Tessa Young—Richard Young relationship

Tessa Young’s relationship with Richard Young is a brief, unfinished bond: he left her and her mother when Tessa was a child, returned to her life by chance only months before his death, and became a source of both acute grief and anger. The relationship’s significance lies in that unresolved contradiction. Tessa mourns a father she had only just begun to know, while refusing to make his abandonment or addiction disappear into an idealized account of him.

Childhood Abandonment and Reconnection

Richard Young had left Tessa and her mother when Tessa was little. In her account, he had chosen a life apart from his responsibilities as a father and husband. His return did not undo that history: Tessa says he came back into her life only a few months before he died, and then by chance. She connects their meeting to being with Hardin Scott at a tattoo parlor, recognizing that without that circumstance she might never have seen Richard again.

That accidental reunion gives the relationship its narrow window of possibility. Tessa did not have years of shared life with Richard from which to form a settled judgment of his character. At his funeral, she says she did not know him well enough to decide accurately whether he had been a good man. What she does know is more concrete and difficult: he left when she was a child, and she had only recently encountered him again. The closeness that began to form was therefore inseparable from the long absence that preceded it.

Discovery and the Finality of His Death

Tessa discovers Richard’s body on the bathroom floor. She opens the door expecting to check her makeup before going downstairs; instead, her foot catches on something, and she struggles to focus on the body. Her first fear is that the person lying there might be the man who left her. When her eyes adjust, she realizes that it is not Hardin Scott, but her father. Relief at that distinction gives way to the fact of Richard’s death.

Paramedics and police officers confirm what Tessa already understands from seeing and touching him: Richard is dead. He died after injecting heroin into a vein. Bags of heroin in his jeans indicate that he had brought the drugs with him, and he had been alone in the apartment for hours before Tessa found him. The discovery gives their recent reconnection an abrupt ending before it can become a more sustained relationship.

The encounter stays with Tessa in physical, sharply specific fragments. When she cries Richard’s name and shakes him, his jaw falls open and the needle drops from his arm with a small clinking sound. She later recalls that sound as continuing to echo in her mind. Richard’s hand also jerks in hers; Tessa cannot determine whether it was an involuntary muscle spasm or a false hope created by her mind. Checking his pulse again resolves that uncertainty into the knowledge that he is dead. The body, the needle, the sound, and the failed search for a pulse become part of how the relationship is remembered after it can no longer develop through conversation.

Grief, Anger, and Conflicting Judgments

In the aftermath, Tessa’s thoughts turn toward everything she believes she has lost. She imagines that entering the apartment has cost her her mother, her home, and the chance to reconnect with Richard without finding his lifeless body two months later. She also links the apartment to other damage in her life, but the loss of her father is distinct: she has only just regained access to him, and now that possibility is gone. Her despair is not presented as a neat conclusion about Richard; it comes amid shock and a sense that she has no strength left to keep fighting.

At Richard’s short funeral, Tessa is angered by the praise offered by people who, she believes, often had not even met him. The church’s reluctance to celebrate the life of an addict, the stiff words, and the condolences leave her caught between public performance and private knowledge. She is not claiming certainty that Richard was wholly bad. Instead, she measures the tributes against what she knows: he abandoned his family, and she did not have enough time with him to judge the rest of his character fairly.

Tessa also tries to understand her own response to his addiction. She recalls that she had accepted his alcoholism more readily than his drug use, and recognizes that she may have been trying to make him better in her mind. At the funeral and afterward, she questions why he left his responsibilities only to live as a drug addict. Her anger is mixed with love, guilt, and the painful recognition that she cannot know every motive behind his choices.

When she speaks with Zed, Tessa admits that she feels angry at Richard for dying. She knows the feeling sounds wrong, but anger seems preferable to the emotional nothingness and gives her a distraction from it. She makes a distinction between Richard’s death and the choices that preceded it: she does not think he knew he would die, but believes he knew bringing drugs into the apartment carried that possibility. She feels he had put getting high ahead of the people affected by his actions. Saying so does not cancel her love for him; it gives her a way to acknowledge injury as well as loss.

Memory Beyond the Loss

Tessa’s later memories of Richard change in tone without rewriting their history. In a domestic moment, Hardin Scott asks about Frosted Flakes, and the exchange brings back a memory of Richard bickering with him because Richard had eaten all of Hardin’s cereal. Tessa smiles and keeps the memory. Its humor offers a different image of her father from the one fixed by the bathroom floor and the funeral: not an excuse for his absence, but a small, ordinary glimpse of the person she had only briefly come to know.

By this later point, Tessa no longer thinks of Richard only with pain in her chest. She can admire the positivity he showed during their short time together and remember the humor he brought into their lives. That change does not amount to a declaration that the past has been repaired. Richard’s abandonment remains a fact, as do his addiction and the suddenness of his death. Rather, the relationship continues internally through memories whose emotional meaning can shift: grief and anger remain part of the bond, but they no longer exclude affection, humor, or gratitude for the time Tessa did have with him.