Dinner at Jack's

by Rick R. Reed

  “Wow.” He moved his gaze from me over to Maisie. “You win the lottery, Toots?” he asked.

  She snickered. “Yes. Beau here is the first of many changes I’m making. Soon we’ll be moving into one of the mansions on Park Boulevard. I have BMWs ordered for both of us, silver for me and cherry red for you—if you can ever manage to get your sorry ass out of bed. The yacht is being custom-built.”

  I looked at her, and she grinned at me. “But seriously, folks, Beau here is just looking for a little side job while he gets settled in his old hometown. Isn’t that right, Beau?”

  I nodded.

  Jack said, “So you work cheap?”

  “I guess I do. Or would.” I shifted my gaze over to Maisie. “That is, if I get hired.”

  Maisie laughed. “Oh well, you definitely have an edge over all your competition.”

  “And who might that be?” Jack scoffed.

  “Um, nobody.”

  As much as I wanted to just disappear into the colorless bedroom walls and listen to the mother-son banter, I thought it was up to me to get things on track. “So Jack, tell me what you like to eat.”

  He sighed and blew a strand of his pale hair off his forehead. “Brown sugar Pop-Tarts, Cheetos, beef jerky, and beer.”

  I clapped my hands together. “Those are my favorites too!” I took some initiative and sat down at the very edge of the foot of the bed. “But I think we can save those for special occasions, like birthdays, House Hunters marathons, and the like.”

  Jack asked, “What are you, some kind of smartass?”

  “You got me. I’m also a great cook…and I specialize in good old-fashioned comfort food. I make a turkey meatloaf with chipotle ketchup that’ll knock your socks off. Ever had Italian wedding soup with escarole and little tiny meatballs?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “If you haven’t, you’ll be begging me for it after one taste.” I rubbed my hand along the surface of the quilt, caught myself, and cut it out. “Fried chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, a killer mac and cheese—I use creamed corn in the recipe—weird, but you won’t believe how good it is. I do a wicked beer and beef stew, which I serve up with thyme beer bread I make myself.” I shrugged. “That’s just the start. You think you wanna try something out?” I glanced over at Maisie, who was smiling. “I could bring a little sample over tomorrow, and you see if you like it. If you do, maybe we can set up a more permanent arrangement.”

  Ever have a feeling about someone you just can’t put your finger on? A bond your heart makes that your mind is saying “What the fuck?” to? That’s how I felt with Jack, even though he’d done nothing but glare at me the entire time I was speaking. Maybe I knew him in another life or something.

  “That sounds like a great idea!” Maisie exclaimed. “Doesn’t it, Jack?”

  “What are you gonna charge for this sample?”

  “Jack…” Maisie warned.

  “Nothing at all. This is a trial run, part of the hiring process.”

  “Well, if it’s free, I suppose we can do that.” Jack removed his gaze from me, picked up the remote next to him, and started House Hunters up again.

  I looked to Maisie. “I guess that means we’re done here.”

  Jack snorted. Maisie sighed. “C’mon. You want a cup of coffee?” And Maisie led me out of the room.

  As she closed the door behind us, the volume on the TV went up to ear-splitting.

  Back in the kitchen, Maisie grabbed the carafe from the Mr. Coffee on the counter and began filling it from the tap. I took a step toward her.

  “You don’t need to do that for me. I’ve already had three cups this morning. Any more and you’ll be scraping me off the ceiling.” I scratched my chin. “Besides, I should be heading out.”

  Maisie set the carafe in the sink and turned off the water. When she looked at me, I saw the sadness in her expression. “I get it,” she said softly.

  I cocked my head. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t blame you,” she went on, as though this answered my question. “Even though he’s my only kid and I love him like there’s no tomorrow, I know he’s hateful. I don’t think anyone would want to be around him.” She sighed and sat down suddenly at the kitchen table. Sat isn’t the right word. It was more of a graceless plop, as if all the energy had drained out of her. She put her head in her hands for a moment and then looked up at me, her eyes shiny with tears.

  “Hey, hey. I think you’ve got the wrong idea there, Maisie.” I squeezed her shoulder and then moved toward the sink. I finished filling the carafe with water and then proceeded to make us a pot of coffee, even though I didn’t really want it.

  I sat down at the table with Maisie as the coffee started to brew. I reached over and picked up one of her hands and squeezed it before letting it go. “I wasn’t heading out because I wanted to get away from you guys. I was gonna head over to the supermarket and pick up some stuff for my world-famous sweet potato turkey chili. If that doesn’t make a believer out of Jack, I don’t know what will.”

  Maisie smiled a little, but the smile couldn’t hide the look of disbelief that came over her. “Really? You mean you’d come back?”

  I nodded. “Sure I would. You won the lottery, right? So you can pay me big bucks.”

  Maisie laughed longer and harder than probably was warranted, but I suspect the laughter was more from relief than amusement. “Yeah, right. How does five thousand a week sound?”

  “Make it six?”

  She shrugged, her laughter dying down. “How about five with a signing bonus of, oh, twenty grand?”

  “Done.” I reached out my hand for Maisie to shake.

  But she ignored the hand and scooted her chair out from the table to rise and come over to me. She wrapped her arms around me, engulfing me in her warm and fleshy presence and the slight aroma of talcum powder and hair spray. She hugged for a long time, and I didn’t pull away, mainly because I could feel some little rhythmic shakes going through her. I didn’t want to embarrass her.

  At last she turned from me and dabbed at her eyes, blew out a big breath. I stood and moved to the Mr. Coffee. “You take cream? Sugar?”

  “Both,” she said. “And lots of it.”

  I had been going to ask her about what had happened to Jack, why he was the way he was, but decided that could wait for another day. I poured us each a mug of coffee, and we sat down at the table together.

  I could hear the theme music and chiming doorbell for another episode of House Hunters starting up in the other room.

  Chapter 8: Jack’s Dream

  The white blocks everything else out. Jack’s lost in a world of white. It isn’t until he pulls back a bit, away, like a camera taking a longer shot, that he realizes the white is snow. Not a gentle snowfall, but something like you’d see in Alaska dishing out one of its worst winter storms—a whiteout, they call it.

  But as he moves farther back, he sees more and more. The flakes begin to separate and become distinct. At first there’s little dark space between them. But as he moves back—or up or away, he really isn’t sure of direction—the flakes become unique. Paradoxically, the farther he moves from the snowflakes, the more defined they become, until he can take in their breathtaking crystalline structure.

  And then the magnification blurs and blurs, until at last the snowflakes morph into stars in a winter sky, cold yet twinkling, a poetic image from long ago.

  And then he’s floating above an urban landscape. There are some things that look familiar: the winding downhill avenue, a graceful glass arch over the street in the distance. It all looks familiar—and cold.

  And frightening.

  He seizes up, and he’s not sure where the fear comes from. But it grips him, like an icy hand, squeezing tighter, tighter, until he can barely breathe.

  A fist comes toward his face, on each finger a tattooed letter spelling out the word HATE.

  The white shifts in an almost wavy, gauzy movement. The stars, the snowflakes vanish, and now there’
s red. Just a cascade of crimson blood.

  * * * *

  Jack awoke with a strangled scream caught in the back of his throat. He was panting, his mouth dry. His heart thudded so hard in his chest he thought of trapped birds. Sweat coated his naked body, and the striped sheets twisted around him like snakes, constricting. He couldn’t move one of his legs.

  He whimpered.

  There were footsteps pounding quickly toward him, outside his door. His mother. He listened as she stopped, presuming she was doing the same—listening—just outside his door. He could see her out there, her worried face, clutching her bathrobe shut at her chest. He wished she’d go away but knew there wasn’t a chance.

  He must have screamed louder than he thought.

  There was a gentle tap at his door, barely loud enough for Jack to hear.

  “Jack? Honey, are you okay?”

  He sighed and then twisted his legs angrily to free them from the balled-up sheet. He lifted the upper portion of that same sheet to mop up some of the sweat dripping down his face.

  He gave his breathing a chance to slow, his heart to go from a canter to a gallop, and called out, “I’m fine, Ma, just a bad dream. Go back to bed.”

  He didn’t want her to come in. He was sick of her comfort, her failed attempts to make him whole again. Jack didn’t think wholeness was a possibility for him anymore, even if he didn’t understand why. In the past several years, his world had simply died, the fear brought alive by his nightmares taking over both his slumber and his waking hours.

  He was a prisoner. He feared the key was buried in snow…

  She knocked again, a little harder this time. “Sweetie, are you sure?”

  “I’m sure, Ma!” he screamed, meaner than he wanted to be. What was wrong with him? He knew she loved him and was only trying to help. “Just go back to sleep. The boogeyman is not in here.” He let out a bitter laugh. He wondered, though, if he’d met the boogeyman sometime in his past, perhaps under a curtain of snow that changed to blood.

  He shook his head. It was no good. There was no use trying to make sense of the strange images that came to him in dreams and sometimes even when he was awake, scaring him, making it hard to breathe, hard to swallow, as though the fear itself wanted to squeeze the life right out of him.

  Maybe that would be a blessing.

  His breathing and heart rate were slowing to what was normal, he supposed, for the middle of the night. His skin, instead of dripping and dirty-feeling, now simply felt clammy and cold. He leaned over the side of the bed to snatch up the quilt that had fallen to the floor. He arranged it over his shivering body and then stopped, very still, and listened as his mother’s footsteps padded away from his door.

  Jack felt both relieved and sad that she was leaving. He laughed bitterly. Maybe what he really wanted was for Mom to stand outside his door all night, guarding against night sweats, night terrors. He knew she’d be happy to. Or no, maybe he wanted her to come in, sit next to him on the bed, and sing, in her raspy voice, one of the lullabies she’d croon to him as a little boy—”You Are My Sunshine” or “Stella by Starlight.” The thought made him want to slam a fist into his forehead hard enough to hurt. The thought made him hiccup back a sob.

  He got himself up to a more proper sitting position. There’d be no more sleep for him tonight. He grabbed the remote from the bedside table and clutched it. He wasn’t quite ready to dive into that other pixilated reality just yet, but holding the remote, like a key, gave him a weird sort of comfort.

  For a while he listened to the sounds of the house he’d grown up in all around him, noting its creaks and sighs as it reacted to the wind outside, the settling of its aging bones. Funny, there was a lot he couldn’t remember about his past, especially his immediate past, but he could remember growing up in this little brick ranch, him and his mom, and always thinking, from the age of about ten onward, that he would get out of it at his earliest opportunity. He would never return here.

  And yet here he was.

  And he could hear Mom’s slippered feet approaching his door once more.

  “What now?” he cried. He just wanted to be alone.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” she called from the other side of the door. “You just sounded so, I don’t know, overwrought? Scared? I just wanted to do something for you, honey. So I heated up some milk for you. And I grated some fresh nutmeg into it, like you used to like when you were little.”

  She paused, and he could imagine her worried, careworn face out there. He hated that he was such a shit to her most of the time, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

  “Can I bring it in?”

  His first reaction was to tell her to leave it outside the door, after he rejected telling her to drink it herself or chuck it down the drain. And then maybe his cruel, damaged heart opened up just a little, and he called, “Yeah. Gimme a sec.”

  He rolled over to grope around on the floor until he found a pair of plaid flannel boxers and a T-shirt. He hurriedly pulled them on, dabbing away some more sweat with the bottom of the tee, and then said, “Okay.”

  When she entered the room, she was smiling, as though he had bestowed upon her some great honor. The expression on her face made him hate himself all the more. He was a heel. He was a piece of shit. He didn’t deserve her kindness.

  She set the mug down on the nightstand next to him. “Drink up before it gets cold. It’ll help you sleep again.”

  He lifted the mug and took a sip, and immediately the warm, nutmeg-scented beverage took him back to his boyhood. He’d never known his dad—he’d taken off, according to Maisie, when she told him she was pregnant. Jack had never quite given up on his dreams of finding the man, but that wasn’t exactly a thing he could share with her.

  “I don’t think I’ll be going back to sleep,” he sighed. He lifted the mug and took a sip. He wanted to tell her it was good, comforting, but somehow the words stuck in his craw. It would feel like he was betraying himself if he said them. “Not tonight.” He took another sip and swallowed. He set the mug back down. “You can take that away.” He looked over at her, and she looked, as he expected, disappointed. He wished he could just drink the damn milk for her. It would make her so happy. And wasn’t that pathetic?

  She lifted the mug from the table and clutched it as though for warmth. She eyed him. “Can I sit down?”

  He scoffed. “What? On the bed?”

  She gave him that look, the one he hated. Like she was scared of him.

  “No, no. I can just curl up here on the floor.” She actually started to squat next to the bed.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ma! Just sit on the fuckin’ bed.”

  He watched as she swallowed hard. And then, very gingerly, she sat on the edge of the bed, right where that chef guy had parked his ass earlier.

  She didn’t look at him. She simply spoke to the darkness. “You wanna tell me about it?”

  “The dream?”

  She nodded.

  “It was like all the other ones. The reason I’m so damn tired all the time! It made no fuckin’ sense.” He caught himself. “Sorry, I know you don’t like me swearing.”

  “I don’t,” she said in small voice. “That’s not how I raised you.”

  “So, well, nothin’. I can’t tell you much about the dream because it didn’t make any sense. Snow, blood, a fist coming toward me.” He could see the fist, with its tattoo, so clearly in his mind’s eye. It was like a memory. And he realized he’d never, until tonight, or at least as best as he could remember, actually been able to make out what the tattoo letters spelled out. The realization made him give a little gasp.

  “What?” Maisie asked, turning a little toward him.

  “I just remembered something.” He slammed a fist into the pillow, and he could tell it startled Maisie. She jumped. “What difference does it make? I’m never gonna remember what happened to me that night. Not if I haven’t after all these years. Right?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. Wh
at did you remember?”

  And he told her.

  “That’s awful.”

  “Yeah, so maybe I’m better off not remembering. Maybe my mind’s doing me a favor.”

  Maisie stared at him for a long time, and he could see the pity in her eyes. Part of him wanted to comfort her, and part of him wanted to slap the look right off her face. She reached out gingerly, like one would to a wild animal, and gently laid a hand on his calf beneath the comforter.

  She looked ready to say something, and he stopped her. “Don’t.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “You know what. Don’t tell me I need to see someone. I did that when I moved back here. Even did the whole hypnosis route. All I know is all I’ve ever known—I woke up on a snow-covered sidewalk in Seattle. Both of my eyes were swollen shut. I had a concussion and three cracked ribs. Someone had left me there, I guess, to die.” He looked away from Maisie as he uttered the next part. “And maybe I would have, if that nice cabbie hadn’t come along and bothered to stop. He took me to Virginia Mason.” He sighed and then mumbled, and not for the first time, “Maybe he should have just left me there.”

  And not for the first time, Maisie responded, her voice tinged with hurt and indignation, “Don’t say that!”

  “Why not, Mom? What kind of life is this? I’m afraid to go outside, for Christ’s sake. I jump at my own reflection in the mirror. I’m a pathetic excuse for a human being. Whoever broke me, broke me good.”

  Maisie didn’t say anything for a long while. Absently, she sipped at the mug of milk. “You gotta have hope, baby. None of us knows what’s coming, what’s around the next corner. I know it seems like this will be your life, your life sentence if you will, stuck here with your mother. But that doesn’t mean things won’t change, that you won’t get well. That doesn’t mean that in a year or two or maybe less, you’ll be the old Jackson, the one who always made me laugh.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say something that would shit all over her comfort and her optimism, but he gave himself credit for thinking to hold it back. It was what passed, he supposed, for progress in his little neck of the woods.