, unlike the girls and unlike Adelaide, who had a burrito in her purse. She thought about how her husband was organized that way—hunger was for home, airplanes for looking out the window and thinking about air flow and lift, about cloud formation. The man at work would have not the slightest idea whether the plane had two engines or four. If he were sitting on the other side of her now, he would not be monitoring the sound of the engines, would not know that if one of them failed there was risk but also, with care and precision, the possibility of righting the plane. 

“Charlie’s self-control is one of the things I love most about him,” she had said to the man at work not long ago. “That and the fact that he is interested in things outside of himself.” She had gone too far, seeing the hurt on the younger man’s face. But they’d had a fight that day about sleeping together—why was she resisting? 

“Do you think—” She turned to Charlie now. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask, so why had she even begun a sentence, opened up a question? “Do you think my dad will live much longer?” she said. “He’s got that spine thing, and that heart thing, and he sleeps a lot.”

It wasn’t the alien biome and culture of the Southwest that caused Adelaide’s sense of dislocation whenever she visited her father and stepmother. She admired the jutting mountains of southern Arizona, the dry, fragrant air, the mission churches appearing suddenly along arid highways. But she knew that even if Sheldon was still living back East, whether she visited him for one day or six, she would feel the same desperation. She longed to escape her father’s self-absorption, his fretfulness and pessimism, and above all, her fear that she would turn out just like him, might even be like him already.

“He’s a hypochondriac, of course,” Charlie said, still looking out the window. “He isn’t sick with anything in particular. Those are old complaints, though I guess they can eat away at you.” 

Did he mean If you let them, they will eat away at you? She thought that’s what he meant, but would not say aloud. He shifted and looked at her. “I could hazard a guess, but I’m no doctor. He could live for years.” He pulled his backpack out from under the seat in front of him, now that the plane had achieved altitude. He fished for his book. “Why worry about things you can’t do anything about?” 

She was grateful that Charlie had made this trip with her; his presence had been steadying, comforting, in her father’s house. Remarkably, this was true even now, even in her present state of anxiety, wondering if she would give in, if she would complicate their life, knowing she would. But for once she wished Charlie would worry with her about things she couldn’t do anything about. She wished he would say, “What are you worried about, Adelaide? Tell me.” 

The man she wanted to sleep with would greet her the following morning when she went in to teach her class. He would follow her to her borrowed desk.

 She thought then, and she was right, that she would remember that day she returned to work as the best out of all of the days or parts of days they spent together—best for being the most acute, the pleasure of seeing him almost painful, familiar but strange. He wasn’t tall or short, not thin or sturdy, his hair was the same color as hers and his clothes were unremarkable. Their conversation would fall away, no more quotations from books they loved, no more protestations about time and honor, stood in their way. Their way was this, surely—his body delighting her, and hers him.

1. The Broken-Up Home

Adelaide was twelve, her brother Joe two years older, when their father left. 

Sheldon told Adelaide he was leaving, told her why—for his own happiness, he said, and for the woman’s—he must go. He named the woman with whom he said he could not live without. They sat on a park bench, one parent on either side of Adelaide. She wished Joe were there, but her parents had decided to tell him earlier. The park was the oddest place to learn something that made her cold through and through. Adelaide felt her insides jump, as if suddenly aware of a vital organ she’d taken for granted. 

“She was willing to wait,” said Sheldon, about his mistress. (Adelaide, who had always been bookish, tortured herself by using the precise nomenclature.) She had five children, and those young enough would remain at home with their father.  When he named them, Adelaide realized she knew the two youngest, little boys with black hair and rosy cheeks. She remembered them from the playground the previous year, her last year of elementary school. 

“We thought about waiting until all of you were in high school. But I decided that wouldn’t be fair to her.” In the years to come, Adelaide wondered: Had her father really said this then, that day in the park, or had this breathtakingly obtuse statement been uttered later, in one of his many explanations? Fair to whom, after all? Sheldon talked on, elaborating the difficulties of a double life, the pain of knowing he was causing hurt. Jeanne said nothing. When she was older, Adelaide would wonder about her mother’s passivity that day, her silence. Had Sheldon asked it of her, or had she insisted, and was she there to help soften the blow or to bear witness to the pain he was causing her and their family?

Joe was often not home in the months after Sheldon moved out. He studied transit maps and, as a ninth grader, was assumed old enough to take the train with a friend to Philadelphia to ride the trolley cars, or to New York to explore the subways. Sometimes he invited Adelaide to ride bikes with him along the canal towpath near their house. But more often that fall, Adelaide and her mother were alone in the family house. The lawn got brown and crunchy, stray blades of grass grew between the cracks in the cement walkway.

III. Deathbed Honesty

Nine years after the Mexican lunch, Sheldon suffered a series of medical problems. Adelaide and her brother each flew to Arizona several times, for surgeries and rehab stays, heeding their stepmother’s concerns as soon as pieces of their own lives could be shuffled. Back East, their mother, at ninety a few years older than her ex-husband, remained stubbornly healthy. Adelaide admired her mother’s hardiness, but Jeanne’s longevity sometimes seemed a reminder of the dogged strength a wronged spouse—a cuckold—could have. Didn’t Adelaide know.

It had begun and ended in less than a year, her affair with the man at work. Adelaide told herself she was a coward for waiting until there was an external reason—she wouldn’t be in that office anymore, would be an adjunct in another college, across town—when the real reason was more complicated.

“Are you afraid?” the man had asked her, standing in his office. Other people could hear, from their offices, if they cared to listen. She’d never known if they did. 

“Of course I am,” she said. She imagined the man thought she was afraid to move confidently forward into a new life with him. 

“But I don’t need to be rescued,” she added. He balked at this. He never said she needed to be rescued, he told her, how could she accuse him of such a thing—she had free will. He loved her, didn’t he, had been trying to show her this in the deepest way he knew how. 

“You mean by sleeping with me?” she asked. Once again, she had gone too far. 

But how do you begin or end an affair without going too far? That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Sex was half—more than half—a longing for something you could never quite reach, and how many writers out there had called it a flame, for good reason? The fantasies they built together by desiring each other and tearing each other’s clothes off in oddball moments and places were just ways to try and reach that flame.

Meanwhile she’d drifted, vague and unsettled at home. Charlie wouldn’t ask. Was it patience and generosity or denial and self-preservation? She thought all of those. He had once, when they were first married, told her that if she was ever unfaithful to him, he would simply walk out the door and not come back. But she believed he was a better man than that hypothetical tough guy. 

In the months of their affair, she and the man at work had compared themselves to villains and romantic heroes, to Chekhov characters. It was exhausting, it had been unproductive. Certainly, she was afraid, but her fear had been of turning into someone she didn’t like.

She boarded an airplane in Syracuse, for what she knew would be the last flight before her father died. She sat in the window seat, where Charlie would sit, next to her, on a flight they would take in the near future, whenever they would need to take it, after Sheldon died. Would it be two weeks from now? A month? She looked down on the patchwork green of the country’s center, thinking about how our intense feelings of love, hate, jealousy, and longing get volleyed back and forth during our lives: bestowed on our parents and siblings, then romantic partners and children, and back to parents.

“Can I get you anything, Dad?” she asked several times a day. Would he eat a few bites, have a sip, take another hit of the pot puffer?

Sheldon gripped the edge of the sheet and pulled it up over his long torso, his bony shoulders.

“I never should have done it.” He shook his head, lifting it slightly from the pillows.

“Done what?” asked Adelaide. She dreaded another of her father’s apologies for having messed up her childhood. Sorry, sorry, sorry, he had intoned periodically during her adolescence and young adulthood—regret dredged up unhelpfully out of his own guilt. Because he always followed up these apologies by explaining that it was unavoidable, he’d had to do it. 

“I never should have left your mother.”

“What? Wait, Dad,” she said, her curiosity piqued. She should have known better than to respond, by now, but he’d never said exactly this before. He’d regretted hurting them, yes, but not leaving her, not that particular loss. “Are you saying it was a mistake to leave Mom?” She pictured her two parents together in old age, sharing a dinner table—as she and Charlie would be—or a park bench. An ordinary, elderly couple. Maybe he really was—all these years later—imagining the same thing?

Sheldon’s eyes opened, wide and rheumy. “It was a mistake leaving all of you,” he said, “for her.” He named his former mistress, for whom he’d left Jeanne.

Adelaide sat back with a jerk. Of course. Her father was not sorry for cheating on her mother or rupturing the family; he was not sorry he hadn’t tried to be a more reliable dad once he had left. His only regret was that he’d gone after that particular woman! She counted her own regrets for having slept with the man at work nine years ago—lying, wasting time, not crediting her husband with the ability to understand if she explained—but in no world was one of her regrets that she’d had an affair with the wrong man.

She reached for Sheldon’s water glass to keep him hydrated. It’s crazy, she thought, that I love him. And then, it occurred to her that it was too late—he was dying, she was too old—to be having this discussion about regrets.

And yet, the next day, when her stepmother was out, Adelaide could not resist asking Sheldon to clarify what he’d said the day before. Would he remember what he said about making a mistake? What did she want him to admit?

“Dad,” she said, as he struggled to sit up. She held his tea mug with one hand and tried to straighten the pages of the unread Times beside him with her other hand. “Yesterday. Did you truly mean—do you remember what you said?” Should she go on? “Did you mean that if you had left Mom for someone else, someone—oh, I don’t know, more interesting, more beautiful, maybe if you’d met—” and she named his third wife—”maybe it would not have been a mistake to leave Mom? If you’d left her for someone else, someone better, then it would have been worth all the trouble?”

Sheldon was quiet, his eyes closed, his fingers working to smooth the wrinkles of the sheet hem. Adelaide thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. 

“Well, I do regret leaving your mother for her,” he said. “But would it have been better if I’d left her for someone else?” He shifted his bony frame, but comfort eluded him, and he slumped again.

“Better for me, maybe. Not better for you.”

Adelaide started to laugh, and as she laughed, her father opened his eyes and looked at her with sudden focus, with a touch of his old pleasing smile, sharing the joke.

Elizabeth Weinstein’s fiction is published in the Mid-American Review and she has a story in a forthcoming Special Issue of the Caribbean Writer. The author of Shakespeare with Children: Six Scripts for Young Players (Smith and Kraus 2008), Elizabeth won 3^rd place in the 2025 William Faulkner Literary Competition. She lives in Tully, New York.

9 October 2026