by Daniel Smith
“Something like that.” I don’t like the nasty reference to my subordinate status to Corinne but it’s not an assertion I can easily disprove.
“You got something to eat?”
“Geez, Danny, I’ll make you a fuckin’ sandwich in a minute. Just tell me what’s going on, ok?! I’ll even settle for a headline!”
“Damn, Pops. Haven’t seen you upset like this since I was messing around in high school.”
Finally, Danny ends his walkabout in the house and plops himself on the sofa, takes a deep breath, then: “Dawn and me, it’s not looking good.”
“‘Trouble in RV Land?’ That can’t possibly be the headline, Danny. Did you hit her? Is there some sort of domestic violence thing—?”
“Of course not. What kind of son did you raise?”
“Just trying to be ready for anything.”
“So it started with this brief little fling I had with this woman I met at an art fair.” Danny’s recently been playing music and showing some of his paintings for next-to-nothing money, no doubt hoping to find an attractive patron who sees something in him that the art and music world keeps missing. He’s not without talent—which is part of the problem as he’s forever flattered with faint praise and thus will not give the “artist thing” up for something more solid and reliable.
“Well, somehow Dawn found out about it—she hadn’t been, you know, intimate with me for some time.” “Intimate” I took to be Danny’s way to curry favor with me about his affair: he wasn’t just sleeping around in east Arkansas, I was being told: he was understandably in search of the deep intimacy that his own girlfriend should have provided but refused to do so.
“Anyway, Pops, I ended that pretty quick. But somehow, Dawn got wind of it and, I guess, out of revenge—who knows?—decides, long after I’d stop seeing this other woman, Dawn decides to start sleeping with the owner of the restaurant she works at. Can you believe that? And this sleazy dude—who’s married, by the way—is a rich big shot in town. Thinks he owns Boaz.”
“Maybe he does. How rich do you have to be to own that little town?”
“Not the point. What I’m saying is she embarrassed me in public I don’t know how many times—now that I look back on it—since I learned just the other day that it’s apparently well known in town that she’s been fucking this guy for MONTHS, which explains all these pathetic looks from the locals, which I never could figure out until”—
“Until what?”
“Until a couple of nights ago, when I fucking walked in on Dawn and this ass wipe pounding away!”
“In the RV park?”
“Yeah, the RV park. Focus, Pops!”
“So what’d you do? Attack him? Pull out one of your fancy knives?”
“Are you kidding? I’m not wasting one of my knives on this punk. I’m not going to jail over this. I just left and made a beeline the next morning for the bank.”
“Oh, God.”
“Hold on, hold on. Well, first, on my way out, I grabbed all the money out of Dawn’s purse—$37 bucks—but the next morning I cleaned out our entire joint bank account.”
“How much was that?”
“Let’s just say it’s enough to get started with. But I knew they’d be coming after me, so I spent a couple of nights at a friend’s house—a guy I play music with in Little Rock on the weekends.”
“So you’ve been hiding?”
“Until I could get all the money, yeah, and made some plans. You would too if you’d just understand”—
“That you stole money from your girlfriend?!”
“It was OUR money, and if she wants to whore around in that two-bit town, she can do it on that jerk face’s dime, not mine. “
“But you took her half too.”
“It wasn’t half; more like a third. I don’t know. Point being, that money was supposed to be savings for US, me and Dawn, to get married and maybe buy a house with. TOGETHER. Like a normal married couple. Instead, she’s decided to hook up with Shithead, Mr. Bigshot, who’s married to some very sad-looking chick who works at the bank.”
“Mr. Shithead—does he have a name?”
“Yeah. Calvin Thompson. Who the fuck has a name like that?”
“The man fucking your girlfriend. So why are you up here, Danny? I’m on your side on all this, of course, but why did you drive all the way to St. Louis in such a hurry?”
“‘Calvin’ didn’t take too well to my discovering what an ass he is. And he especially didn’t like it when Dawn informed him that I’d cleaned out the joint account. Guess his depressed little wife saw me in the bank yesterday. Anyway, Dawn told Shithead to go find me and get back her money. And that limp dick loser said he would.”
“Calvin’s after you?”
“Don’t be so literal, Pops. Not him, exactly. But a rich guy like that knows people. Believe me.”
“‘He knows people?’” I fight back a growing urge to race into the kitchen to pour myself a huge glass of whiskey.
“Yeah. People he can sic on someone like me the way you’d sic a rabid dog on somebody you want to hurt.”
“You’re being followed by some thugs this man hired?”
“Now you’re catching on! I didn’t even get on the interstate all the way up here. Took all kinds of backroads and detours, just in case Calvin Shithead had people ready to intercept me anywhere along the way.”
This was now starting to feel like the plot from a bad B movie, starring my own son. Trouble is, he looked the part and was playing the role really well. “Danny, how sure are you about all this? You’ve been smoking weed. You know how that makes you paranoid. Is this even real?”
“It’s real, Pops, insane-in-the-membrane real.”
“And you say this because—?”
“Because ‘Calvin’ left several messages on my cell basically telling me he was coming after me.”
“Maybe that’s just tough Boaz talk.”
“He’s done this to other people in town for a lot lesser things. He’s a nut job with lots of money, and obviously a small dick. Bad combination, man. So I high-tailed it up here to sort of lay low for a while, get off the radar, you know?”
“Jesus, Danny.” My head is spinning wondering how Corinne will react to all this chaos. Sometimes I think she feels that because we successfully launched Danny into the world—raising him with as much love as we could muster, getting him through the perils of his teen years culminating with his graduation from high school, and interceding here and there with emergency funds and advice in the years afterwards—that now he’s truly on his own and we should mostly stay out of his life, except, of course, for his birthday, holidays, and those rare moments when there’s a well-planned visit. If Danny had been our biological child, I wonder if she’d be trying to compartmentalize our parenting experience in such a way.
“Hope you’re okay with this, Pops. I just need to get my footing and I’ll be up and running and out of your hair.”
Now I’m starting to pace around the house. And I could tell that’s making Danny nervous.
“Look, if you and Mom want me gone, just say the word and I’ll hit the road.”
“Speaking of your car, where is it?” I say, glancing out the front window seeing nothing.
“Oh, I drove it straight into your little garage and closed it up. Hope you don’t mind. Can’t let it be sitting out real obvious in the driveway.”
“These thugs know where I live?!”
“I don’t know, man! Jesus! Just making sure that if they followed me, they can’t find me now. OK?”
I look at my watch. Nearly six. I rush into the kitchen and pour a big glass of Scotch. Danny follows me.
“Damn, when you need a drink, you need a”—
Just then the front door opens and I hear a familiar voice: “Hey, honey I’m home.”
I chug the entire glass of scotch.
3 | Brian
“In here, sweetheart,” I say feebly. Danny and I exchange concerned gla
nces as Corinne walks towards the kitchen.
“I think I made a breakthrough on the Ferguson case,” Corinne says in an upbeat voice from the living room, “so I figure we ought to pop a cork and celebrate”—
As she enters the kitchen, her eyes widen at the sight of Danny and me drinking Scotch and looking helplessly her way. “What the hell?”
“Danny’s here,” I needlessly observe.
“I can see that,” she says glaring first at Danny then me. “Hence my question.”
“Hey, Mom. Great to see you. Pops and I’ve been visiting.”
“’Visiting’? Did I miss a call, an email, a text about your ‘visiting’ us today, Danny?”
“Well, I did call Dad.”
“Oh, well that was thoughtful. Guess that was information that was conveyed on a strictly need to know basis,” Corinne says throwing me an angry glance, before walking up to Danny and giving him a perfunctory hug.
“He called me while I was out on my hike—like an hour ago.”
“So, to what do we owe the honor, Danny?”
“Well, it was a bit of a spur of the moment thing, I admit. As I was telling Dad, I’ve been having some issues with Dawn, and I, well, I needed to get some space to sort of clear my head.”
“And you chose our house 500 miles away from Bumfuck, Arkansas to ‘clear your head,’” Corinne says as she pours herself a huge glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.
“’Bumfuck.’ I like that,” Danny reacts with a chuckle.
“There’s nothing remotely funny here, Danny.”
“Right,” Danny responds. Suddenly, he gets anxious and decides on a new tactic. “You know what? I left my smokes out in the car. Mind if I run get them?”
“You smoke now?” I ask.
“Socially, only,” he says as he goes out the kitchen door and heads toward the garage.
Corinne trains her intense gaze on me now, as if she’s looking for something in my eyes or my face that can explain why she had ever gotten to know me, let alone married me.
“It was so sudden—he called me from the road, a half hour from here. I couldn’t turn him down.”
“’Couldn’t turn him down.’ Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, Brian.”
I try to explain Danny’s predicament as quickly and fairly as I can but the more I explain, the more Corinne’s face fills with anger and disbelief. It has been so many years since Danny’s often crazy world has intruded into our quiet little domestic life that Corinne has come to assume that she and I built something together that is virtually impregnable against the forces of Danny. Realizing now that he can still insinuate himself into our lives—and with virtually no advance notice—seems to leave her with a feeling of disturbing vulnerability.
“This is not healthy, Brian. I know he’s our son, but we can’t have him just show up in our home like this,” she tells me in a powerful whisper.
“It’s his home too, Corinne.”
“It won’t be if he stays here.”
“What do you mean?”
“We need to sort this crap out—whatever drama it is that’s going on with him—but come the weekend, if he’s still here, you and I are going to have some real trouble.” With that, she stalks out of the kitchen.
Given Corinne’s level of upset, I decide it’s only politic for me and Danny to go into town for dinner. No way is Corinne in the mood to break bread with Danny this evening. So we drive over to Louie’s, a downhome Italian place on the Hill, to get a bite to eat.
Danny clearly understands the turmoil he’s caused, but I try to do some useful damage control, explaining Corinne was just shocked and taken aback in the moment. “Corinne’s not into surprises,” I remind Danny, who nods as he tucks into a big plate of spaghetti as if he hasn’t eaten in a couple of days. Though he never talks about it, I can tell that Danny senses that when it comes to Corinne there’s a certain restraint, a holding back of full maternal love, that’s doubtless rooted in him being adopted. Whether this leaves him saddened or unmoored from a clearer family identity is hard to say. The fact that I go out of my way to stay emotionally connected to Danny draws him closer to me. The one thing I’ve never revealed to him is the underlying role he played in our marital “deal”: that Corinne agreed to the adoption as a necessary element in sealing our marriage.
“So do you want to talk about this thing between you and Dawn?” Danny throws down a glass of Chianti, looks at me a second, then shovels another bite of pasta into his mouth. I try to remember when I last looked at my son and saw only happiness and joy. Age five. Before Corinne and I ever even mentioned we weren’t his biological parents, before Danny felt even the slightest doubt about the world or his place in it. By the time he entered the first grade, we sat him down and told him about his background, but that by choosing him, we were singling him out as special, as uniquely worthy of love. At first he liked that, but soon he began asking endless questions about why his mommy and daddy “gave me away to strangers.” From that point on, Danny must have come to see his life as always precarious, where mystery and the unknown prevailed over confidence and inner certainty.
Finally, he polishes off the pasta, wipes his mouth and takes a deep breath. “It’s like this, Pops. Sometimes you have to go through fire with someone to figure out if they’re worth the effort.” Before I can fully digest this piece of wisdom, Danny plunges on. “Yeah, I may have screwed up with Dawn. Shouldn’t have been boning that other chick, but I ended that and owned up to it. What Dawn did was pure revenge and she never told the truth about it. And of all people, with that loser shithead! So that’s why I didn’t get all that upset or wail on ‘em when I walked in on their little scene. It just confirmed something I kinda suspected: she’s not worth my time.”
“So at that point you just focused on cashing out.”
“You could say that.”
“But now you’re on the run. Do you think that turned out to be a wise choice?”
Danny shrugs and decides to order dessert. You’re only going to get so much reflection out of my son; as he once reminded me after a lecture I gave him with my professorial tone, “I’m not like you, Dad: I don’t live inside my head; I live from the skin out.” He feels his way through life. Right. And it can’t be feeling too good right about now.
I feel my cell buzzing and give it a quick look: it’s Claire calling from Texas. I get up and step outside to take it while Danny schmoozes with the waiter about the dessert possibilities.
“Hi, Claire, what’s up?”
“Oh, nothing much. Your dad fell so we’re getting some tests done.”
“Again?” He’s fallen like a dozen times the past year and each time I fear it will produce a broken hip, a concussion or worse. A former athlete, my dad likes to brag, even in his frailty, that he “knows how to fall.” From what I can gather from Claire’s concerned but calm tone, he may have only bruised his shoulder and knee. But I worry that all these falls will exacerbate his dementia, which is already pretty advanced.
“Thanks for calling me, Claire, and tell Daddy we’re thinking about him and want him to stay safe, and do what you tell him.” She laughs. We both know how ludicrous it is that Robert will follow orders from anyone. As she nearly always does, Claire asks me to give her love to Corinne and Danny. I almost tell her about Danny’s surprise visit but decide against it. She has enough on her plate as it is.
I return to our table where Danny is studying the dessert menu as if it’s a wondrous treasure map.
“That was Claire.”
“Oh, cool,” he says, still deep in study.
“She asked how you’re doing.”
“Yeah, I need to go visit Grandpa sometime.”
“That would be nice. Listen, Danny, whatever you need to do to sort things out, I want you to know I’m here to help.”
“Wait a minute, Pops,” Danny says, throwing down the menu. “What’s better here, the crème brulee or the cheesecake?” Before I can respond, he calls the waiter
over and makes his big decision.
After watching Danny devour a huge slice of cheesecake, I realize I only have a few minutes to get some things straight with him. “You can only stay three days with us, Danny. Corinne and I have talked”—
“Yeah, I know she must have laid down the law.”
“No, not the law. An understanding. We’re going to help you get back on your feet, get your head clear, whatever. But you need to head back down there to face things, make some final decisions with Dawn, confront the people trying to find you, deal with the money, and so on.” Danny nods vaguely. “Just a few days. Do we have a deal?”
“The cheesecake was dope, by the way.”
“Danny!”
“Yeah, we’re cool.”
On the ride home, Danny asks about Corinne’s legal career, an odd question coming from him. “What do you care about the cases she’s working?” I ask.
“No big deal. Just wondered what all the celebration was supposed to be about.”
“She’s handling a murder case involving a romantic triangle—a woman killed the wife of the man she was having an affair with.”
“Cool. And Corinne’s representing the chick who killed the wife?”
“Yeah. She’s a defense attorney.”
“Wow. That’s fascinating. I should talk to her.”
“Whatever for?” Now I’m alarmed. The last thing either of us needs is Danny grilling his mom about her legal work. Danny shrugs and is about to say something when his cell buzzes. He looks at the number and grimaces, then clicks it on to talk.
“What?” He shakes his head, only half-listening as whoever is on the other end is clearly ticking him off. “You can talk all you want, but we’re done.”
“Dawn?” I whisper. He nods.
“That was sick what you and Shithead were doing,” he tells Dawn. “I don’t care. With me that was different and you know it!” Again, he pulls the cell away from his ear as if the very sound of her voice was painful to him. “And, no, I’m not returning the money. That’s it. Let him come at me. I look forward to bashing in his fucking skull.” He clicks off the cell.
