Chapter Seventeen

Today is my father’s birthday. He is fifty-three. My mother is throwing him a party tonight, an apparent attempt to keep up appearances of a happily married couple. My father sees his childhood friends once a year for his birthday. The rest of the year he spends his time alone with us. Once my mother pulls the trigger on the separation, he’ll find himself even more alone.

The house is empty. My father isn’t in his customary seat. He is back at work, a note from my mother reads. She is out to lunch with friends, and then, she’ll be running errands for the party. I’m assuming there will be lots of whiskey getting. I toss the note in the trash. It’s been a few days since my mother and I have had a sustainable conversation, aside from the uncomfortable dinner at Larry’s Steakhouse. Even then, she spent most of the time bickering with my father. Her constant concern for my mental wellbeing has mysteriously ceased, which I don’t necessarily mind because it is now considerably easy to forgo the antidepressants. I have been tired recently, and mind-splitting migraines have become increasingly common. Dr. Rosenhill wouldn’t be pleased with my cold turkey.

When I was at college, my mother made sure I never forgot to wish my father a happy birthday. She executed her very own trifecta of reminding me: a phone call, text message, followed up by an email. The first two years, I obliged, and called him. We spoke for a few minutes until the conversation ran its obvious course. The last two years of college, however, I grew increasingly spiteful. Purposefully, I’d call him a day or two later, explaining that I was drowning in schoolwork. He didn’t seem to care.

By noon, I am sitting in my car, cradling the Fosters’ address in my hand. An attempt to enter their address into the GPS comes up short. The address appears instantly. A year ago, when I was at college, someone broke into my car. Luckily, the perpetrator only escaped with my iPod and a few loose dollar bills. A week later, I upgraded my GPS, and now if the car is ever stolen, I can log online, and track its position. Though, not that the GPS is put to much use. There is only one address saved. With stubborn confidence, I reverse out of the driveway, and tell myself this is the day.

I pull over to the side of the road after twenty minutes of driving along winding, narrowed roads where there’s a sign every half-mile gently warning you that, at any moment, a deer can jump out, and scare the living s**t out of you, and possibly wreck the front of your car. Tall swarming trees hang over the road on both sides, and the leaves on the trees have officially changed colors; mostly varying shades of orange and plum. The changing of season is supposed to bring new things, new beginnings; not this season. It’s only bringing out the worst.

It is nearing rush hour. I have been sitting off to the side of the road for two hours. In the last hour, instead of continuing onto see the Fosters, I have veered the Honda farther off the road. I sit edged against a rusty guardrail that may possibly snap and give in at any moment, and send me crashing into a shallow ditch. Even if I wanted to see them now, it’s too late as traffic is beginning to swell around me. I look ahead, searching for the source of the stagnancy. There are too many muddied pickup trucks obstructing the view to see anything. Drivers muddle by at a snail’s pace, which gives every passersby the opportunity to dart their bored Saturday gazes at me. Curious pairs of eyes hone in on me like a fly to amber. Their expressions quickly fade into disappointment when they realize I’m not dead; I am just sitting here. Instead of looking back at each and every driver, I gaze up at the dying tree, its distorted trunk curved directly above my car.

I make two phone calls. My father doesn’t answer his cell phone. He is presumably home napping. Birthday or not, he always finds time for a nap on Saturdays. The store closes early on the weekend, which is counterproductive for a hardware store, I think. Isn’t that when most people do their DIY home projects? My second call is to Anna. She is apparently screening my calls. I leave her a vague voicemail. I don’t mention the Fosters. She sends me a text two minutes later. It is scrawled in all CAPS, imploring me to never ask that question again. I get it, but each time I imagined making the trip to see the Fosters"to explain everything"I picture Anna in the passenger seat beside me.

Traffic is at a complete stand still when a hammy gloved fist hammers against the window. I look up, and see a cop on a motorcycle. He’s got the right look to ride the bike: long lined face, a bushy mustache, and broad shoulders to fill out the creased bomber jacket. I refrain from rolling my eyes.

I lower the window, force a smile. “Yes, officer?”

He narrows his thick brown eyes at me. “What’s going on, son?”

I shrug. “Not much.” Step 1 in the Traffic cop Manual says: Use terms like son, champ, or sport when talking to a young person to develop a line of relatable, non-threatening communication.

            He leans back on his bike, crosses his arms against chest. “Something must be going on, son. Folks just don’t sit on the side of the road unless something is wrong. Car trouble? Ya got a flat? Need a jump?”

            “The car is fine. Just, you know, doing some quality thinking.”

            “Ah.” He nods, as if he completely understands. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to do some thinking in traffic, with the rest of these folks. An ambulance needs to make it to the front of this mess. You’re blocking the way. I’m sure that’s not your intention, correct?”

“Has there been an accident?”

            He nods. “The folks up there need medical attention. So, do me a favor and merge in with these folks here for me.”

            He sure says folks a lot. “Why don’t you just have the traffic move over to the left?”

            “Where?”

            “Never mind.”

 

After opening gifts and eating cake, the party"those who have dared to stay past nine p.m."has moved to the backyard. A handful of us are sitting around the table"my father, his two childhood friends: Jim Lansing and Carl Tully, Louis, Carl’s son, and Lisa Bart, my mother’s friend. Jim is half-asleep. Lisa spends her time searching for my mother. Every few minutes, she wanders her eyes around. When I catch her, she smiles at me. Though, with all of the botox injections she’s had, it’s difficult to tell if she’s smiling. My mother is inside, cleaning up. She played her part of the loving wife tonight, mingling with the crowd, laughing at my father’s jokes. Though, each time there was lull in activity and she was forced to talk directly to my father, she abandoned the room, claiming party hosting responsibilities. I arrived an hour and half late due to traffic. The first thing my father said to me, as I stepped inside, was: “She’s been drinking all day.” For my part, I’ve done my best to blend in, given that everyone knows about my mental breakdown eight months ago. I am the elephant in the room. It’s surreal when you realize what’s going through a person’s mind as they talk to you. That doesn’t make for many sustainable conversations. When my father’s sisters were here, they leaped to their feet each time I attempted to cut the chicken on my plate with a plastic knife.

            Louis Tully sits beside me. He’s grown into that fat head of his. He’s also relatively slimmer since I seen him last, which was five years ago. He grins widely at his father’s retelling of a story from their childhood, in which they totaled my grandparents’ Chevy into a ditch. Like Carl and my father, Louis and I grew up together. But it was much more than that. Our coming of age was a collective experience. Louis was always beside me. I was there with him, basking in the glory of adolescence. We were on the same team in little league, first and second base, went to the same elementary school"Taft Elementary. Our families spent countless Thanksgivings, Christmases together. We were practically brothers. And, since I’m a year older, I had to, throughout our childhood, act as the older brother protecting the younger one from getting his a*s kicked. His inability to censor himself was constantly getting him into outmatched fights with bigger, stronger kids. I was usually able to talk our way out of it. I have never been in a fight, which stresses me out whenever I’m on a street I’ve never been on.

            All things, good or bad, must come to an end. The Tullys moved away to New York when Louis and I were eleven. Carl Tully was promoted from Sales Manager at a local dealership in town to General Manager of a much larger car dealership in upstate New York. Louis and I only saw each other a few times after that. Many things have changed, happened, and changed again since we last saw each other, but, as he listens to his father drone on and on, the expression on his face flattens, and revolts into something completely different: something between disgust and benevolence. After all these years, we have one thing in common: we both abhor our fathers.

            I feel a gentle tug on my shoulder. The smell of wine overwhelms me. “Benjamin.” I look up, and my mother is standing there, cradling her bowl shaped glass of red wine. Her face is flushed red. She glares at my father; he doesn’t notice.

            “What’s up?”

            “Are you okay?”

            I nod. “Mom, I’m good.”

            “Where we you earlier?”

            “Where was I?” I repeat her question, and try to think of a good excuse.

            “Good.” She turns, and walks back inside.

“Momma’s boy,” Louis says. These are the first words he says to me all night. He pulls himself away from the conversation between our fathers. “Some things never change, huh?”

            “You don’t know the half of it,” I say. “She doesn’t stop.”

He nods, cutting himself off. “Appreciate what you got, man. Life is fleeting.”

            Is he a stoner, now? “Right. Do you ever hear from her?”

            Louis drinks his beer, the neck of the bottle disappears underneath his sprawled hand. He gazes at his father to ensure he isn’t listening. He isn’t; he’s too busy yakking it up with the birthday boy, who continues to take steady, huge gulps from the bottle of Jameson.

            “I’m moving out there next month, actually.”

            California. Does anybody move to f*****g Idaho or North Dakota, anymore? California is where everybody seems to go, or wants to go. It’s very cliché. 

            “Do you have a job lined up?” I am tired of having this conversation. I am just tired.

            “I don’t know if your dad told you, but I wrote a spec script for this online contest. The winner gets to write for a webseries, and…I won. Me and two other guys will be writing webisodes. That’s what they’re called.” He glances over at his father, who is telling a story I’ve heard countless times. “Hoping that’ll catapult me to a series or something. Have you seen what’s on TV these days? Better than most films.”

            “No, s**t?”

            “I s**t you not,” he says. “I’ll be staying with my mom who lives just outside of L.A. It’ll be with her new family.”

            With most people, the words ‘new family’ would be racked with benevolence, bitterness, but not with Louis. He seems detached, careless as to his mother’s life without him. Louis’ parents got divorced when he was young. Once the divorce was finalized, she moved out to California, and never came back.

“Is that going to be awkward?”

            He shrugs. “It’s temporary. Anyway, she was the one who offered.”

            “Going from one mansion to the next, boy you really are unlucky.”

            “Ben, my father’s house only seven bedrooms. By mansion standards, that’s quite low.”

            I wait for the smile, the laughter, the proverbial tongue-in-cheek, but it doesn’t come. “Weren’t you going to trade school to become a plumber?”

            “A plumber? God, no. It was for electrical engineering.”

            “Same thing, practically, in that I know nothing about it. Just like plumbing.”

            He finishes his beer. “I went, I saw, I conquered.” I hand him another beer. He wipes at his mouth before popping the top off. He drink it, and dipping his head back, I catch sight of a thin red line, running along the bottom of his chin. I gave him that scar when we were playing tackle football. I brought him down in the corner of the endzone, which was divided between pavement and grass. There was a lot of blood. “I only went because of him.” Shyly, he points to his father. “He had a hard on for me going to trade school, instead of going to, as he put it, ‘some liberal college.’”

            “That’s completely insane.”

            “What?”

            “I have never met anyone more stubborn than you and to hear you went ‘cause your dad wanted you to, it’s mind boggling.”

            He smiles. “I must have left off the part where he bought me a car.”

            “Yeah, but he probably got a discount.”

            He laughs. “Damn, you’re probably right.”

“Ben!” The shout comes from my father. I glance across the table. He is pointing at me, his eyes barely open. “Ben!”

“Yeah?” The entire table fixates their eyes onto me. My father leans forward, and even that, is a difficult task. He wraps his hands around the almost empty bottle of whiskey. “Drink this for your old man. It’s my birthday.” He passes the bottle across the table. “Come on, son.”

            “Dad.”

            “Drink it,” Carl shouts.

            “It’s my birthday,” my father says. “You have to.”

            “I don’t want to.”

             “Oh, right. You’re on those head pills.” He smashes his index finger to this forehead, alluding to my frail mental state. “Give it back to me.”

            “You know what, I’ll give it a swig.”

            “Your mother will kill me. Give it back to me now.” He points at Carl. “Get that from him, Carl. Quick!” Carl thrusts it out of my hands, grinning like an a*****e.

            “Thanks, Dad.”

            Louis leans over and whispers. “Don’t worry. I’m on those ‘head pills’, too.”

I wait for the peering eyes to dart their gazes elsewhere. “You know, you used to give me s**t about writing.”

            “Like hell, I did.”

            “You did,” I say. “Do you remember when you guys visited for the weekend? It was the summer before my senior year, your junior year. I showed you a couple stories I wrote, which was a f*****g scary thing to do. You spent the rest of the night"“

            “"giving you s**t about it. Yeah.”

“You called me a f****t. A p***y.”

            “I don’t remember that part.”

            “If you’re going to be in Hollywood, I’d refrain from calling people f*****s.”           

He grins. “So, what do you have going on?”

            “What’s the webseries about?”

            He hunches his brow. “Two twenty-somethings fall in love with the same girl.”

            “I’m sure you’ll be able to make that interesting.”

            “I know exactly what you’re thinking.”

            “No, you don’t.”

            “You’re thinking it’s a bullshit gig, and you’re right. But it beats going to film school and working my way up from that s**t. Fighting with douchebags over whose two minute short film is better.”

            “You’re probably right.”

            “I know I got lucky, but I’m going to make the most of it.” He looks me over. “Enough about me. Are you working on anything? Your dad told me that you’ve been looking for a job.”

            I shrug my shoulders, completely unsure of what to say.

            “Seriously. What do you have going on? I’d like to know.”

“I don’t have anything going on.”

“Come on, I want to hear it. Are you working on the next Great American novel?”

            “There’s nothing.”

            He darts his eyes away. I’ve made him uncomfortable. “Obviously, you don’t want to talk about it.”

            “There’s nothing to talk about.”

            He throws up his hands, palms out. “Okay, got it,” he says. “What do you do for fun around here? Do you have a girlfriend? On Facebook, it says that you’re single. ”

            “If it’s on Facebook, it must be true.”

His eyes widen. “Dude, did I say something to piss you off?”

I stand up. “Excuse me for just a second. I have to piss.”

            “Ben. What did I say?”

           

In the bathroom, I reach into my pocket, and pull out a familiar, crumpled piece of paper, a sticky note with a dead man’s scroll on it. The corners of the note are folded over. I can hear my father erupt into laughter.  

Author's Note

This is an excerpt/Chapter from a novel, however:
Can you discern what's going on?
Is the writing clean, concise?
How does the protagonist come off?