The Odds of You and Me

by Cecilia Galante

  James smiles.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen when he tries to put them on one day and he can’t get his foot into them. Or when they just fall apart completely and we have to throw them away. He’s going to be devastated.”

  “You don’t have to throw them away.”

  “Well, yeah, of course I do. They’ve already started to smell. And they’ll be—”

  “Let him keep them,” James says. “Even if he just puts them under his bed. Or in his closet. He needs to have something like that.”

  “Like what?” I laugh softly. “A pair of old shoes sitting around, smelling up his—”

  “Something he can believe in,” James interrupts. “Even if he doesn’t know why just yet.”

  A slim chorus of voices drifts up beneath us. “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .”

  I press myself more tightly against the banister, look at James as I hold my breath. “They’re just saying the rosary,” he says. “They did this last night, too. When they’re done, they’ll leave.”

  “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .” I close my eyes, lean my head back against the balcony. The women’s slow, muted voices have an almost soporific effect on me, weighting my eyelids, slackening my jaw. I used to say this prayer every night, right before bed. I don’t really have anything against Mary, per se. When I was younger, in fact, I thought she was one of the loveliest women I had ever seen, with the crown of stars set just above her long, serious face and her blue robes. I’d even imagined her as a real mother of sorts, looking out for me from afar. Now, though, she’s just another part of that same dubious Catholic-icon category: beatific, ethereal, anything but real. Anything but here.

  “Does Angus like preschool?” James asks.

  I open my eyes again. “Yeah. Pretty much. There’s one kid, though . . .”

  “A bully?”

  I wince, thinking of my shameful tirade against Jeremy. “It’s kind of hard to tell if he’s actually a bully. They’ve been best friends for the last year. Angus is crazy about him. But lately . . .” I shake my head. “I don’t know. They haven’t been getting along.”

  “Does he pick on him?”

  “It’s more of an attitude.” I pause, searching for the right word. “What’s it called when you don’t give a shit anymore about someone? When they could shrivel up right in front of you and disappear and you wouldn’t care?”

  “Apathy,” James says. “He’s apathetic.”

  “Exactly. That’s what Jeremy is. Apathetic. When it comes to Angus anyway.” I shrug. “He is only five years old. I could just be coming down the tiniest bit too hard on him. I don’t know. I guess you want everyone to love your kid the way you do. All the time, no matter what happens.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” James’s voice is gentle.

  “Yeah, I know. It sucks.”

  “Glory be to the Father, to the Son, to the Holy Spirit . . .”

  “You’re a good mother,” James says out of nowhere.

  I lift my head. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How do you know I’m a good mother? You’ve never even met Angus.”

  “I don’t have to. I can tell just by listening to the things you’ve said about him.”

  I look down at my jeans, rub a finger along one of the denim creases. No one’s ever told me such a thing before. Not even Ma.

  “You don’t think you are?” James asks.

  I shrug, blink back tears.

  “But how could you not be? You love him so much.”

  I nod. My jeans are blurring under my eyes; a tear drops down on the dark blue material, splattering slightly.

  “Bird.” He reaches out, brushes his fingers over my leg. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” And it’s the truth. I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes when I think of Angus stuck with me, I feel like I could cry and never stop. He deserves so much better. So much more.

  The Hail Marys start again, amid a series of soft sighs. I wipe my cheeks with my fingers, try to laugh a little. “They sound like they’re falling asleep,” I whisper, motioning backward with my thumb.

  James nods, still watching me. His face is somber, as serious as I’ve seen it tonight. “He’ll be okay, you know. With you. Even if you screw up sometimes.”

  I look over at him, my eyes still leaking a little around the corners. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted to believe anything more in my entire life.

  “All he needs to know is that you love him. If he knows that, he’ll be okay. No matter what else happens.”

  Below us, the faint chorus of voices begins chanting the Hail Holy Queen prayer, signaling the end of the rosary: “Hail holy queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope . . .”

  We sit silently, listening to the prayer and, as it ends, the shuffle of people as they rise, collect their things, and make their way out of the church. There is the heavy sound of the front doors closing a final time, and then a clicking from somewhere in the back. Slowly, the red lights go off, one after the other, like a series of traffic lights, until the only thing visible in the whole building is the pool of yellow light hovering over the Eucharist in the corner.

  Then complete silence.

  Chapter 29

  James.” I move closer to him, reach out and touch the tip of his sock. Dad’s sock. “Tell me what happened the other night. In the bar.”

  There is a long silence, and for a minute, I regret that I’ve asked such a question. That I’ve gone there again. I withdraw my fingers, sit back again against the wall. I must be imagining this light familiarity that I feel between us. It isn’t real. Or maybe it used to be, but it isn’t anymore. Now, it’s just the memory of the thing; an old coat thrown on casually, without thinking about how tightly it fits in the shoulders. I bite my lip, get ready to apologize, to retract my statement. Except that James starts talking.

  “These last couple years, I’ve just been taking care of my dad.” His voice is weary, as if anticipating the first step of a long journey. “He was sick when you and I first met, but then he took a turn for the worse. That’s why I came back from California. The doctors said he had a rapidly progressive form of Alzheimer’s, and he probably wouldn’t last much longer. One of them said a year, and that was what I let myself hang on to. One more year, and then I was gonna leave again.” He leans his head back against the wall, stares up at the ceiling. “Except that the bastard took his own sweet time to die, just like he did with everything else.”

  “And you took care of him? While you were working and everything?”

  “Well, he was already in a nursing home when I got back from California because he couldn’t take care of himself anymore. There were nurses there, tending to him around the clock, so I didn’t have to worry about the basics. But I came at night. To sit with him. To read to him.”

  “What’d you read to him?”

  James starts to say something and then stops. “Let me go back a little. Before he went into the nursing home, when we were both working at the Burger Barn, he was already starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges. He lived alone, but when he called me—which he did every so often—I noticed that he’d forget some people’s names or what certain foods were called. I didn’t think anything of it, really, but it made him crazy, not being able to remember things. It infuriated him. Anyway, one day he asked me to come over to his place, and when I did, he showed me a pile of books he’d gone and checked out at the library. They were all these science books about the planets and atoms and space and all that. He was a carpenter all his life, but he’d always loved anything having to do with science. Said if anything had a right to make him feel small, it was the universe. Anyway, he sat me down after showing me all those books and he told me something that I’ve never forgotten. He said he was at war.”

  I arch an eyebrow. “At war?”

  “With himself,” James finishes. “He said he was fighting a battle to ke
ep his mind intact and that he’d be damned if he was going to lose it. Then he said he needed my help, which, I’ll tell you, almost made me fall out of my chair.”

  “Why?”

  “He’d never asked me for anything,” James answers. “Half the time, I wasn’t even sure he knew I was alive. Except when I got in the way, of course. Or was trying to pull him off my mother.” He rubs one eye. “Anyway, he said he needed my help, that every afternoon after I got off work from the Burger Barn, he wanted me to drop by, give him three facts from one of the science books, and then quiz him the next afternoon to see if he remembered them. I was a little hesitant about the whole thing, I guess because it was just such an odd thing for him to ask, and I asked him why he couldn’t just do it himself.” A small smile escapes James’s lips. “He said he’d cheat, that he needed someone else around to keep him honest.”

  “Is that why you were always reading the fact book at the Burger Barn?” I ask, marveling silently at the situation’s new context. And to think I’d thought he was a freak, leafing through all those random statistics at six o’clock in the morning. A weirdo!

  James nods. “We ran out of the science books in a few months, so I went and got a few of my own, one of which was that Curious Facts and Data. He loved that one—there were things in there that made him chuckle. Anyway, I liked to check up on the new things I would tell him, go over some of the questions he might ask me afterward.” He bites his lower lip with his teeth and holds it there for a moment. “He’d get so excited when he remembered. God, you would’ve thought he won a gold medal or something the way he’d explode when I told him he was right, hopping a little in the air and pumping his fists.” A vague smile fades. “But then the opposite was true, too. It was awful when he couldn’t remember. He’d curse and throw something, even spit sometimes. And then after the anger passed, he’d get so down on himself, slumping around the kitchen, pulling his hair. He’d tear so hard at it sometimes that it came out by the roots.” He flicks his eyes up at me. “That’s when I started to realize that maybe his mental state was really starting to go.”

  “Because he pulled his hair?”

  James smiles sadly. “Remember all that hair I used to have?”

  I nod. How could I forget?

  “I got it from him. Like, exactly. Same color, thickness, even the same two cowlicks in front. When I was real little, he used to say that if I hadn’t had the same hair he did, he’d have to be convinced we were even related.” James shakes his head, purses his lips as if tasting something bitter. “He took serious pride in his hair, getting the part right, always slicking it down with this wide, perfectly arched swoop in front. For him to pull at it like that—to leave bald patches all over his skull—was another indicator that he was starting to lose it. Sometimes I’d lie to him about the answers, just to make him think he was right, because I couldn’t bear to see him so desperate.”

  “It’s amazing that you were able to do that. To make up with him and everything. Especially after all he put you through as a kid.”

  “Who says I made up with him?” James studies his nails, lifting the edge of one thumb to his mouth.

  “You didn’t?”

  “I was just there because I promised my mother.” James’s hand falls away from his mouth. “It was the last thing she asked me to do before she died.”

  “To stay with him?”

  “To forgive him.” James’s voice quavers around the edges. “And I tried. I really did. I stayed right there.” His jaw clenches, the edges of his nostrils flare. “I showed up every night and waited. For three more fucking years.”

  “Waited for what?”

  “For him to say something! About everything that had happened. I wanted him to acknowledge all the terrible things he’d done to my mother and me so that I could, too, and then maybe we could move forward. After a while, I realized I didn’t even need it to be an apology, which was what I thought I wanted. It could have just been a kind word. A glance. Anything that said that he had fucked up when I was a kid, but that deep down he loved me because . . .” He pauses, shrugging. “Because I was his.”

  “Did you ever bring it up?”

  “Once, in the nursing home. He was pretty well gone by then. I don’t know why I even tried. He was upset about something, but I can’t remember what it was. Maybe it was a Tuesday. Who the hell knows? He’d gone and thrown something across the room. The remote, I think, or maybe a coffee cup. Anyway, it broke, whatever it was, just split apart as soon as it hit the wall, and I went over and picked it up and he yelled at me and told me to leave it where it was, that he didn’t need some pansy-ass cleaning up after him. So I went over and sat down on the chair next to his bed for a minute, and then I asked him why he was so angry all the time.” James furrows his forehead. “He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about, like I was speaking Russian or something. He kept saying things like, ‘Angry? I’m not angry. What’re you talking about?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Dad, you’re angry. You’ve been angry my whole fucking life and I want to know why.’” James leans his head back against the wall and stares up into the inky space above. “Stupid, to ask him then. So stupid. I don’t know what I was expecting. But, God, he was such a shit about it. He just turned on me. Practically sneered in my face. ‘You gonna get psychoanalytical on me? Huh, Mr. Freud? Ask me ten million questions about how I feel, how I should do things? Huh?’”

  I fold one of my hands over the other, resisting the urge to reach out for James’s arm.

  “He just wouldn’t meet me halfway. Ever.” James raises both hands over the wide span of his face and rubs at the edges of his temples. The tips of his fingers turn white; his knuckles are calloused and worn. “And you know, I realized something that night. That when my mother had asked me to forgive him, she’d meant that it was something I had to do, for myself, without expecting anything in return. But you know what? Still, even after realizing that, even after sitting with it and mulling it over, I couldn’t make myself do it. I wanted—I just needed—him to say something first.” He lifts his eyes. “Do you think that makes me a terrible person?”

  “No,” I whisper.

  “Maybe just a selfish one.”

  “You’re hardly selfish. My God, look at all the time you gave him. Especially before the nursing home.”

  “It wasn’t real time.” James shrugs the suggestion away. “We both hated each other through the whole thing.”

  “No, you didn’t. I can’t speak for your father, but you wouldn’t have agreed to give him those three facts every day and then come back and quiz him on them if every part of you hated him.”

  “Well, I guess that makes me a sucker, then, doesn’t it?” James stares hard at me. “Or just an idiot.”

  “I don’t think it makes you either.” I reach out and touch the toe of his sock again. “I think it makes you human.” I close my fingers around the soft material. “I think it makes you good.”

  “Good.” James snorts, spitting the word back out at me. His face twitches suddenly, and he winces, reaching up to brush the cut on his forehead.

  I sit forward quickly. “Are you bleeding?”

  “No. It just itches.”

  I reach for the backpack, pull out the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and the small plastic bag filled with cotton balls, Q-tips, and gauze that I took out of the medicine chest at home. James watches silently as I saturate the cotton ball with peroxide, and closes his eyes as I press it against the cut on his head. But after a few seconds, he pulls back, out of reach. “Please let me,” I say. “Otherwise, it’ll get infected.” He relaxes again, letting me clean the wound. It’s so deep that I can see flesh inside the cut, the pale striations of fat and muscle within the skin. I keep wiping, then arrange a square of gauze over the cut, bite off a section of tape.

  “He died two weeks ago, just before everything happened at the bar.” James’s voice floats up from under my hands. I sit back down, a little closer to him this time, t
he circle of tape still in my hands. “I was so stunned when I came into the nursing home that night and they told me he was gone that I literally just stood there for about five minutes without moving. Then I left. I walked around the city for hours. It was so cold that I couldn’t even feel my feet after a while, but I couldn’t stop walking. I couldn’t believe it was over. I just couldn’t believe it. I think somewhere, deep down, I’d really convinced myself that he would break through that goddamn wall he lived behind and look at me. See me, you know? As someone. As his son.

  “But it didn’t happen. And I didn’t know what to do with that fact. I didn’t know how to make sense of it, or how to make it better. So I went down to Dugan’s and sat on a stool and started drinking. I remember when I got home that night, I went into the bathroom. Stared at myself in the mirror.” He winces. “Maybe I was just drunk as shit, but the longer I looked at my reflection that night, the less I recognized the person looking back at me. I had this crazy thought that maybe my father had had that same experience, that when he looked at me, he didn’t recognize anything. That maybe that was why he didn’t love me, because he couldn’t see anything of himself in me except for a fucking head of hair. And so I opened the medicine chest, and took out the razor and shaved it all off.” He shrugs. “Maybe it was a ‘fuck you’ to him; maybe it was the booze; hell, maybe it was just me starting to go off the deep end. I don’t know.” He inhales deeply, the edges of his nostrils turning white. “Anyway, I did the same thing the next day. And the day after that. Went to Dugan’s. Drank. Walked and walked in the freezing, bitter cold. Went home.”

  He looks at the floor, nods as if accepting something. “It was my fault. I was two sheets—hell, I was eight sheets—to the wind by the time Charlie walked in.”

  “Charlie?” I gasp involuntarily, lean forward a little. “Wait, is that who . . .”

  James nods. “It wasn’t what you think, though, Bird. I wasn’t out to settle any kind of score or anything. I swear. He was just there with some girl.” James looks past me. “Some young kid, probably not even old enough to drink yet. He was all over her, whispering in her ear, playing with her hair, and then at one point he got up to go to the bathroom. We locked eyes and he froze, and I swear that whole night in your apartment passed between us in a second and then he blinked and said, ‘What the hell you looking at, dirtbag?’ I just looked away, but I could feel something starting to build inside, and then on the way back from the bathroom he bumped into me. I knew it wasn’t an accident, and I told him to watch his step—that was it, I swear to God, Bird—and he stopped for a minute and said, ‘What’d you say to me?’ And I repeated myself, although I think I threw in a few expletives this time, and before I knew what was happening, he had reached out and grabbed me, right around the face.” James demonstrates with his hand, reaching up to grab the hollows above his jawline.