John felt a distant sense of déjà vu as he drove Rose and Mike home from the doctor. John and Mike coming together for the sake of their mother, despite the differences that at times left them strangers, was not without precedent. John sneaked a look at his brother in the backseat and wondered what he remembered.
It was late spring of 1990. John was a high school senior, his grades and his social life drifting unpredictably on the teenager graph between Under-Performing and Tolerably Proficient. Mike was burning up the Midwest club circuit with Gravel Rash, pickled primarily in whiskey and coke and absent from his family for months at a time. And Rose had lost herself in the only sustained relationship she would know following Larry’s death.
Since the brutal blow of losing her husband five years earlier, Rose gave in to an emotional skittishness that made her an awkward burden to the friends who were determined to keep her strong. No one else in their social circle had had a spouse struck dead, and while divorce was prevalent it was not the same; even if it left them bitter and alone, there was time to adjust from being married to single. Larry Husted was unexpectedly plucked from their midst at an age when they were in their prime. Rattled by the bluntness of the loss and its portents for their own mortality, most of Larry’s friends instinctively knew to close ranks around his widow.
Rose was at the tail end of a generation that rigidly built its social structure around couples, even more pronounced among the upwardly mobile medical community of Holt City. After a respectful period of time following Larry’s death, Rose was besieged by friends determined to include her in Friday nights at the country club and cocktail parties every few Saturdays. When her grateful but consistent rejections stretched well beyond even a generous grieving period, her friends became more firm in their invitations.
In time, the Widow Husted tentatively returned to surroundings where she once was content to mingle decorously at her husband’s side. Now she ached to feel so alone, and despaired at being the third wheel. After only a very few nights out, she began hiding behind her answering machine and returning calls only when too late to accept an invitation. If John took the message, she blamed it on her careless teenager for not telling her someone called.
Undeterred, Rose’s friends moved on to matchmaking. John was fifteen when a bland, pink-skinned man first appeared in his living room, reeking of Vitalis with designs to escort his mother to the 7:10 showing of Three Men and a Baby. Bill Stiegletz—heir apparent to the Stiegletz Home & Appliance empire—dimly peppered John with questions about his grades, his sports interests, his girlfriend status, and all of the other lazy crap adults inquired about when trapped alone with a teenager.
In time, John would have bullshit answers ready for his mother’s suitors (“My girlfriend has lupus, which sucks”), but on that first, awful evening John scowled sullenly at the flabby betrayal plopped down into his dead father’s La-Z-Boy. His mother clumsily informed him of her impending evening out, insisting with a mortified quiver that it was not a date but simply a movie with a friend of a friend. But having only recently sat for the first time sweating in the living room of a girl he barely knew, John knew what a date looked like.
He watched with queasy disapproval as his mother finally descended from her bedroom, acting dithery and weird as Bill Stiegletz startled her with a formal peck on the cheek. As they moved for the front door, John refused to shake the guy’s hand.
When Rose returned before ten, John was pleased that the date appeared stillborn. He stood at the top of the stairs for a very long time, making sure the sounds of conversation did not emerge from the living room. When all he detected were the solitary stirrings of his mother and her occasional sighs, John went to bed.
The new men friends kept filing through the living room every few months, none making more than three appearances. One was named Vern early on, so this became John’s generic tag for all of Rose’s half-hearted attempts at companionship: John was free to jerk off to the soft-core porn-thriller on HBO Saturday night, because Mom was out with one of her Verns. The dates never ran long enough for John to figure out who in the T&A mystery had committed the badly plotted crime. But once he did his business into a wad of Kleenexes, he never seemed to care.
None of the men who came to call seemed to make his mother any less lonely or sad.
Until Don Huff.
He was a flourishing boat mogul, with stores in Madison and Milwaukee and a third up north that was his big earner. Ski boats, fishing boats, pontoon boats—Don Huff was “the man to see before setting sea.” He appeared in his own TV commercials, bringing him a form of celebrity that drew well upon his sea-stiffened good looks.
When one Friday night in 1989 he materialized in Larry’s La-Z-Boy, John was begrudgingly impressed. Don had a charisma different than the stiffs and businessmen his mother failed to bond with, and he seemed to be a genuinely nice guy. Rather than bore John with the usual inane small talk, he engaged him in a detailed discussion of Michael Crichton’s Sphere, which John was reading and that Don could recall at length. Don listened earnestly as John expanded upon some plot machinations that he predicted would tighten the screws as he read forward, and when John made references to The Terminal Man—an early Crichton book Don hadn’t read—the teenager felt uncommonly smart. John’s choice of college—Stevens Point, maybe with a business major—met with Don’s approval.
After John saw Don elicit a sort of smile from his mother he didn’t recognize, and when that smile endured even when Don went home, John decided to not be the typical teenager who might try to destroy the relationship just to be an asshole.
The dates became a regular thing. Don, only tangentially connected to the doctors’ clique, easily joined their ranks. Rose went out most every Friday or Saturday night, either socializing with her usual crowd or making new friends in Madison, where Don lived.
Upon returning home, there became sessions where Rose and Don settled into the living room with the lights low and God-knows-what taking place. John tried like hell to be out every weekend when his mother and her new boyfriend were in, but it was impossible to wall himself off from it completely.
On nights he wasn’t able to make plans, he’d hole himself up in his room, sealed off by headphones plugged into a movie or his tunes, the volume loud enough to obliterate the living room thoughts that made him squirm. When he went out with his friends or had a date of his own, he never knew what he’d be returning home to. Far too many times he’d creep in through the front door, perhaps a bit high, only to find that his mother’s date was running longer than his.
“John?” his mother would call from the dark of the den.
“Yep.”
“’Night.”
“’Kay.”
“Things good, kid?” Don Huff would usually pipe in chipperly from his unseen perch, seeming to need to establish his presence.
“Yep.”
Racing up the stairs to his room one time, John heard his mother giggle. Either she and her boyfriend shared a laugh about him, which was confusing to John, or Don made a move that elicited a girlish titter from his mother. Which was … really confusing.
* * *
But most of the time, John didn’t have a problem with Don. He’d come over for dinner once or twice a week, and John was regularly invited to eat out with the two of them. It was strange walking into restaurants and watching people do a double take at the celebrity in their midst. Waitresses never failed to smile more broadly for Don, and customers often gave him a familiar nod. Don was always gracious to anyone who acknowledged knowing him from his ads, but he otherwise seemed oblivious when diners at other tables would nudge their companions to sneak a look. Nevertheless, Rose came to feel a certain thrill at becoming a regular fixture at Don Huff’s side. John did, too.
Fortunately for everyone, Mike was gone for weeks at a time that spring. He had hooked up with a booking agency in Chicago, and now the band’s tours spread farther and farther beyond the southern Wisconsin/northern Illinois axis of clubs that they were outgrowing. While still seedy and depraved caravans of getting high and rocking out, the tours took on a more professional feel, with paid roadies, decent gear, and a secondhand motor home that kept the party on the road and out of profit-depleting hotels. Venturing as far from home as Syracuse, Kansas City, and Akron, Gravel Rash won new fans and defied the record industry to ignore them.
Mike’s stays at home usually came unannounced and lasted only until he could seduce another female fan into letting him move in rent-free. Engaging his brother only when unavoidable, John suspected the nerve-pixilated, nose-rubbing twitch of a raging cokehead. Mike’s tattered rock clothes hung from his needle-thin body, he was never not deathly pale, and he usually stank of stale liquor, sex, and body odor. For his chosen profession, this was business attire.
Rose was offended by her son, but was unable to turn him away when he needed somewhere to stay. Given the late hours that Mike kept and Don’s reluctance to wade into such a complicated dynamic in this new relationship, it was not hard to keep them apart. But as summer approached and a meeting between Mike and Don became unavoidable, John suggested to his mother that it be over dinner, in public, where maybe both men would be constrained from displaying what was assumed would be mutual distaste.
The setting was a Friday night fish fry at the Sunset Supper Club. This provided a sure way to hide him from the disapproving eyes of Rose and Don’s peers, who would be starting their weekends over cocktails at the country club.
Mike grumpily rejected Rose’s first several requests to finally meet the new man in her life, until John stepped in.
“He’s all right,” John said sheepishly in defense of Don, provoking Mike’s derision for acting like a mama’s boy.
“He’s a fucking tool,” Mike scoffed while building himself a sandwich in his mother’s kitchen. He mocked Don’s TV ads. “‘I’m Don Huff. For all your boating needs, come suck my dick and I’ll set you up with a shitty ass rowboat for you and your whole gay family!’”
John shook his head at the predictability of his brother’s act. “Asshole.”
“Pussy,” Mike countered.
“She likes him, okay? He makes her happy.”
“So did Dad. Her record for picking men is for shit. Don’t mean I gotta give a fuck.”
John stared at this repellant stranger who darkened his house. The decision was not hard to use whatever it would take to deliver to his mother a civil, if strained relationship between the son she no longer recognized and the man who made her smile.
“She used to fight with Dad about you,” John began. “She defended you.”
“Bullshit.”
“They went at it, just a couple days before he died. I listened from my room. He wanted you and the band out. Didn’t care if you ever came back, didn’t care if you froze to death on the street. He was sick of the noise and the dope and you, and he said if you weren’t moving out, he was. And she said you weren’t going anywhere.”
“Bullshit,” Mike said again, not quite as sure. “She never stood up to him, for me or anything.”
“She said that she wasn’t going to be forced to choose between her marriage or her son, but right then she knew that you needed her more. It got really mean. I don’t know if they were really talking to each other again when he died.”
None of this was true. One afternoon John heard Larry say he was sick of having the band in the basement and Rose said she didn’t mind, and Larry growled fine, so long as it was when he was at work—that was the extent of it. John balls out lied about the rest. It felt like the right move at the time.
Mike shivered at an alien sensation as affection for his mother slipped past his hard-ass perimeter. John saw it happen.
“She slipped you money for the band, even when Dad was still around to bitch about it,” he continued. “And then when he was gone … Fuck, man, she propped you guys up, even when you were being such an asshole.”
“Those were loans,” Mike protested weakly. “I’m payin’ it all back.”
“Bullshit,” John said, driving his pitch home. “What’s she gonna have after we move out? Are you such a skeevy fuck that you want her to be alone for the rest of her life? What did she ever do to you?”
Mike’s silence proved the point.
“Then just be okay with this,” John concluded. “Meet the guy and don’t be a total dick about it. Do that for her.”
Mike gave a mocking sneer to deflect any hint of compliance. “Fag,” he drawled.
“Ass pus.”
* * *
So it was that John, Rose, and Don sat and pretended to not keep glancing at the front door of the darkly paneled supper club. Mike sullenly agreed to join them there, but insisted on driving himself. He was coming straight from band practice, he said, but obviously he just wanted his own escape vehicle if things got too uncomfortable. John wished he thought of that.
The chime of the front door finally brought with it a look of confused joy that broke across Rose’s face. John was puzzled when she stopped talking, and then understood when he turned and saw what she saw.
Only Mike’s atrophied posture remained as he slunk into the restaurant. He had bathed, his long, frizzy hair tied into a clumsy ponytail. It was one of the first really hot days of spring, but he wore ill-fitting slacks and a mismatched, long-sleeve shirt. John realized why and was amazed: Mike hid his tattoos to mute his image. He looked like a dope dealer forced to supplement his income by working part-time selling car stereos at Best Buy.
He sank self-consciously into the open chair as Don extended his hand with a smile. “You must be Mike. I’m Don Huff.”
Mike couldn’t help being impressed by the boat guy on TV sitting there in front of him, nursing a Bud. “What’s up?” he said, avoiding eye contact.
“Well, we were just all eyeing the all-you-can-eat fish fry,” Don said, trying to read the menu without the glasses he rarely wore. “But dinner’s on me, so order up whatever looks good. Looks like you could use a good meal.”
Mike might have taken this as a shot, until Rose gently grabbed his wrist. “You look very nice tonight,” she beamed.
“Excuse me, miss,” Don called out, friendly but with haughty undertones. “The rest of our party has arrived, I’m guessing he might want something from the bar.”
The waitress, who was young and not at all pretty, did a double take as she recognized Mike.
“Oh,” she stumbled. “Sure. I mean … Hi!”
“’Sup?” Mike grinned silkily. “Jack. Straight up.”
“Great!” She scribbled in her pad, brushing her hair back nervously. She turned and flitted off quickly to get Mike his drink.
The boat tycoon and the rock star sized each other up. Fruitful topics were going to be hard to come by.
“So,” Don began, “your mother tells me that your band is really taking off.”
“We’re playing our asses off,” he replied with a cavalier cock of his chin. “Breaking big all over the Midwest, workin’ our way out from there. Finishing up on a demo, and then hope to do some showcases in New York by the end of the year.”
“That’s a tough business you’re trying to crack,” Don said sagely, one professional to another. “Even if you get your foot in the door, there’s a lot that could go wrong.”
Mike vacantly ran his thumb along the edge of a butter knife. “We think we’ll be okay.”
John watched his brother grin vacantly behind glassy eyes; he probably coked up just before he headed into the restaurant.
“Just be careful,” Don continued. “If anyone offers you a deal, make sure you have a good lawyer go over the contract.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Mike reflexively dismissed Don with a scoff. “But … thanks.”
The waitress returned with Mike’s Jack Daniel’s, spilling over the brim as she anxiously set it before him. “Are you all ready to order?” she asked brightly.
“I think the rest of us decided on the fish fry,” Don said. “Mike?”
“Gimme the T-bone, medium rare. And another one of these.” He drained the glass and handed it back to her with a seedy wink.
The waitress departed, and the four of them felt the awkwardness descend. The silence pressing in, Mike slouched farther into his chair, sniffling and brushing invisible cobwebs from the end of his nose.
“Looks like someone is catching a cold,” Rose smiled.
* * *
John graduated high school and the “summer of Don” commenced. Long weekends to Chicago, Lake Geneva, and other upscale destinations became routine for Rose and her boyfriend, and John overheard talk about a West Coast trip in the fall.
By then John was sleeping with Becky Allerang, his girlfriend since the beginning of their final semester, so it was beyond stupendous to have the house to himself for days at a time. Mike was always on the road or crashing with a fan, and John took full advantage: sex in his own bed, parties as the urge arose, sleeping until midafternoon—the bachelor idyll of a minor league playboy. John earned decent tips bussing tables at an Italian place downtown, and college loomed in the fall with only slight foreboding. Life was just too good.
When one afternoon in early July John woke to find Rose and Don in the kitchen, legal-looking papers spread across the table and Rose signing her name wherever Don pointed, John noted mostly the smell of fresh cut grass breezing in through the window screens and the fact that they were almost out of toaster waffles.
He and Don remained civil over the summer, although the rapport they shared in the early days of his mother’s relationship cooled. Don Huff was a self-made man, relentlessly focused on his business, and after the early glow of courtship with his mother faded, John saw that Don could be a prick. Toward the end of the summer, John took Don up on his offer to work at the Madison store, hosing down boats that had been on the lake for a test drive to earn extra cash for school.
Out of Rose’s presence and master of his empire, John observed Don as a brittle and petty boss, yelling at his employees with a red-faced sneer. When Don let loose on John for failing to flush sand from an anchor winch, wrecking the motor, John walked out and decided he was done. Over breakfast a few days later, John met Don’s lecture about John not honoring his commitments with a dark scowl. College could not start soon enough.
* * *
When his mother’s calls stopped coming to his dorm room in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving break of his freshman year, John took it as a relief, not a warning sign. It wasn’t until he returned to Holt City for the holiday weekend that he learned that the feds raided Huff Marine, exposing tax fraud going back years. Prior to the market crash of ’87, Don wildly overextended himself in the store up north. When his stores started failing, he claimed sold assets on his taxes that he had actually just moved to another set of books. This false shift in his tax burden gave Don a cushion to retain the image of solvency, as did his habit of forging manufacturer rebate payments that were supposed to go to his customers.
But as his debts kept mounting, Don started asking friends to lend him large sums of money, supposedly just to artificially inflate his asset sheet while he courted a new partner. This is what John came upon that July afternoon, his mother smiling contentedly as she signed away a substantial amount of the money Larry left the family. A woman in Middleton gave Don even more; he was sleeping with both of them. A third woman, who knew better, started making the calls that would bring Don down.
John was not quite nineteen when he returned home to this.
College had been excellent. Classes were going well, dorm life was a blast, and the week before coming home a pretty sophomore from St. Paul slipped her hand down his pants while snuggling beneath a blanket with The Simpsons in the common room.
John would never hear directly from his mother what Don Huff did to the family; the extent of Don’s deception and the financial mess Rose got them into would come through country club friends who knew John was coming home for the holiday.
Frank Kirschner, a lawyer who occasionally filled out a foursome when one of Larry’s usual golf mates couldn’t make it, sat John down for a talk in his office that Monday morning after John asked school for a hardship leave. Rose would be able to keep the house, Mr. Kirschner said with a positive smile that failed to calm John. He was horrified to hear that losing the house was even a possibility.
But the money she gave Don was gone for good. He was headed to prison, and some of his customers were suing him over the stolen rebate money. Between that, back taxes, and lawyer bills, there would be nothing left.
“The money your dad left you all, what’s left of it, is invested well,” Mr. Kirschner assured John. “So long as your mom stays healthy, I really don’t see any reason why she can’t maintain the life she’s been living for a very long time. We’ll just have to keep an eye on her expenses. It will mean some adjustments.”
John’s mind was racing so he didn’t notice at first as his mom’s lawyer slid a sheet of paper across his desk. When he finally focused on it, he saw a list of college scholarships and emergency financial aid information.
* * *
Two weeks later, Rose was still mum about what happened, and John was still not comfortable leaving her to get back to school. She slept all the time, and there was a leaden sadness about her when she got out of bed that made the old house go gray. Still a teenager, John didn’t know how to draw her out, to encourage her to unburden herself and let her know he didn’t blame her for anything—even though he did. He talked to the financial aid office at school, relieved to hear that his mother had paid his tuition through the school year. But after the spring semester, paying for school would be a challenge. He filled out student loan applications and scholarship requests to make it work, but they weren’t going to cover everything.
* * *
John slept fitfully in his old room one night when he heard a noise. He bolted awake alertly; because his mother wasn’t keeping normal hours, she often got up in the middle of the night, wandering aimlessly through the dark house. When he would sit with her, she said that her bed wasn’t as comfortable as it used to be.
John sat in the dark to listen for the source of the noise. When he heard a male voice followed by a female titter, he stomped for the stairs.
Mike was in the kitchen, giggling through an obvious dope fog as he prowled through the refrigerator. A slutty, leather-clad club chick sat at the kitchen table about to light a cigarette when John burst in, not self-conscious at all in his T-shirt and tighty-whities.
“No!” he whispered fiercely. “No fucking way!” He yanked the cigarette from the girl’s hand.
“What the fuck?” Mike shouted as the girl tried to process where her cigarette had gone.
“Shut up! It’s three o’clock in the morning. Mom’s asleep!”
“Gimme my cigarette!” the girl protested.
“You have to go,” John insisted to her before turning to his brother. “She has to go. We have to talk. Why didn’t you call me back?!”
“You’re not my father,” Mike scoffed as he grabbed for the cigarette. John shoved him back, grabbed the phone, and slammed it to the table.
“Call her a fucking cab and get her the fuck out of here,” he hissed. “We have to talk.”
* * *
The night was bitterly cold. John knew that getting dressed and dragging Mike out into it was the best way to sober him up. They both shivered sleepily as they walked the neighborhood.
“Fuck,” Mike said bleakly, the reality of what John told him seeping in. He angrily shoved John off the sidewalk, the frozen grass crackling beneath his feet. “Fuckin’ Don Huff, I told you the guy was an asshole!”
“I know,” John said quietly, rejoining his brother as they walked. It wasn’t like what his mom was suffering with, but John was betrayed by Don, too. And he felt that, somehow, he should have known better. Should have protected her.
“How much did she give him?”
John knew the question was coming. Mike would find out eventually.
“Almost one hundred fifty grand.”
Mike stopped in his tracks. “What???”
“He said it was just for a couple weeks, just to make it look like he had more money in the bank. So he could…” John trailed off. “He conned her, okay? It’s gone, and that’s it.”
Mike still didn’t move. Their house loomed at the end of the block.
“So what’s left?” he asked.
“Enough. There are some investments and her Social Security. There’s some insurance but it sounds like it’s not enough. We could sell the house if we have to.”
A primal trigger tripped in Mike’s head. “Motherfucker!” he snapped, running for his car at the curb. His fury would not be contained with the toxins still running through him. John strained to hold him back.
“You can’t get to him. They’re holding him until the trial. There’s nothing we can do.”
Mike took sharp breaths of the cold night air through his nose, shifting in place like an angry, doped-up bull. John wished more than anything he could set Mike loose on Don Huff, to for once let his brother’s crude impulses be put to savage, satisfying use. But it wasn’t possible.
Mike accepted this bitterly, then walked the rest of the way back to the house without a word. He was about to storm through the kitchen door when John grabbed him at the elbow.
“Hey,” John whispered, pulling his brother back. Their mother sat at the kitchen table in her robe. They watched her from the darkness as she stared at a pile of unopened mail. A sigh eased into a yawn as she rubbed her eyes. She looked much older than her fifty-one years.
John watched his brother watching their mother. He couldn’t get a read on where Mike’s anger was being channeled, and he couldn’t risk letting it be toward her.
“Don’t let this be about the money,” John implored evenly. “Not tonight, she’s not ready.” Mike headed inside, revealing nothing.
As the back door opened, Rose turned with muted surprise to see her oldest son. Mike had been on the road for over two months, but the weeks since Don was found out made time crawl through a deep sludge for her—it seemed Mike had been gone forever.
She stood and walked quietly to him, her arms outstretched. Mike felt his mother crying softly into his chest.
“Hey, Mom,” Mike said tentatively, the silence of the kitchen broken by the wall clock that kept the time since they were boys. “What’re you doing out of bed?”
“I wanted to see you,” she sniffed. He gently broke the hug.
“You need to get some sleep,” he smiled down at her. “We can talk in the morning.”
“You’ll be here?” she asked urgently.
“I’ll be here. Drag my ass outta bed after you’ve got the coffee on, we’ll hang out. Long as you want.”
She silently commanded Mike to stoop down so she could kiss him on the cheek, and she went back to bed.