One Last Thing Before I Go

by Jonathan Tropper

  When they arrive in Long Branch, windblown and dusty, Oliver can’t find the house. They drive around for a while, up and down quiet residential streets filled with large, laid-back-looking homes, while Oliver tries to get his bearings. Jack offers to put the address into GPS, but Oliver is adamant that he can find the place, and seems unwilling to have to resort to satellites, as if that would be too much confirmation of this decade-long estrangement. But he finally gives in, pulling up the address from his phone, his faced etched with frustration.

  Two right turns later, they pull up in front of a large, comfortable-looking house with an L-shaped addition and the shoreline visible about a quarter of a mile behind the backyard. It’s an idyllic house, almost fake in its relaxed perfection. Oliver whistles, impressed.

  “Restored Georgian, five bedrooms, three and a half baths, newly renovated, ocean views. That’s some serious real estate.”

  “What does your son do?” Silver asks.

  “He writes children’s books.”

  “He must be good at it.”

  Oliver gazes out from the car, sinking down in his seat. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “You are sick,” Jack says. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “Nevertheless,” Oliver says. Then he cracks open his door and pukes onto the sidewalk.

  “Seriously, Oliver?” Jack says, looking away.

  Casey leans forward to rub Oliver’s back, a gesture that strikes Silver as particularly generous considering she barely knows him, and he feels a warm lump form in his throat.

  “We shouldn’t have come,” Oliver says, pulling himself back into a sitting position, wiping his mouth on a loose napkin from the floor. “I think we should go.”

  Casey looks over at Silver, her eyes imploring him to intervene.

  “You can’t be serious,” Jack says.

  “I’m sorry,” Oliver says, still looking a bit green. “This was a mistake.”

  “Bullshit!” Silver says loudly.

  Jack and Oliver both turn around to look at Silver, unaccustomed to such vocal certainty from him.

  “This is not a mistake. The mistakes were already made, years ago. We all made them. And we’ve been paying for them ever since. But there’s only so long we can keep paying. I don’t know what happened between you and your son. But whatever you did to him, it can’t be any worse than what I did to Casey—”

  “I slept with his fiancée.”

  That silences Silver for a moment. It silences them all, even those of them who were already silent.

  “Shit, Oliver,” Jack says. “Silver had a perfectly good pep talk going there, and you had to go and fuck it up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My point still stands,” Silver says. “You can’t let your mistakes define you. You’ve paid for it long enough. No kid should be without his father. And if your son continues to make that choice, then that’s his tragedy. But it’s your job, as his father, to let him make that choice. You can’t make it for him.”

  Oliver looks at Silver for a long moment, then back at the house.

  “He’ll probably just tell me to get the hell off his property.”

  “And if he does, you can go home knowing you tried.”

  Oliver nods slowly, then opens his car door again.

  “Good luck,” Casey says.

  They all watch as Oliver heads up the long, curved walk to the house.

  “He’s had cancer for six weeks and he didn’t tell us. Can you believe that?” Jack says, shaking his head. “What the hell is wrong with him?”

  “The same thing that’s wrong with all of you,” Casey says, watching Oliver ring the doorbell.

  “And what’s that?” Jack says, turning to look at her, but Casey remains quiet, unwilling to explain what it is she meant.

  * * *

  The front door is opened by a tall, thin woman in exercise clothing. A small boy stands beside her. Oliver is momentarily thrown by the sight of the boy. The woman says something to him, but Oliver can’t take his eyes off his grandson. He says something to the boy. The boy responds, and Oliver nods somberly.

  The woman looks briefly past him to where Jack, Silver, and Casey are sitting in the car. The three of them smile and wave self-consciously. She waves back—a positive sign?—then disappears back into the house, leaving Oliver to stand there with his grandson. A moment later they are joined by a stocky man in khaki shorts and a T-shirt. This is Tobey. There is no way to miss the family resemblance, down to the same pattern of baldness. Father and son stand there for a moment, each taking the full measure of the other. Like his wife, Tobey looks past Oliver to the car, and the three of them wave again. Tobey doesn’t wave back. Then Jack throws the car into gear and pulls away from the curb, tires squealing. Silver and Casey are thrown back against their seats.

  “Jack!” Silver shouts. “What the hell?!”

  Jack shouts over the roar of his accelerating engine as he steers them out of the neighborhood. “His son would have to be a real prick to kick him out if he doesn’t have a ride.”

  Silver has to concede that maybe he has a point.

  * * *

  Jack finds the beach, and manages to scare up some blankets from his trunk. Silver buys some sandwiches and sodas from the concession, and they eat lunch while they watch the pounding surf. The beach is crowded for a weekday. People are starting to sense the end of summer, still a few weeks away. He looks at Casey pulling her hair into a loose ponytail as she turns her face into the wind, and feels all the usual deep pangs of love and regret. It would have been so easy, he thinks, to do things like this; take her on drives, to the beach, to a movie. Anything. It’s not like he was busy traveling the world. He was right here, and nowhere to be found.

  He lies down on his back and closes his eyes, trying to shake off the self-loathing that has suddenly descended upon him.

  “Don’t die,” Jack says.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  * * *

  Later, Silver and Casey walk barefoot along the waterline with the sun at their backs. Casey throws bits of bread up to the low-flying gulls, who snatch it out of the air as they bank and swerve.

  “I slept with Jeremy again,” she says.

  He looks at her, at the way she’s looking straight ahead, focused intently on his reaction without ever looking at him. It’s a strange thing to tell him, but these are strange times between them, and something about the crashing surf seems to blunt the edges of their conversation, making everything feel a bit safer than usual.

  “It was that night at his party, before you and Mom showed up. I went there to tell him about the baby, and I ended up sleeping with him.”

  “I figured,” he says, remembering what she looked like coming down the stairs with Jeremy that night. “Why do you think you did?”

  He worries that he sounds too much like a shrink, but the way she considers the question tells him he was right to ask it. “I guess I just wanted to feel like a regular teenager again, you know? I wanted to feel how it would have felt if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, if we’d kept fooling around for a little bit, you know, a summer fling, my first sexual relationship.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Yeah, because, as far summer flings go, I screwed this one up pretty badly.”

  “There’ll be plenty of others.”

  “Plenty? You think I’m quite the whore, don’t you?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She smiles. “You think Oliver’s son will forgive him?” she says.

  “I don’t know. Not everyone is as forgiving as you.”

  “True.”

  “Thank you,” Silver says. “For never giving up on me.”

  “Oh, I gave up on you,” she says, taking his hand. “I just
don’t have any follow-through.”

  He smiles and they head down the beach at the leisurely pace of two people who have nothing to do and no particular destination in mind.

  * * *

  When they come to pick up Oliver, he is sitting on the front porch next to Tobey, with his grandson on his lap. Another boy, a few years older, sits on Oliver’s other side.

  “This looks promising,” Jack says.

  They watch as Oliver stands up, reluctantly putting his grandson down. He turns to Tobey and they exchange a few strained words and shake hands. Then Oliver reaches out and tentatively touches his son’s shoulder. It’s an awkward, almost lame gesture, and it makes Silver cringe inwardly in empathy. He knows the broken love that forces the need for contact like that.

  Oliver crouches down to hug each of his grandsons. The younger one pulls back and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Even in the car they can hear the kid’s sweet, high-pitched voice as he says, “Good-bye, Grandpa.”

  Oliver gets back into the car, and Jack pulls away. “So,” Jack says. “How did it go?”

  “He didn’t throw me out,” Oliver says.

  “Baby steps.”

  Oliver nods, then turns to look out the window as suburbia gives way to strip malls and traffic lights, and then the Garden State Parkway. Everyone is quiet, relaxing into the noisy wind stream of the convertible as Jack pilots it down the highway, and the occasional slight tremor in Oliver’s shoulders is the only indication that he is silently weeping against the car window.

  * * *

  They are driving out of a rest stop just north of Newark when Jack asks Oliver if his son is going to come in for the surgery.

  “He doesn’t know about that,” Oliver says.

  Jack looks over at Oliver, incredulous. “You didn’t think to mention that you’re having surgery?”

  “It didn’t come up.”

  “How about the cancer? Did that come up?”

  “I didn’t want to manipulate him.”

  Jack brakes hard enough that they all lurch forward in their seats. Then he turns in his seat to face them, oblivious to the fact that he is parked in the middle of the entrance ramp. “I just want to go on record as saying that the two of you are handling your respective illnesses with a degree of ineptitude that is staggering. This one can’t be bothered to have the operation that will save his life, and this one keeps his cancer a secret from his friends and family. I mean, Jesus Christ!”

  Behind them, a car honks, then swerves angrily around them. Jack stands up in his seat to yell an angry fuck-you at the driver.

  “Take it easy, Jack,” Silver says.

  “Fuck you, Silver,” Jack says angrily. “Fuck you and your torn aorta and your little emotional monologues that make everyone feel uncomfortable.”

  “Jack . . .” Oliver says as another car honks and swerves around them.

  “And fuck you too, Oliver,” Jack says, gathering steam. “Fuck you and your secret-ass cancer and your old-man platitudes. You’re fifty-six, for God’s sake. Get over yourself.” He stares back and forth at both of them, and then sits down, staring forward grimly. “I’ve got an ex-wife who wishes I was dead, and an eight-year-old bastard kid that has been raised to think I’m the antichrist,” he says. “I don’t have a family. You’re my goddamn family. And believe me, I know how pathetic that is, but that’s where I’m at. And I am sick and tired of you both acting all casual about dying. Death is the least casual thing there is. And if you two leave me alone out here because you couldn’t be bothered to take care of yourselves like normal people, I will make a point of visiting your goddamn graves on a weekly basis just to piss on them.”

  He nods to himself for emphasis, then throws the car back into gear and starts driving again.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, as an afterthought.

  “Don’t be,” Oliver says.

  “It was a good speech,” Silver agrees.

  “Really? I thought maybe I took it a bit too far with the whole pissing-on-your-graves thing.”

  “Nah,” Silver says. “That was fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. You’re good.”

  “It was really more of a metaphor,” Jack says, and something in the way he says it sends Casey into a fit of tearful laughter that lasts for a good half mile or so.

  CHAPTER 49

  Tonight feels complicated.

  For one thing, Silver is seeing stars. Not stars, really, but glimmers, like the air is wearing sequins, so from his seat at the bar between Oliver and Jack, everything in the room is glittering. For another, he is on his third glass of bourbon, neat.

  He has never been a beer drinker, has always found it to be a sluggish buzz. He sticks to bourbon, always neat, and has learned through trial and mostly error to start watering them down after his third. But still, three shots of Noah’s Mill can give him that warm flush, that sense of shifting, as if someone has been making minor adjustments to the gravity in the room.

  So there’s that.

  Also, Lily is sitting on a stool at the center of the small, jerry-rigged stage in the corner of the bar, strumming her guitar and singing a soulful, acoustic rendition of Pat Benatar’s “We Belong,” which he finds both beautiful and random. He is here at her invitation; it was the last thing she said to him as he clumsily backed away from her in the bookstore.

  “I’m singing at Dice tomorrow night. I don’t get much of a crowd. You should come by.”

  He had sensed and been moved by the forced nature of her seemingly casual invitation, tossed out there like it was of no consequence, and now here he is, simultaneously hopeful and angry at himself for being so. Hope has never been a friend to him.

  Tonight is also a little bit tricky because Miranda, the mother of Jack’s bastard son, Emilio, is tending bar, and she is clearly not happy to see Jack here. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Silver thinks. And Jack’s not making it any easier, staring her down over the lip of his beer mug.

  And Oliver has come along, not so much to provide Silver with much-needed moral support but because today he faced his son for the first time in a decade and met his grandsons for the first time, and he needs to drink his pain, hope, and fear into submission.

  And Denise will be getting married this weekend, and the date looms totemic in Silver’s mind. He doesn’t know if that will be the best or worst thing that could possibly happen to him, if it will save his life or be the thing that puts him over the edge.

  So, yeah, it’s complicated.

  Time is bending. It’s slowing down and speeding up with no rhyme or reason. Lily finishes the Pat Benatar and starts singing Chrissie Hynde, but suddenly she’s finishing that one and Silver can’t remember hearing the song through. Now she’s playing “She Talks to Angels,” by the Black Crowes—which for some reason is required in every acoustic set played in every bar across the country—and he’s hearing every note, seeing the chords as colors in the air around them, flashing and changing through the glittery air.

  She never mentions the word addiction, in certain company.

  Her hair is down tonight. It’s the first time he’s seen it like that, and she’s wearing a bit of makeup, and a dress and boots that stop just below her knees. Silver is entranced, in a way that makes him pray to God, to himself, to whomever might come through, that he find within himself some basic level of social competence tonight, and maybe, from some forgotten corner of his personality, just the faintest hint of charm. He doesn’t know that he was ever charming, but he suspects he may have once been at least a little bit.

  She’ll tell you she’s an orphan, after you meet her family.

  Lily’s voice, high and soft, pushes past the tin buzz in his ears to land softly in his head. The air shimmers, giving everything a dreamlike quality. Oliver tosses bac
k another shot of Maker’s, and Jack curses at Miranda under his breath.

  “You got something to say?” Miranda says to him, her voice filled with the threat of violence. She is a short, coffee-colored woman with exquisite bone structure and thick dark hair that falls around her like a mane, and she moves behind the bar with a liquid grace, ducking the lame attempts at protracted flirtation from her patrons, ensuring tips with her easy laugh and the low-cut sleeveless T-shirt proclaiming the name of the bar in bright pink letters. It’s easy to see what it was that pulled Jack in.

  “No. Nothing,” Jack says, slapping down an excessive tip onto the bar. “Another beer, please.”

  “That guy giving you a problem?” someone says from farther on down the bar. They all look down to see the guy, late twenties, hair locked into place with pomade like it’s the ’50s, shoulders and biceps rolling off each other beneath his tight T-shirt.

  “She’s my baby mama,” Jack calls down to him.

  Silver watches Lily sing, transfixed. It’s ridiculous, the love and tenderness he feels filling him up. He wonders if it might be yet another stroke, but then reminds himself that there’s been something about her since he first saw her, more than a year ago, singing in the bookstore. He’s been around long enough to know that men, or at least men like him, can fall in love like that. He sees something in her, senses it from her crooked smile, from the way she opens her eyes between verses to look out at the back of the room, from the soft uncertainty of her voice, from the songs she chooses. He knows her without knowing her.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jack says, although Silver’s pretty sure no one has said anything.