by Chris Lynch
Ten minutes later my dad and I are sitting across from each other at a picnic table on the boulevard overlooking the beach. It’s still early-ish season, and it’s breezy and overcast, so the space is largely quiet, largely ours, largely perfect. I have on my new foolish orange tie-dye T-shirt with a surfboard on the front. In the trash can by the souvenir kiosk is my soiled, lost, and unlamented previous shirt. That one had no embarrassing kitsch on it but did have some prominent designer branding, which made it actually easier for me to part with. I hate wearing advertisements for the manufacturers, but because I am a lazy and passive consumer and my mother bought me that shirt and because it was a particularly fetching forest green, I wore it a lot. I’m glad it’s gone.
“We’ll get you another one of those,” Dad says.
“Sure,” I say, because I am meaningless. “But if I really wanted to, I could probably wash that one fine.”
“There will be no Pegasus shit in our household,” he says. But I already knew that. “Persnickety” would describe my dad, to the point where, not only would I never expect to drag home Pegasus droppings, but on the rare occasion (twice ever, to my knowledge) when he ever steps in more common droppings, he has to buy new running shoes before even coming home. He had to run an extra seven miles one time.
The clams, on the other hand, are magnificent. As is everything else. We both got the same thing, the large fisherman’s platter, which has fried clams and scallops and haddock and massive butterfly shrimp and thick crispy-out/fluffy-in french fries that taste miraculously of seafood. Ketchup and tartar sauce are both along for the ride and almost make up for the crime of one ice cream scoop of coleslaw that threatened to infect everything before we banished it. Root beers with actual creamy heads bring the whole thing home.
Dad is chewing and staring at his plate, gesturing at it with two priest-blessing hands. “I love this more than my own offspring.”
“Nice, Dad. Thanks.”
“What? You think I’m your father? Your mother was supposed to tell you . . .”
This is our Sunday service. I would stack it against anybody’s.
My phone beeps a message. I am still sweating the Junie situation enough that I jump every time. Normally I would let it beep and defer to Dad and fried seafood.
“Must be serious,” Dad says as I read.
Call me please now. I love you.
“I have to call, Dad. I’m really sorry. I’ll just be a second.”
“Fine,” he says. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
Normally this is the type of thing that would irritate him—on Sunday. But he is being very understanding as I step away from the table and walk toward the sea.
Then I look quickly back over my shoulder and catch him kidnapping a butterfly shrimp. He fills the vacancy in my plate with fries.
“Nice, Dad,” I say again. He looks pleased to have been caught.
Come on, Junie, answer.
“Hello?” I say when there is a silent answer. “Hello? Junie? Come on. What is it?”
“Oh, Aunty Em, Aunty Em, I’m frightened—”
I stare off into the distance, into the wind and the surf as the man works the humiliation deep into the wound.
“You’re an unbelievably awful guy, Ronny,” I say as calmly as I can into his cackling laughter. “Where is she? Is she back yet?”
“What about my portrait? When should I come over?”
A shudder, a real, honest-to-hell full-body ripple runs all up and down me at the thought of this man in my home.
“I’m working on it,” I say, probably unconvincingly.
“You promised me.”
“In actuality I never quite—”
“Don’t you dare go thinking that your mother’s gonna do Leona before me. I don’t know who you think you’re playin’ here, kid, but that ain’t happenin’. I don’t play.”
“I never believed that you did. Play. I was—”
“Screwin’ with me, yeah. You was just screwin’ with me is what you was doin’. Don’t get cute with me, boy, or it’ll be your sorriest day ever. You and Maxine go thinkin’ you’re gonna make a dope out of Ronny Blue, you got somethin’ else comin’.”
I think of the angles on that. Of how it could be possible for anyone to make any more of a dope of Ronny Blue. About how half the reason I am getting this earful is that he’s not man enough to try it with Maxie, and I think again how much I would like to be her when I grow up. I think of those angles and some other clever ones, and then I step up and take the more me angle.
“Nobody’s making a dope of you, Ronny.”
“Good. ’Cause if anybody tried to cut in line and get my wife’s picture done before mine—if I even let her get one at all—then it might be a little bit of a shame ’cause of how she’s gonna look come picture day, and who wants a picture of that, huh?”
“Hey,” my dad calls, done with being patient on a Sunday.
“Who would want that, huh?” I say to the awfulest guy there is.
“Right. So fix this up. And do be in touch.”
“I—”
He apparently has no need to hear my continuing thoughts on the subject.
“What was that?” Dad says, looking at me with one eye squinted, the way he always looks when somebody tries to sell him something.
“Nothin’,” I say.
Now both eyes are squinted. “Dropping our g’s all of a sudden?”
“Nothing, Father. Anyway, what is this?” I gesture at my fisherman’s platter, which has clearly been tampered with.
“Seagulls,” he says. “I wish you’d been here. You would have been so proud of me. I fought them off heroically, at great risk to myself. I shouted at them as I flailed away. I said, This succulent fisherman’s platter belongs to my special boy, you big screeching feathered bastards, especially the clams, and to a lesser extent the butterfly shrimp, and if you think you are getting away with them, well, you can just take me, too! It was quite epic. Are you sure you didn’t hear it? You were right over there. . . . Oh, that’s right. You were on your phone. On a Sunday.”
You have to respect the rituals of the true believer.
“Sorry, Dad. You’re right. Thing is, that was Ronny Blue.”
“Ronny Blue.”
“Ronny Blue.”
“Not Junie Blue.”
“Ronny Blue.”
“Rotten Ronny?”
“That’s the one.
“Scumbag Ronny Blue?”
“I think we have identified which Ronny Blue it was, Dad.”
“What’s he want with you?”
I finish the last of the scallops and clams. Dad has been out of seafood for a while now and is social-picking at the fries. The gulls are gathering like a sinister gang around us.
“Actually, Dad, it’s what he wants with your wife, more than me.”
The fry falls right out of his hand and lands under the table, provoking a frightening seagull scrum right there between his feet. In his shorts, with those legs, he could be in jeopardy if there is a nearsighted bird in the crowd, but he is oblivious to them.
“What?”
“Yeah, Dad. It’s Mom he’s rooting around for.”
His face fills with a rush of blood, which then flushes right back out again like in a human head cistern.
“Son, you are absolutely decimating Sunday right now.”
I stand up and surrender the beachhead—the tabletop—to the seagulls and wave Dad to walk with me. “He wants her to do a portrait of him. That’s all,” I say, laughing as much as I honestly can when Ronny Blue is even part of the subject.
“Oh, thank God,” he says, a hand flat on his thrumping heart. My father has a lot of great qualities, and I know I can count on him for almost anything. But if it came down to an interfamily rumble, I think I’d take Mom with me.
“So, you’re cool with Ronald McDouchebag coming by and putting his feet under your table sometime this week?”
He keeps wal
king, keeps that hand glued to that chest.
“See, I was just calming down there. Really, you are simply slaughtering this Sunday for me.”
“Ah, Dad,” I say, putting an arm across his shoulders and pulling him hard into me. “It won’t be a huge deal. We’ll figure out something to get the thing done and over with. I’ll tell you what I’m really upset about, though, if you’re up for it.”
“Oh, absolutely, that would be wonderful. Anything to get my mind off that terrible thing you just told me. Shoot.”
I laugh, shove him away from me. “I’m really glad we can spend this kind of quality time together, Dad, and to know you’re there for me.”
“Great. Now hurry up and tell me your awful thing so I can forget my awful thing.”
“Ha. Well, our awful things are related, as it happens.”
“Okay, tell,” he says seriously. “I’m listening.”
On the way back to the car, I unburden myself to my father. I tell him how much the whole situation with Junie Blue has been killing me anyway, and how now the thing with the weirdness of her “vacation” is just overwhelming my thoughts completely. Telling him does make me feel a little bit better, even though it will have no practical application.
“She is a wonderful girl,” he says, looking at me across the new-penny copper roof of his low-slung Mitsubishi. “It’s going to be a lot of work to ever do as well as her again.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t capable, just that it will be hard work. Speaking of work . . .”
He has this vision of me and him in the family business together, shoulder to shoulder spending our days convincing people that really, their money and our money is really all the same thing. I have no such vision, but no competing vision to counter him with, and therefore no stomach for the vision/career/future discussion in any of its forms.
“Dad, unlock the car. I’m begging you.”
“But . . . you have such a great vocabulary,” he says desperately.
I laugh out loud at him. “Well, whoop-de-shit to that, Dad.”
“See, there it is.”
“What’s a vocabulary got to do with anything, Dad?”
Here’s one of the many things that make my dad singular. As well as I know him, I never know. Never know what serious thing is going to make him laugh. Never know what neutral nothing is going to pull him up all grim and serious.
“Everything. It’s got everything to do with everything. How you talk. How you carry yourself. How you present and how you relate. Those are the keys to absolutely everything, and you have got all that. You think I’m a success because I am some kind of financial wizard? Pffft. I don’t know bo diddly about finance. I know how to relate, Son, and that is what counts.”
“That’s ev—”
“And golf,” he adds. “All that, and golf. That’s what counts.”
“If you unlock the car,” I say with folded prayer hands before my face, “I promise to give this a lot of thought.”
“Promise?”
My hands remain folded, my manner solemn. “Not really.”
His manner goes perky. “I’m going to take that as a ‘We’ll see.’ ”
We get in, and in seconds he is zipping his way up the boulevard and I have my window wide open, my head hanging out there doglike in the direction of the surf, the scent, the sacred stuff.
“You think Ronny Rat has done something bad to her?” Dad ventures when he feels enough time and wind have blown through my head.
I pause. “I don’t know,” I say.
He pauses. “You want me to go over and kick his ass?” he says.
We both pause. But just.
“Bwa-hah-hah-hah . . . ,” we burst out together.
• • •
Another vital sacred part of Sunday used to be the walk over to Junie’s neighborhood, to the corner shop, to buy a newspaper from her. It would be late in the day, and I would pass about five thousand copies of the same papers piled up in other shops along the way, much of the news already old, so it wasn’t the most practical of trips. But I always looked forward to it, always brought her something from my mother’s kitchen, since baking and soup-making were another part of the Sunday sacreds of our home life, even though Junie worked in a shop all day and could snack as much as she wanted to.
But those snacks wouldn’t be my mother’s cran-blueberry muffins, that’s for sure, and they wouldn’t be her coconut crab soup, that’s for sure. And if, what-ho-lookit-the-time, I just happened to show up within an hour of closing time, then hanging around and being a pest followed by walking the lady home was just one more element making a sacred Sunday sacred, was it not?
Until she told me to cut it out. Until she told me I had to leave her and her Sundays the hell alone finally.
That left a bit of a hole, that did.
“Come on. Come out and play some tennis. Stop the moping.”
It’s my friend Malcolm, who has appeared quite mysteriously somewhere down there beneath my bedroom window. I am lying on my bed, not bothering the universe in any way and so reasonably expecting the universe to reciprocate. Malcolm has not interrupted a Sunday of mine since I stopped playing soccer and tennis after Junior year.
“I’m not moping. I’m relaxing.”
“You’ll get hairy hands,” he says, really loudly. It has always been a defining characteristic of Malcolm’s that he seems to believe there is a dedicated line of communication between himself and whomever he is communicating with, and the world at large cannot hear.
“Thanks anyway, Malcolm.”
“Come on,” he yells. “I have two rackets here and a full can of balls. Which is more than you can say.”
I go to my window, kneel down, and press my forehead against the screen. “It’s Sunday, for God’s sake.”
“So? Is your religion anti-tennis?”
“Why are you here?”
“Tennis,” he says, holding up the equipment to prove it. “Like I told you.”
And Malcolm is a man of truth. He says precisely what he means, usually at great volume, and often even when you wish he would be less straightforward.
“Right,” I say, “but why now? I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“That’s because I didn’t know you got dumped. Sorry about that, by the way.”
“Thanks. Who told you?”
“Your dad.”
Grrr.
“Thanks, Dad!” I call out.
“Your mother put me up to it,” he calls back. From the garage. Waxing his car is a sacred.
“Thanks, Mom!” I call out.
“You don’t have to yell,” Malcolm says, pointing at the floor below with a racket held like a machine gun. “She’s right there at the window.”
I hear a Shush so loud, it makes the rosebushes in the garden rustle.
“Fine,” I say. “If everybody wants me to play tennis, I’ll play tennis.”
I am just pushing away from my window when I see Malcolm nod repeatedly and grin toward that downstairs window, and my mother loud-whispers, “Yes!”
Have I gotten this pathetic?
“In a word, yes,” Malcolm says as we head down the street toward the public courts. We could play at Dad’s club, but the local courts are closer, quieter, and not infested with little rocket-propelled-snots who’ve been taking lessons since they were two and stare up at their own radar-gun readings for twenty seconds every time they serve an ace. Yes, radar guns.
“It was a rhetorical question, Malcolm. The kind that not only does not demand an answer but, if you are a good friend, doesn’t even suggest one.”
“Or, to look at it another way, if you’re a really, really good friend, and honest, you are duty-bound to provide one.”
“Okay, so if you are that level of friend, how did you let me get this pathetic?”
“Easy. You dumped me.”
“What? I never dumped you. Anyway, that doesn’t even make sense. Guys don�
��t dump each other. They just . . . are, or not.”
“No, you dumped me, Hamlet. You dumped all sub-Junie life-forms once you guys connected. And now that you are dumped, with me being me and nature abhorring a vacuum, I am attempting to fill the probably unfillable space that was occupied by the exquisite Junie Blue. By the way, for the record, you did very well for yourself there, while it lasted. Even though I still don’t appreciate being dumped.”
“You were not—”
“If a guy has to be dumped for somebody, it’s almost an honor to be dumped for the likes of the lovely Ms. Blue.”
It’s kind of a nice thing for him to say. It kind of hurts to be reminded.
“Well, thanks. I guess.”
“Can I ask her out?”
“Sure,” I say brightly. “Can I kill you?”
“Oh, I see. A skill you picked up hanging around the Blue household?”
“What, Ronny? He’s no killer.”
“No, he’s not. He’s also not such a bad guy, actually.”
“He’s not . . . Compared to what? And where did you come up with that?”
We have arrived at the courts, and as I figured, they are all ours. They are only a couple of blocks from the beach, and are cracked asphalt. But I feel like I know every crack, and so it’s almost a plus.
“I played tennis with him once,” Malcolm says as he slips his racket out of its case and flips me the other one. He saunters to his end of the court as if he has just said nothing particularly interesting.
I stand, staring at him, even though I know, intellectually, I should be walking to the other end of the court. But, really.
“You played tennis, with Ronny frickin’ Blue.”
He has opened the can of balls, two-toned yellow and green. He bounces one, then another several times, hard, testing them out. He throws one down to where I’m supposed to be, puts one into his pocket, then bounces the other one intensely.
“Yeah,” he says, addressing the ball. “It’s tennis. I’ll play with anybody.”
I walk to my end of the court, not looking at him but still talking to him. “You are going to tell me the rest of this story, are you not?”
“Excellent idea,” he says when we’re faced up to each other like real tennis players. “We’ll play for info bits. Like points. Every time you score, I gotta give you a detail.”
