by JA Huss
Old Maddie would be irritated with her for projecting her failures into my happiness, but I’m not Old Maddie. So I sympathize. “Look, you guys, you’re not stuck, OK? Stuck is a state of mind.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Diane says, taking a long sip of her drink.
I take a sip of mine, then almost choke from the rum. “That’s strong,” I say, eyes watering and throat burning.
“Not strong enough if you ask me,” Diane mutters back.
“Stuck isn’t a state of mind,” Caroline says. “It’s just reality, Maddie. And don’t mind Diane, she’s just upset because we feel like… like every time things start going good something happens to derail us, ya know?”
Boy, can I ever relate.
“And it’s not like we’re unhappy for you and Annie. You two deserve happiness.”
“We all deserve happiness,” I say.
“Yeah,” Diane says. “But we don’t all get lucky and find it, do we?”
“Look,” I say, and now it’s my turn to blow out a huff of breath. “You both have degrees, for Christ’s sake. What did you major in?”
“Economics,” Caroline says. “Both of us. But the market fell and job opportunities weren’t good and—”
“And now things are better!” I say brightly.
“Sure,” Diane says. “But we’ve spent the last few years as fucking prostitutes trying to pay off student loans. Uh, no one is going to be hiring us as financial advisors now.”
She’s right. Once you make a mistake like prostitution, it stays with you. Maybe not forever, but every bad decision digs you a little bit deeper into the hole. You gotta claw your way back up with a vengeance to have any hope of getting a second chance. It’s not what human resources is looking for when picking job candidates.
“Why did you guys go with that anyway?” I ask, probably not cautiously enough.
Diane glares at me. “Asks the stripper.” Yeah. That’s pretty fucking fair.
“There’s always a way.” I sigh. “You just need to be creative.”
“Like you?” Diane says, getting up and walking away. Then she calls over her shoulder, “Good luck, Maddie. I really mean that,” as she goes inside.
“Sorry,” Caroline says. “She’s just… down these days. She’ll come out of it. She always does.”
Yeah. What choice does she have, right? Give up or keep fighting. That’s all there is to life. And Diane is right. I was creative. I mean, I had a new idea practically every week. But none of them paid off. Not even the drone, even though it was a good idea in the end. I’ve failed at every creative venture I tried. Tyler’s the one who found fortune, not me. I’m just a tagalong.
“Well,” I say, getting up. “I gotta grab some clothes and stuff and get back to Tyler before he does something dumb.”
Caroline laughs as she gets up too. She hugs me tight and says, “Don’t be a stranger, OK? I’m gonna miss you more than you think.”
I smile at her. Sweet, sweet Caroline. I wish I could make everything perfect for her. But I can’t. So I don’t even try. “I promise,” I say. “I won’t.”
Back in my bedroom—which is actually neat since Tyler picked it up one day weeks ago and I haven’t had time to mess it all up again—I pack. At first I only pack a few outfits to get me through the week, but the thought of coming back here every few days just to get more clothes changes my mind.
I don’t want to be a stranger, but I don’t want to be here either.
So I pack up all my clothes that don’t have Scarlett written on them. I take down the few photos I had tacked to a bulletin board. Scotty and me. Us and the parents when we were kids. One of me and Annie from college, which I stole from her, because I have no pictures of myself during that time. And a few of all four of us—me, Caroline, Diane, and Annie—taking selfies during rare moments of happiness right after I moved in.
An hour later my room looks… cold. Impersonal. Ready for the next tenant who comes through here.
I’m not moving out.
I tell myself this over and over again.
But I am moving on.
Chapter Three - Tyler
Five stars.
That’s what I give the dude who drops me off at Mandalay. Five stars. Because that’s what you do. You give everybody a five-star rating. Unless the driver gets into an accident or, like, verbally assaults you or whatever. Otherwise, tap! Five stars!
So stupid. That’s what the world has become. Just assholes giving their online opinions of other assholes. Because when you rate a driver, or a dry cleaner, or a restaurant or whatever, it’s not like a thoughtful or nuanced critique. It’s just an opinion. I liked it or I didn’t like it. It was good or it was bad. Not a study of your experience, not an assessing of the dimensions of your experience, not a consideration of your own role in the dynamics of a thing. Just a feeling. Fuckin’ hell. Everybody and their fucking feelings. Jesus.
But at least I can do everything on my phone now and don’t have to carry money and shit. It’s like the whole world has become a hotel room. Because doing all this shit on our phones is like ordering room service. No money changes hands and you don’t even think about it, but then at the end of the month when the credit card bill comes, you’re like, I spent five thousand dollars on moo goo gai pan? What the fuck?
Whatever.
I’m only kicking all this shit around right now to avoid going inside. I’m not even sure what I’m doing here. No. Yeah, I am. This is one of those things I have to do if I’m gonna be fresh-start, new-look Tyler. I have to deal with my dad. I goddamn have to. That he came to Evan, looking for me, just forces my hand. Because I’m real, real curious about what would compel him to show up out of the blue. I don’t know the guy at all anymore, but the guy I knew wouldn’t do something like that. Not for me, anyway. I mean, he didn’t come looking for me for twelve years.
I don’t even really know how that happened. It just kinda did. I tried staying in touch when I went off to basic. I’d call him and, like, send emails and shit, but he was always too busy to talk, and he’d NEVER take the time to return an email, and eventually I just decided fuck it. I engaged with it like an experiment. Let’s see – if I don’t reach out to him – how long it will take him to think to try to reach out to find me.
Forever, it turns out, would be the answer.
And all of a sudden, I feel a little sick. Because I never saw it before right this very moment.
I’m just like my fucking dad. Fuck me.
I ghosted in the same goddamn way. I know I’m different than him in that I at least concocted a bunch of bullshit rationales to justify why I disappeared on the world, but I’m not sure if that makes me better or worse. One thing I can give my dad credit for, if I’m being generous (and fuck it, it’s the holidays), is that he’s never pretended to be anything other than the unconscionable cocksucker he is.
But shit. He wasn’t always. I mean, it was so long ago that it almost feels like it was somebody else’s life, but I have this weird, vague memory of things that I didn’t totally hate about him. Like, I remember the first time I ever had pizza, it was just me and him. I don’t know where Mom was. But I must’ve been about six and he picked me up from school because there was a burst water main or something, and we went and got pizza. And maybe it’s just the foggy haze of memory, but I don’t think I’ve had a slice that tasted that good since.
I also remember him coming into my room, when I was maybe even smaller, after I had had a bad dream or something, and crawling into my bunk (I slept in the top bunk of my bunk bed even though there was nobody sleeping in the bunk below. I just liked being up above everything), calming me down and reading a Batman comic to me.
But then, I also remember when Mom got sick, how he changed. How he couldn’t handle it. How he started drinking and fucking disappearing on us for, like, the whole weekend. And how for almost three years, it felt like it was just me and Mom. I was the one toweling her mouth off after she�
��d throw up from the treatments. And I was the one sitting with her in the hospital when she had tubes and shit dripping poison into her. Because when you’re talking about treating cancer, you’re just trading one poison for another in the hopes that the man-made one can overpower the natural one. Man versus nature. The lesser of two evils.
Mom used to try to tell me that he was just dealing in his own way. Always seemed to me that he wasn’t dealing at all. And then she died. And whatever remnants of “good guy” he had in him died along with her.
Those five or so years when it was just me and him made me who I am, I now realize. I learned a lot about myself during that time. Mostly I learned that drunk people are hard to reason with and that you’ll have to be ready to fucking kill me if you want to trade fists, because I won’t back down, I won’t quit, and I will keep coming until you won’t be able to tell whose blood is whose.
Guy got me ready for battle, I’ll give him that much.
Which brings me back to why I’m here today. If I’m here to put the past behind me and get closure with him, or forgive him, or myself, or whatever I hope to accomplish, I figured I should do it here, at his work, instead of at home where all those memories might just cause me to forget that they’re in the past too. The mind is a funny thing. It makes you believe that some shit that used to be true is still true now.
That’s what makes fighting so satisfying. When you’re being attacked with a knife, you aren’t worrying about being attacked with a knife. You’re just fucking reacting and scrambling to stay alive. It keeps you from dwelling on the past, on worrying about the future. You’re too busy focusing on survival. It’s a great way to distract yourself.
But it’s time to let that shit go. It really is. I’m all fought out, I think. And Maddie deserves better. So it’s time to be better. Better than my dad, at least. Which is a low friggin’ bar, but on the plus side, it means it should be easy to hurdle.
OK. Let’s fuckin’ do this.
Walking inside a casino always takes me a minute or two. Especially in the middle of the day. It’s tough for me to get my bearings because there’s so much going on. Sounds, and sights, and smoke and perfume and desperation. It’s a lot.
I flag down a cocktail waitress. “’Scuse me, is Jack Morgan around?”
“Jack? Sure, yeah, I think so. Hold on.” And she goes off to find him.
I assume everybody knows him. He’s been here since the place opened. Only reason I know this is where he still works is because he scurried away back over here after we saw him in the lobby of the Four Seasons. So funny—if I had even stopped to think that he might have been here, I probably would’ve put Maddie’s parents up at a different hotel. And then I wouldn’t have run off back to Evan’s, and Maddie wouldn’t have come after me to make sure I was all right, and she might not have had the interaction with Robert that led us to the Hoover Dam, which is the night it really feels like we locked into this thing we’re into now, and the night that Pete’s burned down, which bonded us even more tightly, and brought us to this place where we are now. This place where I want to be with her all the time and always. And to do that, I need to start living my life in a quieter, more peaceful, more forgiving way. And to do that, I have to confront my father.
A butterfly flaps its wings and halfway around the world Tyler Morgan talks with his dad for the first time in twelve years.
“Here he is.” The waitress’s voice comes from behind me. Because of course it does. Because there’s no way this could just be semi-normal, where he walks across the floor, sees me, and we both have a moment to prepare for the fact that I’m here. Of course it has to be this big fucking dramatic reveal where I turn around and he sees me, and the expression on his face changes and it’s like a scene out of a goddamn Hallmark Hall of Fame movie or some shit. Because this is my life.
So, I turn around, and yep, all that shit happens.
Classic.
Finally, finally, after me staring at him for half a minute as the world continues to whizz by around us, he says, “Hey. Uh...” And that’s it.
Solid start, Pops.
“You went to see Evan about me?” I figure I’ll just get this show on the road.
“Uh, yeah. I did.”
I wait. I nod. Finally, “And? What do you need?”
“Nothin’. Nothin’. It was just Christmas and I... Nothin’.”
Three nothin’s in one sentence equals somethin’. That’s just math.
Finally, I take a breath and decide to try this “being the bigger man” shit. And not just physically. “How you been, Jack?”
He takes a half-step toward me. It’s an uncertain, shaky half-step, but he’s that much closer. Not sure how that makes me feel. “Um, I dunno. OK. I been OK. You?”
I nod a little. Purse my lips. “I’m alive. So it feels like I’m ahead of the game.”
I remember Jeff’s funeral and how I wondered, if I had died, would Jack Morgan even have known? Would he have cared? And then I push that memory away, because it ain’t helping right now.
“Tyler, I—”
“What do you do here now? You still a pit boss?” That used to drive him crazy. It’s actually called “pit manager,” but I knew it made him cringe when I called him a “boss,” so I said it all the fucking time. (I don’t do it now to piss him off. It’s just habit.)
“No,” he says, more gently than I would’ve imagined him reacting. “No, I’m, uh, I’m a shift manager now. I oversee the whole operation while I’m here.”
I raise my eyebrows and nod again. “Good for you.”
“Tyler... You wanna maybe go to my office, or—?”
“No, I’m good.”
Silence. Well, between us anyway. The sound of the casino continues to play its gambler’s melody in the background.
“I think about you all the time,” he says.
“Yeah? You do? What do you think?”
“I think...” He rubs his hand over his mouth. “I think... I fucked up. Real, real bad. I think that I gave you a terrible childhood, on top of the fact that your mom died. I just made things that much worse.”
I purse my lips again and shrug. “OK. Well, we’re on the same page about that.”
He sighs. “And that by the time I pulled myself together to, I dunno, reach out, you were gone. And I figured the last thing you’d want is to see me again, so...”
“So you decided not to try.”
He nods sheepishly. Another long beat passes.
“It’s fucked up that you didn’t even recognize me.” I don’t know why I say it. It’s just what comes out.
He wags his head back and forth. “I know. I mean, it was out of the fuckin’ blue, and that beard is... Fuck. No. No excuse. It was fucked up. I’m sorry.”
Three things occur to me now:
One, I don’t think I’ve ever heard Jack Morgan apologize for anything.
Two, this feels a lot like I’m on the other side of the exact same scenario that happened with me and Maddie. Except for all the sex, obviously.
And three, I realize what this really is. I’m now the dad. And he’s the kid who screwed up and is standing in front of me wondering what kind of punishment I’m going to give him.
The whole thing just makes me sad. I’m not feeling vindicated or purified or whatever I was hoping to feel. I just feel... yeah. Sad.
“You seeing anybody?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Nah. No. Not right now.”
“You ever get married again?”
“No. No. I mean, I don’t wanna get all... But your mom was the only woman I could ever see myself being married to like that. She filled in all the fucked-up places in me that needed to be filled. I don’t think I’ll ever find that again.” He’s looking at the floor as he says it, then he lifts his eyes to me. “I mean it.”
My breathing speeds up and gets a little shallow. I don’t know why. Or I do, but I don’t wanna get into it.
“You?” he asks. �
��You married?”
I actually laugh at that. “Me? Ha. Yeah, fuck no.”
“Yeah,” he says on a tiny laugh. Like maybe this is a place where we understand each other. Like who the fuck would have us, right? Then he says, “You kept up with the Claytons?”
Shit. I didn’t even think that he would ask about that. But of course he would. We’re making fucking small talk and the only thing he knows about my life at all is that he saw me on Thanksgiving with the Clayton posse.
“Nah, not really. Maddie and I just ran into each other a couple months back and... Nah. Not really.” Yeah. That seems like just about all I want to share on the subject.
He nods. Then he says, “I dunno what to do, Ty. I don’t even know where to start.”
Yeah. No shit. “Um, well, like, here,” I offer. “This is what some might call a start.” Again, I’m not really planning what I’m going to say, shit’s just coming out of my mouth.
“Yeah?” he says. “Is it? You wanna...? I dunno. Something?”
I cross my arms in front of my chest completely involuntarily. “I dunno, Jack. What would ‘something’ look like?”
“Yeah. I dunno either, but... You doing anything for New Year’s?”
I eyeball him carefully. “Why?”
“You like Maroon 5?”
Maroon fucking 5? “Not really. Why?”
“Oh, they’re just playing here, and I thought I could get you tickets and... Whatever. No big deal.” And he looks at the floor again. Shit. Watching him, I see all the similarities between him and me, and it makes me... I dunno if there’s a word. “Was there something you wanted?” he asks. “From me? Particularly?”
I think about that. And while I’m thinking, some drunk-in-the-day tourist bumps into my side and I grab at it and grimace.
“You OK?” asks Jack, stepping over to me. “You hurt or something?”
“No, no, man, I’m good,” I say, backing up and waving him off. It’s wild. The way he stepped to me resembled some fatherly, protector impulse or something. It’s kinda freaking me out. He puts up his hands and backs off.
