by TJ Baer
“Dad sure as hell doesn’t come to me.”
“No, but he values your judgment. When I was making an ass out of myself in high school, he was always asking me why I couldn’t be more like you.”
“Funny, when I was staying in on Saturday nights and showing no interest in girls, he was always asking why I couldn’t be more like you.”
“My point is,” he went on firmly, “that you’re like...you’re like glue.”
“Glue.”
“You’re the glue in this family. If you weren’t here, it’d all just fall apart. Like it did after Grandpa Jess died. We all relied on him, and then suddenly he just wasn’t there anymore, and everything went to hell.”
I remembered that well enough, at least. Still, though...
“If I wasn’t here, it wouldn’t make that much difference. Dad’s the one keeping the family together, and he’d keep doing that even if I ran off to Acapulco and never came back.”
AJ shook his head, but all he said was, “If you say so.”
We were silent for a few seconds.
“Acapulco,” AJ said thoughtfully.
I grinned. “It’s in Mexico.”
AJ grunted, and we spent the rest of the drive in a peaceful silence, listening to the radio and watching the scenery go by.
*
We’d been standing on Mom and Dad’s porch for ten or fifteen seconds when AJ cleared his throat.
“Might help to push the doorbell,” he suggested, shoving his hands into his pockets and looking away in a casual, I’m not with this guy kind of way.
I glared at him. “I know.”
But when I turned back to the front door, ready to take that last step and bring us face to face with our father, somehow my hand stayed glued to my side, and no amount of willpower would convince it to reach out and press that little plastic button.
AJ let out a breath. “Do you want me to do it?”
“I can do it.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
Pause.
“Here I go.”
Pause.
“In just a second.”
Pause.
“I’m gonna do it. Any second now.”
“For Chrissakes,” muttered AJ, and reached past me to jam his thumb onto the button.
A soft, tinkling melody echoed inside the house, and I gave AJ a sour look. “I was getting there.”
“Yeah, sure you were.”
We waited in expectant silence for a while, quiet and listening, waiting for the scuffing sound of Dad’s slippers on the carpet, or possibly the lighter, quicker sound of Mom’s footsteps hurrying to the door.
Nothing.
AJ and I exchanged glances.
“Try again?” I said.
AJ shrugged and pushed the button again, and another tinkling fairy tune chimed through the house.
And still nothing.
“Maybe they’re not home,” AJ said.
“Gee, you think?”
He glared at me and started digging in his front jeans pocket. “At least I can press a doorbell,” he said, and before I’d come up with an appropriately snappy response, he’d pulled out a gleaming silver house key.
“You have a key?”
“Yeah, since, like, second grade. What happened to yours?”
“Dad made me give it back when I moved out.”
“Huh,” said AJ with a smirk, and pushed past me to slide the key into the lock and push the door open.
We stepped into the cool dimness of the house with slow, wary steps, glancing left and right into empty rooms and moving with the kind of caution you’d find in one of those quiet, creepy moments in a horror film—the bit where the camera takes you slowly down a dimly lit hallway toward a closed door, and you don’t know what’s on the other side, but you know it’s going to be bad…
In our case, it was the door to the kitchen, and as the door was wide open and nothing waited beyond it except a few dirty dishes from breakfast, it was something of an anticlimax.
I flicked on the light as we stepped through the doorway, and it only took a second for me to notice the piece of yellow notebook paper stuck to the fridge by a banana magnet.
AJ got there first, tearing the paper free and ignoring the clatter as the magnet hit the floor.
“‘Gone to run some errands,’” AJ read in the flat, dull voice he saved for instances of reading aloud. “‘Back in a few hours. Thomas, if you get home before I do, don’t go anywhere. Susan, we’re out of milk, but I’ll pick some up on my way home. Dad.’”
“Thank God he signed his name, or they’d have had no idea who it was.”
AJ sighed and put the paper on the kitchen table. “A few hours,” he said. “What’re we supposed to do until then, play Parcheesi?”
“Nobody under seventy plays Parcheesi. Nobody under seventy should even know what Parcheesi is.”
“We played it all the time when we were kids.”
“If I recall, we used the board as a bridge to march toy soldiers over.”
“Close enough.”
“Maybe he wrote this a few hours ago,” I suggested, deciding to steer the conversation away from long-extinct board games for the time being. “He might be back any minute.”
“Or maybe he just left and we’ll be stuck here until dinner time.”
“Maybe.”
We stood there for a few seconds, the kitchen clock ticking out a peaceful, endlessly patient rhythm behind us.
I sighed. “Okay, one game.”
AJ headed for the stairs at a jog, and a few moments later was back with a dusty Parcheesi board and an even dustier book of rules.
I shook my head and took a seat at the kitchen table, already turning to page one of the rule book. “This looks kind of complicated.”
AJ held up a finger, jogged out of the kitchen again, and was back a minute later with a bucket of tiny green army men.
I grinned. “Just don’t cry too much when I beat your ass.”
AJ lowered himself onto the chair across from me and flexed his fingers. “Just try it.”
And the battle began.
*
We spent an entertaining hour or so destroying the game of Parcheesi, and as Dad still hadn’t come home by the time we’d cleaned up the toy soldier carnage and put the board back into its box, AJ elected to head to the living room for some quality time with Jerry Springer. I dropped onto the couch beside him, my eyebrow fixed somewhere in the vicinity of my hairline as another classic episode unfolded in front of us.
“I don’t know how you can watch this crap,” I said after a few minutes, after one of the guests revealed to his longtime girlfriend that not only did he wish to terminate their relationship, but was hoping to start something up with her grandmother—who was actually her grandfather who’d recently had a sex change and found a new career at a geriatric strip club, or something like that.
AJ, who was lounging against the couch cushions with an amused little grin on his face, feet propped on the coffee table so the odor from his socks could circulate properly, wiggled his toes. “It’s funny.”
“It’s embarrassing,” I said. “And faker than professional wrestling.”
Very slowly, AJ turned to look at me, something flaring in his eyes that I’d learned to recognize, long ago, as the prelude to his arm around my throat.
“Professional wrestling,” AJ said carefully, “is an art form.”
I matched his stare, pushing up the sleeves of my shirt and moving into as much of a battle stance as was possible while sitting on a poofy, doily-covered couch. I took a serious moment to consider what manner of insult would annoy him the most, and then remembered the thirty or so posters of a certain individual that had papered AJ’s walls until the age of eighteen. And were still tucked safely away in a drawer somewhere, to the immense annoyance of his wife.
“It’s faker than Mariah Carey’s breasts,” I said with a pleasant smile.
His express
ion flickered, and in half a second, he’d launched himself at me and gotten his arm around my neck, jerking me into prime noogie position. But I hadn’t survived a childhood full of similar situations without learning a thing or two, and before he could grind his fist into my scalp, I twisted out of the hold and landed on my feet on the carpet next to the couch. There was a pause when AJ sat there staring at me, and I stood there staring back, both of us starting to grin a bit through our attempts at deadly serious expressions. And then AJ gave a roar straight out of Jurassic Park and hurled himself at me, catching me around the waist and sending us both hurtling to the floor with a crash that shook the house.
“Jackass,” I wheezed when I got my breath back, struggling to squeeze out from underneath a hundred eighty pounds of muscle and manliness, “you’re lucky we didn’t end up in the basement.”
“Apologize.” AJ grunted, and I felt gratified to see that he was having to struggle to hold me down, something that wouldn’t have been the case before I started my weekly sessions with the Billy’s Bootcamp DVDs.
I shoved hard upward and managed to wriggle halfway out from underneath him, but as my legs were still pinned, it didn’t do much good. “For what?”
“For what you said—” He shifted his weight, and we somehow ended up with me lying on my stomach on the carpet and AJ lying sideways on top of me, so we made a writhing sort of plus sign. “—about Mariah.”
I snorted, which AJ responded to by grabbing one of my arms and wrenching it up behind my back in a police brutality kind of way—though it was more uncomfortable than painful, really.
“Say it,” AJ growled, though the affronted tone was spoiled a bit by the huge grin on his face.
“I forgot how much fun this kind of thing was,” I said.
“I thought you did stuff like this all the time.”
“Not this kind of thing, exactly. And not with people I’m related to, usually.”
AJ opened his mouth to reply—
And like a scene from a sitcom, the front door swung open and Dad stepped into view.
There was a long moment when he just stood in the hallway staring at us, like he couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing. Eldest son pinned to the floor underneath second eldest son, eldest son’s arm wrenched up behind his back, both of them grinning like idiots, and all the while an overly made-up woman on TV was relating her experiences with a goat she was sure held the reincarnated spirit of Elvis inside it.
Dad’s lips twitched, very quickly, and as AJ and I watched in astonishment, he gave a quick, choked sputter of a laugh. A laugh, I realized suddenly, that I hadn’t heard in...God. Years and years and years.
“What on earth are you two doing?” Dad asked at last, and while the brief laughter had faded, there was still a hint of it in his expression—mouth slightly upturned, the skin around his eyes still a bit crinkled.
AJ and I took a moment to disentangle ourselves, at which point I grabbed the remote and prudently switched the TV off. Then there was a lot of throat clearing and brushing off of clothes, by which point Dad had shaken his head and headed off to the kitchen with a mutter of, “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
AJ and I lingered in the living room for a minute longer, listening to the telltale sounds of Dad making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen. Then, with one last look at each other, we headed in after him to start World War III.
Chapter Ten
Dad kept his back to us as he puttered around the kitchen, fetching his favorite mug from the cupboard and freeing a tea bag from its packet while the kettle hissed softly on the stove. AJ and I hovered in the doorway, neither of us really sure how to start, until finally Dad sighed and, without turning around, said, “Well, what is it?”
I looked at AJ, who looked at me. A silent battle ensued, until at last I sighed and took a step forward that seemed to take me miles away from the safety of the doorway. “Look,” I said, “the truth is, we came here to talk to you about—”
“If it’s about your grandmother, I’d advise you not to waste my time or yours. My decision there is final.”
To my surprise, AJ stepped up beside me. “Dad, it’s not only your decision. Jess and me, we’re both adults now. We have as much right to have a say in this as you do.”
There was a long silence.
“You are both adults. But being an adult and acting like one are two different things. To be an adult, you have to be able to make hard decisions sometimes. You have to weigh things rationally and make choices based on what’s right, not what’s easy.”
“The easy thing isn’t always the wrong thing,” I said. “Have you seen her there, Dad? She doesn’t belong there. She’s miserable, and if she stays there, she’s going to—”
The mug rattled loudly as Dad’s fist hit the countertop. “That’s enough.”
“There’s no reason why she can’t live at home,” I persisted. “We could hire a live-in nurse, and she could—”
“I said, that’s enough!” he roared, spinning around so quickly that the mug toppled onto its side and rolled in a slow, sad little circle on the countertop.
AJ, who hadn’t witnessed Dad’s similar explosion the other night, looked stunned, but I’d come prepared for this.
I took a step closer, ignoring the frantic messages from my common sense circuits that suggested going in a somewhat opposite direction, and stared into my father’s face. “Dad, look at yourself,” I said, forcing all the calm I could muster into my voice. “Why is this bothering you so much? You make hard decisions every day at the hospital, but for some reason this one is eating you alive. Don’t you wonder why? Don’t you think that maybe it’s because you’re not so sure this was the right decision?”
His arm twitched, just a millimeter, and for that second I was completely, one hundred percent sure that he was going to hit me. Dad had never lifted a hand against any of us in our entire lives, his voice being a much more effective weapon, but in that instant I was sure he was going to do it. I could see the rage in his eyes, in the clench of his jaw and the shaking, white-knuckled ball of his fist. But then it all seemed to drain out of him and he turned back to the safety of the counter and his tea.
With slow, careful movements, he righted the fallen mug and dropped the tea bag back inside, then eased the lid off the sugar bowl and spent a silent moment dropping a spoonful of the stuff into his cup.
“I’d prefer it if you would both leave now,” he said. “Thomas will be getting home soon, and I’d like to talk to him without the two of you here to influence his opinions.”
I looked back at AJ, feeling shaken and wanting very much to leave, but knowing also that leaving now would mean giving up. And no matter how much the years of my childhood had conditioned me to fear the man now quietly pouring water into his Winnie the Pooh mug, I knew that I couldn’t back down. Not on this.
AJ, for all that he could feign ignorance with the best of them when he wanted to, read my expression and gave a curt nod that said, I’m with you.
I turned back to Dad and opened my mouth to start on part two of the offensive—
And the phone rang.
We all froze like a bizarre tableau of Deer Caught In Headlights In A Kitchen, and it was a few seconds before Dad could break free of our shared paralysis and head into the hall to pick up the phone.
The second he was gone, I slumped into the nearest kitchen chair, realizing with a bitter kind of amusement that I was actually trembling a little.
“Don’t feel bad,” AJ said, sitting next to me. “He might be our dad, but he’s a damned scary guy.”
“There has to be a way we can convince him. On some level, he’s got to know that this is wrong.”
“Maybe he does. But just because he realizes it doesn’t mean he’s going to do a damned thing about it.”
“Yeah, but—”
Before I could get the rest of the words out, though, Dad’s voice rang through the house. “What do you mean, you don’t know wher
e she is?”
AJ and I froze. Then, as one, we leaped to our feet and hurried out into the hallway, where Dad was clutching the phone with fingers that were rapidly turning white from the pressure. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him, and given what had transpired over the past few days, that was saying a lot.
“Someone visited her? Who was it? Well, didn’t they sign in? I was under the impression it was your policy to—Well, what did they look like?” Dad listened quietly for a few seconds, and I watched the color drain from his face, which was somehow more frightening than all the rage I’d seen in his eyes just before then.
“What?” he said, sounding suddenly distracted. “Yes. Yes, I...recognize the description. My youngest son. No, I don’t know where he might’ve taken her. I’ve no idea who the girl was. No. I don’t know. Perhaps a classmate. Yes. Fine. Contact me immediately if there’s any word of them. Thank you.”
Dad hung up the phone with a soft click of plastic on plastic.
He didn’t look at us as he said, “It seems Thomas has taken your grandmother somewhere. A girl was with him, and someone saw them driving off with your grandmother about an hour ago.”
Thomas. A girl. Driving off with Grandma...
“Dammit,” I said. No wonder he’d looked so determined. “I think I know where they went.”
Dad fixed a cool stare on me, the kind of stare that commanded that its will be done or else. “Tell me.”
But I shook my head and made for the front door, digging my car keys out of my jeans pocket as I went. “I’ll bring them home,” I said, and before Dad could reply, I was out the door and sprinting to my car.
“Where do you think they went?” AJ asked as he jumped into the passenger side seat beside me.
I buckled my seat belt and jammed the key into the ignition. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think—”
