“He's just been so nice. He's just an old friend. I don't understand what you're upset about.”
This wasn't going well.
“Look, I...” I had to regroup.
“When I came home the other day and he was sitting in dad's chair, it made me really uncomfortable.”
She pursed her lips and took a shaky breath through flared nostrils.
“Okay. I guess I can understand that.”
“I'm sorry, it just made me really uncomfortable. I wasn't expecting it, and it seems like you're talking to him a lot...”
“Aren't I allowed to have friends?”
“Mom...” She wasn't playing fair.
“Of course. You're a grown woman. You can do whatever you want. I just... I really don't like this guy. I don't know what else to say. He makes me really uncomfortable.”
She regained her composure.
“Okay. I hear what you're saying. I just don't understand.”
Even with all my planning, this conversation was falling apart faster than I could stitch a coherent thought together. I was sinking fast.
“I don't know what to say. He just makes me really uncomfortable.”
“You know, he'll never replace your dad.”
She had completely misinterpreted everything I'd said up to that point.
“I know that.”
“Well then what do you want me to do? Do you want me to stop seeing him, is that what you're saying?”
“No. I just – I can't imagine me ever being okay with him.”
We were venturing into dangerous territory. I disliked the guy on a fundamental level, but that wasn't an easy thing to explain. I'd made a point of avoiding that aspect of my feelings when I'd planned our conversation. I knew it would only make things harder. Unfortunately for my plan, we'd gone way off script.
“Do you want me to be alone? Do you expect me to stay single for the rest of my life?”
“No, of course not. I'm just really not okay with this one guy. Anybody else. Just not him.”
“I'm so tired of being lonely.”
She was tearing up again.
“I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be hurtful. I just felt like I had to say something. It wasn't fair for me to be upset about it and never say anything. I had to tell you how I felt.”
“Well I'm glad you said something, but I still don't understand.”
Things didn't get any better after that conversation. If anything, they got worse. Putting my feelings into words cemented and fortified them. I went from not really liking the guy to hating his guts. Not only that, my mother seemed more infatuated than ever. My sister remembered a line our parents had used when she was fifteen and on the phone nonstop with her first boyfriend. “It's a friend, not an oxygen mask.” That little parenting lesson seemed to have been forgotten. Granted, neither of us spent that much time at home, but the relationship still caused friction. No matter how little we were around, its influence was unavoidable.
Her boyfriend's continued presence grated on me. Maybe I felt like he'd manipulated my mother when she was in a vulnerable place. He'd shown up with the old “I'm there for you” line at just the right time, that was for sure. Maybe I felt like he was disrespecting my father by moving in on my mom so rapidly and settling in so readily. Usurper. I resented the fake cheery mask he'd put on whenever we'd run into one another. I openly loathed the guy and wouldn't so much as be in the same room with him. In spite of that, he insisted on greeting me with the same artificial smile he'd put on the first time we met. It was a slap in the face. I might've hated him a little bit less if he could've found the decency to respect my wishes, if he would've stopped trying to make nice. He knew where I stood. The niceness wasn't genuine, it was a taunt. “I'm fucking your mother. Now I'm going to grin in your face because there's jack shit you can do about it.” She refused to see his mock friendliness as the act of hostility it clearly was. She even told me off for taking it the way he obviously intended it.
My disgust for him grew over a couple months. I didn't start hating him overnight. One day, I stopped by my mother's place and picked up the mail on my way in. The son of a bitch was having magazines delivered to our house. The house I grew up in. The house my father raised me in. This guy certainly planned to be around for a while, didn't he? Another afternoon, I came over to do some laundry while my mother was at work. The driveway was empty, but there he was in our house. Apparently, he was in the habit of stopping by and letting himself in when my mother wasn't even home. Not only that, he was parking in our garage! He greeted me with a loud, leering “Hello!”. Rage flared up in my chest. I found myself clenching and flexing my fists. A little voice growled in my head. “Hit him. Break his fucking nose. I bet he has a glass jaw. Do it. Swing. If only he would swing first. You could pop him with a left and land a right cross before he could even blink. What do you want to bet he'd hit the ground?” I'd never considered myself a violent man, and I had only gotten in a couple real fights my entire life, but that voice was awfully persuasive. I had to work to talk myself down. The worst run-in we had was one morning when I dropped by unannounced. I had been on my way to work and the house was about half of the way there. I'd felt sick from the moment I woke up, just not bad enough to call it in. In the car on the way there, I got caught short. I needed a bathroom immediately. My stomach was churning and I absolutely had to pull over. The house was right there, so I turned down the driveway without even thinking about it. My mother had already gone for the day, so I expected to find an empty building. Instead, I walked in on the asshole, alone in our house, in his underwear. In the middle of the week. There were things I had assumed about their relationship, but this was all kinds of confirmation that I really didn't want. I forced myself to turn around and walk out the door. I slammed it and the house shook. I was shaking, too. I was roaring inside. I had to get the fuck out of there. This thing was moving way too quickly.
You've got to be asking, why did I keep stopping by unannounced if this kind of stuff kept happening? Well for one thing, it was the house I grew up in. It was supposed to be my home, my permanent residence. It had always been a safe place. Even when I didn't live there anymore, there was still a certain sense of belonging. It took me a while get over that, to teach myself that it wasn't home anymore. It was my mother's house, not mine. That wasn't the only stumbling block, though. See, after our talk at the Chinese restaurant, my mother started to pick up on the tension between the family and her new boyfriend. She immediately stopped inviting us over when he was going to be there. We appreciated it. She still broke off conversations to answer the phone when he called, but she'd leave the room. In the following weeks, she stopped dropping his name every other sentence, and he even disappeared from her stories. If I'd wanted to delude myself, I could have pretended it was over between them. But that wasn't the case, and I knew it. To someone who didn't know her as well, it may have looked like there was a new balance in place, where she had reevaluated how important their relationship was relative to the rest of her life. That wasn't it either. She was compartmentalizing. Family went in one box and the boyfriend went in another. She was gradually eliminating the overlap. It didn't seem healthy, but then, nothing about it was healthy as far as I was concerned. In any case, her compartmentalization made it easier for me to forget he was around. The occasional new evidence that he was digging in deeper only made me more angry, made me hate him even more for putting us in our no-win situation. I guess I could have been mad at my father for being gone, but that would've felt misplaced. On the other hand, my hatred of the boyfriend felt right. At no point had I been okay with him. What I hadn't accounted for was that all my anger and frustration had to go somewhere. It had begun building the moment we'd first met, and now its growth was out of control. Our conflict was going to come to a head, and nothing was going to stop it. It was not going to be pretty.
I spent the day working around the house. My dad had never been particularly handy, but I felt like I had to do whatever I could
. I wanted to do whatever I could. There were some missing shingles, a piece of siding that had blown part way off, cabinet doors that were loose on their hinges, some rotten ceiling tiles in the basement, burned out light bulbs in ceiling fixtures here and there, and a cracked bathroom sink. It hadn't all happened at once, it was just the kind of disrepair that happens when you own a house, everyone living in it has higher priorities, and there isn't enough extra money to pay someone else to do the work for you. Little repairs pile up like that. Without the minor preventative maintenance fixes, you wind up with more problems. Bigger problems.
I didn't get it all done in a day. There was actually a lot more to do than I mentioned, but it was all just a bunch of little fixes that needed to get done sooner rather than later. Some of the repairs required new stuff – hardware or something. Others I could finish with a bit of spare time and elbow grease. I couldn't safely do the jobs that needed the ladder, thanks to my recent injury. My knee was still swollen up like a grapefruit. It wouldn't bend or straighten all the way. On top of that, it was sore and felt seriously unstable. It made me nervous, like it was going to fold backwards without warning. That had actually happened a couple times since the accident. Once I hopped up on a curb without thinking. I led with my bad leg and it just crumpled under my weight. It made a cracking noise and I fell in a heap on the ground. I'm pretty sure I yelled something obscene involuntarily. A girl was walking past on the sidewalk right when it happened. She didn't even slow down to see if I was okay - probably thought I was out of my mind. Ladders are a little bit nerve wracking when you're working alone, and I was extra shaky with my knee in such rough shape. Still, I did what I could.
I shoveled a little snow and put down salt along the front walk. I even managed to replace the cracked sink. We had an identical one without a crack sitting in the basement, left over from some bathroom remodel my mother had done years earlier. Removing the old one from the counter wasn't that bad, surprisingly. All in all, it would've been a pretty easy job, but when I disconnected the old taps I found one of the shut off valves was leaky. It hadn't caused much damage, but it explained the moisture I found in the cupboard under the sink. The replacement wasn't too hard, but it meant tracking down the water main to the house and shutting it off. Then, of course, I had to go buy a new shut off valve to replace the old one. The job wound up taking more time than I'd expected. My knee ached and then throbbed from sitting on the floor so long. Even though I'd shut off the main, I got sprayed by the water still under pressure in the line when I removed the old valve. The rest of the work went according to plan, but I was tired and wearing wet clothes when I finally finished. My mother would be coming home soon, so I cleaned things up and left as quickly as possible. It seemed easier to work on the house while she was out. There was less to worry about when I had to do something like shut off the water main. No conflicts about whether she was planning to take a shower or run the dish washer. And, of course, there was less risk of running into her boyfriend if I was gone before she returned.
I'd just left the driveway and was about to turn off our side street onto the main drag when I reached for my phone. It wasn't in my pocket. “Shit, I must've – yep.” It was sitting on the counter next to the damn sink. I could see it in my head. I had meant to grab it on my way out, but I'd gotten distracted mopping up the water and I hadn't wanted to get it wet. There wasn't any question. I would have to turn around. I needed my phone. At least I'd remembered before I'd gotten all the way home. I didn't even turn into a driveway. I slowed down and pulled as much of a u-turn as I could on our little road. It devolved into a three-point turn anyway. Back to the house.
I knew something was off as soon as I crossed the invisible plane that separated the driveway from the road. I just felt it. I can't explain it any better than that. There was a strange vibe, like someone had been there besides me. Like there was someone down at the house already. I started to get anxious right away. I eased the car down the drive, past a gap in the trees where brush had grown up about midway down. As I guided the idling vehicle around the bend in the drive, I saw it. There was a shitty little red car in the driveway.
A shot of adrenaline dumped into my blood stream. I felt it crash over me like a wave. The molecules in my fingertips started to buzz. My skin began to hum with electricity. My heart rate spiked, like I was running full tilt. I recognized that shitty little red car. It was a luxury model, but easily twenty years old. I couldn't imagine it looking any less ridiculous then, either, though. It wasn't the kind that's fancy because it has precision engineering or incredible handling or even power. It was the kind of car that's high-end simply because it's expensive. No other reason, as far as I could tell. Some kind of bullshit ego-mobile. What does it mean to have an out of date ego-mobile? That shitty little red car would have made him look like a jackass when it was brand new. There was something extra sad to it, now that it had aged, but I wasn't sad for him. I was incensed. I could feel the blood cells swirl through my arteries with each massive pump of my heart. My leg might've been useless, and I was losing fitness every day, but my heart still had the power of hundreds of miles behind it.
I pulled up past the shitty little red car and parked. I got out, slammed my door, and walked around the back of my own vehicle, past the trunk. I looked toward the ego-mobile, through its windows. No one was inside. I had only been gone for a few minutes, but the asshole was already indoors. He must've turned down the driveway as soon as I'd pulled out. That son of a bitch must've been sitting there, waiting for me to leave. Don't get me wrong – I would not have wanted to see him. I would've been...well, it wouldn't have been good if he had strolled in through the front door while I was there. But to hide out down the street, waiting, watching for me to leave so he could swoop in? What kind of man would do that? What kind of spineless coward was he? Anger flared in my chest. I felt it burn though my veins. My fingers tingled with it. My muscles burned in anticipation of some kind of conflict.
I turned toward the main entrance and made my way up the walk, to the porch. I reached the front door and turned the knob, swinging it open in front of me. Laughter from inside broke off immediately. I could see them both, sitting there in the kitchen. There they were, my mother and the asshole. She had been with him. They'd both sat there down the road, waiting for me to leave. There I had been, fixing the house, replacing that stupid sink, getting soaked switching out the damn shut off valve, mopping up water. And all that time, they were camped out in his shitty little red car, laughing about god knows what. And where was that son of a bitch now? Sitting in my dad's seat at the table.
The fire roared in my ears. It burned my brain. It coursed through my veins like napalm. My heart was working on overdrive. I could feel the heat in my face. My hands throbbed. I didn't even notice how tightly my fists had formed; I found the nail marks in my palms later. I flung the front door the rest of the way open so that it slammed into the wall. The door knob gouged into the plaster. I stormed into the kitchen, the heat of my rage rolling off me in waves. I stopped in the middle of the room and turned toward the table. For once, the asshole was not smiling. I caught him with a stare that should've turned him to ashes. The look in his eyes only made me hate him more. What was it? Uncertainty? Curiosity? Fear?
As I stood there, eyes locked with the single person I despised more than anyone or anything I'd ever encountered in life, my fire turned inward and stoked hotter. The flames that had spread to the tips of my fingers, to the soles of my feet, that burned behind my eyes, raced back toward my heart, all together. The fire raged, roiled, concentrated, grew even more intense. I could feel it inside. As I stood there, burning him with my gaze, I could visualize real flames forming at my fingertips and collecting in the palm of each hand. I could feel the fire at my core joining with the fire in my hands, one in the same, the physical fire commanded by the rage burning inside me. I wanted to burn him. I wanted to set the cuffs of his goddamn pants on fire and watch him run out of the house in
a panic. I wanted to watch him lose his shit as the flames spread. I could see it – I could feel it as the fire tickled the palms of my hands. The flames were cool compared to the burn of my own skin, the unadulterated fury coursing through me.
I felt the fire at my core reach out to gauge my surroundings as I stared the son of a bitch down. The house itself was highly flammable. It would go up like a book of matches. Matches. There was a box of matches on the windowsill. My new sense spread further, flaming wings of a phoenix opening wide, wrapping around the entire building. There were several highly flammable liquids under the kitchen sink. More in the bathrooms. Lots more in the garage. A can of gas in the trunk of my car. The flames behind my eyes showed me a new scene as a glared at him. Matches from the windowsill. Gas from the can in my trunk. One shitty red car.
I watched myself cross calmly to the window. Take the matches. Walk slowly to the front door. Quietly open my trunk. Remove the gas can. Smash the driver side window of his car. Open the door from the inside. Deliberately douse the upholstery with gasoline. Turn to face the house as the asshole rushed to the front door. Strike a match. Toss it without looking. Hear the roar of flames. Feel the sudden wave of heat singe the hairs on the back of my neck.
I stared that son of a bitch down. Without a word, I calmly crossed the room to the kitchen sink. There, on the windowsill where I knew it would be, sat the box of matches. I took it, and turned back toward the table. We locked eyes again, and I returned to the entryway without breaking contact.
“You have five seconds to get the fuck out of this house before I burn your car.”
His mouth dropped open in shock. The flames in my chest had grown into a towering inferno. He closed his mouth for half a second before it dropped open again, like a fish out of water. He looked to my mother, then back at me. He gave a strangled chuckle, like the whole thing was some kind of elaborate prank. I stared that son of a bitch down. I didn't break eye contact, but I could see my mother looking back and forth between me and her boyfriend. She didn't say a word. She didn't seem to have any idea how to deal with what was happening in front of her. For his part, the asshole kept looking back and forth between the two of us.
Telemachus Rising Page 4
