by Neve Wilder
So Tom was out. My friend Max was gone for the next few days. I was pretty sure Sam had her gallery internship the next day with an ungodly start time. Danny was…I hedged. Danny and I were more school acquaintances than friends, but we’d slept together at the start of the summer and things had been weird ever since. Maybe it was best to just go it alone for the night.
I stopped to grab the mail when I got to my parents’ house, then pulled into the drive while I sorted through it. I’d had high hopes I’d be able to afford an apartment in the city with friends for the summer and my senior year, rather than the dorms, but the pile of bills in my lap was a reminder of how much had changed. I wouldn’t even be finishing my senior year, much less living outside of my parents’ basement. After shuffling through the bills, I separated them from the glossy junk magazines and flyers, then went inside.
Mom was in the kitchen throwing some macaroni noodles into what looked like ground beef simmering on the stove. Ever since she’d gone back to work, dinners were quick, thrown-together affairs, but no one dared complain and really none of us cared. We were a family in survival mode trying to pretend everything was normal. Which probably made us like seventy-five percent of America, anyway.
I tugged on her apron tie as I passed to drop the bills onto the counter.
“Your order pad is still in the pocket,” I said.
She laughed and patted it. “I was in a hurry.” She pulled the apron off and tossed it in my direction. I folded it and laid it over the back of a chair. I could hear my ten-year-old sister, Lainey, playing in the living room. And faintly, the strains of the History Channel coming from the guest room, where Dad had been sleeping ever since shit had gotten real with his cancer.
“Good tip day?” I asked, snatching a few noodles from the colander.
“Decent.”
“I told you Ma, you’ve gotta flash that smile, maybe a little shoulder. Dazzle them.” I winked when she gave me the Look—the one all parents were gifted with the second they popped out an offspring.
“More like blind them. Is that your secret?”
“Oh, I’ll always show some skin.”
She swatted me with her towel and I took the opportunity to steal another handful of noodles, then stood at the corner of the kitchen table to open the bills. Most months, our combined earnings were enough to cover them and the house payment once we’d taken my tuition out of the equation. Where it got tricky was the rent for the building my dad had leased just before he’d found out he was sick. The landlord had recently found a sub-letter, so we’d gotten out of what boiled down to an exorbitant storage fee, but now the medical bills were starting to come in, and the health insurance offered through my mom’s job at the diner was a joke. But better than nothing.
“How’s Dad today?” I was gone before he was up, but Mom’s head shake was enough. Not a good day, then. He was doing another chemo cycle after responding well to the previous ones.
“Left him heaving over the toilet this morning, bitching about how the chemicals were going to turn him into an Oompa Loompa.”
“I guess that’s better than the alternative.” The alternative were the days when my dad felt so terrible that he didn’t bother running his mouth, just lay in the bed in the darkness.
I sat at the table, one hand splayed over the fan of bills, the other tugging at my lip ring.
“Your dad keeps hoping one day you’ll tug that thing all the way out.”
I knew she was trying to get a smile out of me, so I gave her the best I could.
This was what I’d learned over the past six months, though: sadness wasn’t a steady state. It came and went like a shitty guest, showing up to sucker punch you, then vanishing again. And we weren’t even close to the finish line yet. I thought about Mrs. Ware and Rob. If or when the time came, how badly was I going to fall apart?
Mom glanced at me again, then turned off the burner and walked over to brush her lips across my forehead.
“I know, I know. ‘We live around it, not in it,’” I said, parroting her favorite mantra.
“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to tell you that you’re a good kid and remind you that one day it won’t be like this anymore.”
I knew she meant that to be comforting, but all it really meant to me was that my dad would either be dead or my parents would be the kind of broke they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to recover from.
Dad joined us for dinner, which meant he must have been feeling better. We hadn’t always done family dinners. Before he got sick, we were all running in different directions. Dad was constantly gone, trying to get his garage off the ground. I was in the dorms in the city and Mom and Lainey ate in front of the TV. Once I’d moved back in, we’d all started sitting down together again at Mom’s insistence.
Dad put his napkin in his lap but made no move to start eating. Growing up, I’d gotten used to seeing his hands smeared in grease, the nail beds stained black. I still couldn’t get over how clean they were now. Mom would always complain, but I’d bet she’d give anything now to come across a grease stain on her good towels.
“I wrote a letter to Hamburger Helper today,” Dad said. “Told them they need to put up a plaque in honor of your mother for keeping the business afloat.”
Mom gave him an imperious arch of her brow. “This isn’t Hamburger Helper. It’s a recipe I found on Pinterest, and you’re just going to push it around your plate, anyway.”
Dad gave her a weak grin.
“Hamburger Helper is soooooo passé,” Lainey said, and we all stared at her. Typical highlights from her vocabulary included: grody, sick, stupid, no way, sweeeeeet.
“How do you even know that word?” I asked. Much less use it correctly.
“Heard it in a song.” She lifted her shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. “It means totally gross in case you don’t know.”
“I did not,” I lied.
“Listen,” my dad said, pointing the end of his unused fork at her. “There’s only room in this house for one smart person.” He paused for effect. “And that’s me.”
“Not if you die.”
Buzzkill. Mom sighed. Dad put his fork back on his napkin and met Lainey’s hard stare with a pensive expression. It was hard to tell how my dad was going to react these days. He’d changed since the diagnosis. Less filter on his mouth, more brutal honesty, and he tried to keep morbid moments to himself, but sometimes they crept out. Lainey, likewise, had gone through her own subtle change. Right after he was diagnosed, she’d been scared and sad, but lately it’d morphed into this kind of challenge where she’d bring up Dad’s illness all the time, and often out of the blue. Mom said it was her way of processing.
I looked between the two of them, trying to judge which direction this was going to go, but Dad’s expression had shifted to one of amusement. “That’s true,” he said after a moment. “But I plan to be reincarnated as a dictionary. That can speak.”
“What’s reincarnation?”
“It’s the idea that after you die you’re reborn as something or someone different.” Mom glanced at Dad, something passing between them that I couldn’t understand.
Lainey chewed on that, then said, “Then I’m coming back as Maxi Starr.”
“Oh God, you can do better than that.” I wrinkled my nose.
“Is that the girl—?” Dad waved his hand around vaguely.
“That singer who did the thing with the giant teddy bear and the videotape that—” Mom supplied, making a face.
“She’s got horses and her own farm.”
“And maybe herpes,” Dad said.
“What’s herpes?”
“Thanks a lot, John,” Mom said, her lips pursed.
I stopped by Dad’s room before heading out. The History Channel was still going and Dad had a James Patterson paperback open on his lap. He’d been working through that one for weeks. I didn’t think he was actually reading it.
“You’re going out a lot, lately.” He e
yed the keys in my hand as I leaned against the doorway.
“It’s summer. Everyone goes out a lot.”
“Mmph,” he grumbled, but then added, “Can’t say I blame you. Job still going okay? You like it all right?”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “Had a looker on the first one today.”
“Don’t fuck clients.” There was that lack of filter I was still getting used to.
“He’s not technically my client.” I said it mostly to be argumentative. I could look all I wanted, but Rob had made it evident he didn’t want to be any more than a name I’d forget in a week. Which was fine with me. I didn’t make a habit of repeats and especially not with a cheater, if that was what he truly was.
Dad grumbled some more and I grinned.
“Don’t wait up for me.” We both knew he’d be out like a light before ten. He slept a lot.
“Don’t become an alcoholic.”
“Oh Jesus, Dad. I’m nowhere close to the AA threshold.”
“And use a rubber.” That was how he always sent me off.
3
Rob
By the time I’d finished my morning run, I’d all but erased the wine-smeared traces of last night’s call from my mind. Had I been any drunker, I would have lost my resolve and ended up panting on the end of the line while talking Sean through his jerk session on the other end. Many a night had gone that way between us.
I pushed a little too forcefully through the door of the convenience store a couple of blocks from my parents’ house, the bells hanging on the handles clanging against a postcard display. Happy scenes of Nook Island and sedate montages of oak-lined Savannah avenues slid to the floor as I made a wild grab for the wire rack, trying to catch it before it toppled over. Once I’d steadied it, I bent to pick up the postcards, giving the cashier an apologetic smile.
“Still hot out there,” he said with an arch of his brow.
“How could you tell?” I deadpanned back.
“You’re dripping all over my floor.”
So I was. I peered at the sweat spatter around my feet and opened my hands. “Got a towel? I’ll mop it up.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’ll get mopped at shift change.”
I grabbed a water from an ice-filled barrel beside the door, then roamed the abbreviated wine aisle for a new bottle, telling myself I’d limit it to two glasses that night.
The cashier’s gaze trailed my progress. “I see you running every day this last week, but not before. New arrival or tourist?”
I glanced over. He had a pleasant smile, his hands folded on the counter. I picked up a bottle of red, giving the label a cursory read before carrying it and the water to the counter. “Neither,” I said. “Or both. My parents lived up the street. My father passed a few months back, so I’m getting the house ready to sell.”
“Mr. Macomb?” The cashier’s mouth drew up slightly into a warmer smile. Up close, I could see his name tag, which read Alonse.
I nodded. “That’s him. Or me. Both.”
Alonse gave me a sympathetic frown. I prepared for condolences, which had always struck me as a strange social norm. He would offer a nice sentiment and in return, I would thank him and feel awkward for expressing gratitude over such a maudlin subject.
He rang up the wine and water, then paused in thought. “I wondered if something had happened to him. He’d come every other Tuesday in his little chair with the dog running alongside him.”
Plastic crackled as Alonse reached behind the counter and pulled out a couple of wrapped magazines. Not the sort that usually were kept behind the counters and wrapped in plastic, these covers showed diminutive figures laid out upon a miniature battlefield. The title: Civil War Times.
“He asked me to carry it for him. Never mind he could have just subscribed to it. Said he liked to have a place to go and something to look forward to when he got there.” Alonse’s smile curved with a fond sadness that stung my eyes the longer I stared at it. A place to go and something to look forward to when he got there; that sounded just like my dad.
I hadn’t cried at his funeral, and I hadn’t cried at the stagnant vacancy of their house when I’d returned to it a week ago, but I was close, very close, in the convenience store with the rusting postcard rack and the laughable selection of wine. It was one of those inexplicable moments where I felt my father’s absence keenly. It moved through my chest like an ice floe, stealing my breath. My relationship with my father had been more complicated than my relationship with my mother, but that wasn’t what caused me to rub at my chest as if a piece of my heart had been excavated. It was that with him gone too, something fundamental about my existence had been uprooted and set to the wind. We had no relations that I knew of remaining on my mother’s side, and my father’s brother had flown in for the funeral and left the following day. They hadn’t been close.
I pushed some soggy bills across the counter then tucked the magazines into the waistband of my shorts and gathered up the wine and water. “Thank you for doing that for him.”
Maybe it was because of that moment where my sentimentality had been heightened and I was vulnerable, thinking about all of the things in life one might look forward to, but when I spied the boxes of Cracker Jack lined up in a rack beneath the counter, I picked one up without a second thought and handed over another pair of bills. “This, too.”
Alonse brightened and slid the money into his drawer. “Still a prize in every box.”
“Something to look forward to,” I agreed, my smile becoming more genuine.
“I can’t tell if he had a favorite side.” Alex picked up a figure of Robert E. Lee and held it in a shaft of afternoon light. “But, he was really into the details.” He rotated it on his palm, examining my father’s meticulous brush strokes, while I in turn, examined him. I couldn’t help it. Everything about him was magnetic and I might as well have been made of iron filings. All morning I’d tried to come up with a way to start over with him, to find a more satisfying sense of closure from the way we’d left things yesterday. But since he’d arrived, he’d been single-mindedly focused on the remaining packing and joking around with Tom as they moved furniture around and out of the house while I directed from the background. This was the first time we’d been alone all day.
Alex glanced up, catching me watching him. His expression didn’t change and he didn’t look away either. Maybe I blushed. I had no idea, but I forced my gaze to remain steady. The politics of attraction were navigable, and I thought I’d learned them well enough. Looking away abruptly might suggest I knew I’d been caught or that I was ashamed. And beneath that would have been the implication of an attraction I had no business alerting him to, given our previous encounter and my current situation.
“He didn’t have a favorite side and he was obviously against slavery.” I tossed Alex the horse that went with the general. He caught it and studied it, as well, thumbnail tracing a tiny, brown-painted hoof. “I think it was all about the process.”
Tom had gone to make a donation run of kitchen items and small electronics to the local Goodwill, leaving me and Alex to finish boxing up the personal items I’d put aside to keep. I knew Summer would want some of Mom’s things—if she could deign to come back here and get them. I suspected I’d end up shipping them out to her.
Since I’d not managed to squeeze in a shower before they’d arrived, my skin was tacky with a layer of dried sweat and my hair had dried in an unkempt mess that looked not unlike Alex’s, minus the artfulness. That was fine, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone—rather, I shouldn’t have been—even if Alex was five feet across from me, standing there like a bronze Apollo.
“I’m not even sure he was into the Civil War at all except that to him it was an acceptably masculine hobby for men who like small figurines and painting.” My smile was droll as I tossed another General—Nathan Bedford Forrest, I was pretty certain—into the box.
“Like running is for men who like being in the path of other s
hirtless men.” Alex cut a sharp-edged look my way, a glimmer of mischief in his eyes.
I blinked, and I think I did blush then. The kid was teasing me. Or flirting. Or being passive-aggressive. I couldn’t decide. “Sure,” I said mildly, picking up another figurine and wrapping it in newsprint. “Or, you know, for the cardiac and mental benefits that come along with regular exercise.”
Alex let me get away with that, asking, “So what else are you into besides running?”
That question earned him more scrutiny. I wasn’t sure whether he was making the casual small talk of a polite employee trying to pass the time or if he was fishing for something deeper in his semi-subtle fashion. At the moment, I was stuck on the sunlight filtering through his hair, falling across the side of his cheek and flecking his eyes with bits of gold. He was truly devastating. How had I been able to ditch him that night? Yet more evidence that I hadn’t been thinking clearly. Of course, if I had been thinking clearly, that night would never have happened in the first place.
“Is this an I-like-long-walks-on-the-beach-and-reading-Pride-and-Prejudice kind of question?” I asked.
Alex grinned at my dubious expression, his eyes bright and sharp and twinkling in a way that I was quickly learning meant he was amused. “It was more of a we’re-boxing-up-civil-war-figurines-and-I’m-making-conversation-to-pass-the-time.”
Well. That resolved it. I cleared my throat. “I’d like to paint a picture of a well-rounded human being who serves on boards, attends art openings, donates fiendishly, helps the poor, and competes in Iron Man triathlons in his spare time, but I don’t. I work ungodly hours crunching numbers. I run. I socialize some. I do like art openings, though. I’ve always liked art, but the skill never really aligned with the desire, and my father wouldn’t have approved anyway.”
