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My cell phone rings and vibrates. I pull it out of my pants pocket, gaze at the screen. Brad Junior. The doctor. Normally when my kid calls, I can’t answer the phone fast enough. It’s like he’s not an adult. It’s more like he’s still a teenager or even younger than that. I can never shake the feeling that something is wrong for him to be calling. But of course, sometimes he just calls to check in and say hello.
But right now, staring at Bradley Jr.’s name on the screen, I’m tempted to not answer it. He’s a smart, intuitive guy who takes after his mother. He’ll know something’s wrong with me just by the tone of my voice. But then, what if something really is wrong with him? I can’t just ignore him. Tapping the answer icon, I place the phone to my ear.
“What’s up, kid?” I say.
Yeah, I still refer to my adult son as kid. That will probably never change.
“Hey, Dad,” he says. “Is everything okay?”
I feel a slight rush of cold water travel up my spine. Why would he be asking me if everything is okay? He never asks me that, or maybe he senses something strange in my voice.
“Far as I know,” I say. “Why?”
“I tried calling mom like three times and she didn’t answer. Plus, she hasn’t called me back.”
“Oh,” I say, not without a fake chuckle, “she’s been working around the house all day.” Suddenly picturing the exploded bathroom. “She’s been on a tear. She’s renovating the vestibule bathroom all on her own. You know how your mother is when she gets into a project. I’m just driving back from Lowe’s now. She needed me to pick up more supplies for her.”
A long silence consumes the connection. What would I call it if I were a writer? A heavy silence.
“Dad,” Brad Jr. says.
“Bradley,” I say.
“Mom never fixes anything around the house,” he says.
It’s like he’s suspecting me of lying. And I am. Lying doesn’t sit well with me, but what the hell am I supposed to do? Tell him the truth about the two young men his mother killed this morning?
Tapping the brakes, I turn onto Hope Street and breathe a sigh of relief that I’m home and no cop cars are currently occupying the driveway. Joanne isn’t being led out of the house in handcuffs. A SWAT team outfitted in black tactical gear and automatic weapons aren’t poised on the lawn and on the house’s rooftop awaiting my arrival. So far, it seems like we’re in the clear.
“Okay, Brad, I hear what you’re saying,” I say. “But people change. Especially when you get to be Mom’s and my age. We’re turning over new leaves, trying new things. And right now, mom is sick of looking at the same old interior of our old house and she wants to spruce it up a bit.”
More weighted silence.
“Whatever you say, Dad.” Then, “Umm, Dad?”
Now I can tell there truly is something on his mind other than just looking out for his mother. I picture the young doctor seated not behind the desk chair in his office, because he doesn’t have an office yet. He’s a resident still, so he’ll be standing maybe in the hospital corridor, near a big wood door that opens onto the Emergency Room only when you punch a wall mounted aluminum panel. He’ll be wearing his baby blue scrubs and green Crocs on his feet. His hair is thick and black, and he’ll be sporting days old scruff on his round face. The whites of his brown eyes might be bloodshot if he’s been at it for forty-eight hours or more with no, or little sleep.
Pulling up into the driveway, I press the button on the Genie remote garage door opener and wait for the door to rise. When it’s fully open, I pull into the garage, throw the transmission into park, and kill the engine. Silence fills the garage. That is, until I once more hit the button to close the overhead door.
“I’m listening, kid. What’s on your mind?”
He exhales. When he does something like that, I already know what’s coming. But I’ll let him say it anyway.
“I might need to borrow a little cash,” he says. His voice is soft when he says it, like he’s not entirely alone.
I know I should not feel this way about my son who is a very hard worker in a very honorable profession, but when he asks for money, it kind of makes my blood boil. That’s not because I’m angry with him for asking it. I’m angry with myself for never having enough of it. Until this morning, I guess. Not that we can spend any of it yet.
“Jesus, Bradley,” I say, “you’re a doctor for God’s sakes. I thought doctors made like a ton of money?”
It’s my standard retort when he comes to me for extra cash, which is not an infrequent event.
“That’s a myth, dad,” he says. “I owe over one-hundred and fifty thousand in student loans, plus my rent, my car payment, food, gas, internet, and my freaking phone.”
He’s getting hot under the collar. Or in this case, his scrubs. Like I said, he probably hasn’t slept in days, and for sure he hasn’t been able to exercise, which also makes him irritable.
“Okay, okay, Bradley,” I say. “Calm down. How much this time?”
I don’t just sense his hesitation. I feel it.
“Now, see, why do you have to always put it like that, Dad?”
I know what he’s talking about, but I’ll play dumb for a little while. Why am I doing this? If I make his coming to me for money easy, it will become a daily event. Better to make it about as pleasant as pulling teeth.
“How much this time?” he repeats in a mock Bradley Jones Sr. voice.
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I hurt your feelings, Doctor Jones?” I say.
I’m really pouring it on now.
“One thousand,” he says. “If you can spare it.”
I feel the words “one thousand” in my belly like I’ve just swallowed a brick.
“I guess I can spare that,” I say. “Your mom and I will just pick it off the tree, no problem.”
“Come on, Dad,” he says, his voice even more stressed. “I’ve got to get back to work. Can you please just give me the money and I promise not to harass you for more anytime soon?”
At least for another month...
My bank account is in the red. My credit cards are maxed. Where am I going to get one thousand bucks really quick? Of course, that’s when I picture the stack of money stored on the laundry room floor beside an equally large stack of illicit drugs. Excuse me once again... product. Maybe, if I can sneak it from the stack, Joanne won’t know the difference. I doubt she’s even had a chance to count it yet.
“When can you pick it up, Bradley?” I say.
“After my shift,” he says. “About seven tonight?”
“Okay,” I say. “You wanna stay for dinner?”
“Not this time, Dad. I have plans.”
“What kind of plans?”
“I’m taking a girl out to dinner,” he says.
On one hand, I’m glad to hear my son is finally dating. On the other, it kind of tees me off that I’m giving him one thousand dollars from a pile of money that technically isn’t even mine and he’s probably going to blow a couple hundred of it tonight. Maybe I should look on the bright side. Maybe the girl he’s dating is rich.
“See you at seven, Junior,” I say.
He hangs up. I sit behind the wheel of my twenty-five-year-old minivan, stare blankly at my garage wall, and wonder how it is that my entire life has led me here.
Head into the house.
“Joanne?!” I shout.
“In here!” she barks.
I go into the dining room and see her seated at the table. Since I’ve been gone, she’s managed to transfer the big stack of cash upstairs where’s she’s set it on the dining room table. What was once one big stack of cash has now been organized into a dozen smaller stacks. Her face is intense, her eyes wide, both her hands busy peeling off one bill after the other. She’s got a pencil stored between her teeth the same way a pirate would bite a knife.
Set on the table to her right-hand side is a notepad with a whole bunch of figures scribbled on them. To her left is an old manual adding machine that used to be my father’s back when he prepared bids for some construction projects he was going after. Taking up most of the rest of the space on the table is the plastic wrapped, bone-colored...product.
While I stand there more or less dumbfounded, Joanne finishes counting the stack in her hands and places it on the table along with the other counted stacks. Then, she rapidly punches a bunch of numbers into the adding machine and pulls the lever that prints out the total onto a roll of white paper. Tearing a portion of the paper away, she pulls the pencil out of her mouth and jots the number down on the notepad. Only then does she set the pencil onto the table and gaze up at me.
“I’m maybe through a third of the cash and guess how much I’ve counted thus far, Bradley?”
“Couple hundred bucks,” I say.
She rolls her eyes.
“Two hundred thirty thousand and change,” she says.
Fact is, I haven’t seen my wife this excited in a long, long time. Not since Brad Junior’s graduation from med school. That was a milestone moment for us. A moment when we were convinced our boy had become independent from us. A moment of validation as parents. We did a good job raising our child, after all. But what we didn’t realize is the debt he’d be in, and the trouble he would have paying that debt and trying to have a life at the same time.
But right now, seated at the dining room table surrounded by all sorts of illegal cash and substances, Joanne is positively glowing. While my nerves (and a whole bunch of previously under used muscles) are shot from the day’s events, she seems suddenly ten years younger.
As I look into her eyes, the reality of what she’s telling me begins to sink in.
“We just might have close to three quarters of a million dollars there, Jo,” I say.
I guess I can’t help but feel excited about it myself, even if we can’t exactly go out and spend it right this minute. That’s when I’m reminded about Bradley Junior and his immediate financial problem.
“Listen, honey,” I go on, “Junior called me and he wants to speak with you.”
“Oh no,” she says. “Is everything all right?”
“I think so,” I say. “But he wants to talk with you about something.”
“In all the excitement, I left my phone in the bedroom.” She gets up. It’s exactly what I want her to do. “I’ll go call him back right now.”
Pushing out her chair, she comes around the table, heads into the kitchen, then into the hall, and into the master bedroom.
“I sure hope everything is all right,” she goes on. “I hope he isn’t sick. Those emergency rooms are Petri dishes.”
“I don’t think he’s sick,” I say, staring down at the uncounted stacks of money, and shaving off twenty fifties as quickly as I possibly can, stuffing them in my pocket. My guess is she’ll never know it’s missing.
She comes back in with her cell phone pressed to her ear.
“He’s not answering,” she says, sitting back down at the table.
“He’s probably back on rounds,” I say.
“I’ll leave him a message.”
She does exactly that. Leaves him a message about how sorry she is for not having her phone on her and that she loves him. She asks him to call her back as soon as he can. Setting her phone back down beside the adding machine, she resumes the cash count.
“Bradley,” she says, “I’ll take the change if you have any from the Lowe’s.”
I dig in my pocket, careful not to pull out any of the fifties I just grabbed. I finger the few bills that comprise the change left over from the AutoZone and the Lowe’s, set it onto her notepad.
“I don’t mean to be cheap, darling,” she says. “But that’s pretty much all we have left until you get paid late next week and we can start getting this stuff laundered properly.”
“What if Brad Junior needs money, Jo?”
I might as well pose the question since she might be willing to part with some of the stolen money after all.
“He’s just going to have to deal with it like we did when we were young,” she insists. “He’s a doctor, for God’s sakes. A little tough love will do him good.”
How strange. I’ve never seen Joanne like this. So adamant about not giving our son any money. She never says no to Junior. Not that I can remember. Now, with all this money in her possession, she’s a changed woman. It’s like she feels she earned all this cash and didn’t just stumble upon it when she killed those two gangsters.
“Don’t you have some work to do, Bradley?” she says, while grabbing another stack of greenbacks. “It’s getting late in the day and that basement floor isn’t going to fix itself.”
“Yes, dear,” I say, turning, heading back down into the family room and going for the door off the garage. “Time to mix some concrete.”
“You’ll need some water,” she says.
“And sweat,” I say. “Plenty of sweat.”