Chapter Three

Bobby awakened to the synthesized jingle of Eddie Murphy’s old disco chestnut, “Party All the Time,” sounding from his phone. He opened his eyes to a room still steeped in darkness and glanced first at the pillow next to himself, ensuring he was, indeed, alone and then to the alarm clock on his nightstand table. A bottle of Eros lube blocked the digital readout. He slapped it aside as the inappropriately cheerful tune continued its manic melody.

It was four fifteen. He had to be up in two hours to pull himself together for work, despite the dregs of a hangover and a throbbing asshole from dick or dicks unknown at this foggy-memory moment.

Who could be calling now? Middle of the night calls such as these were always bad news, weren’t they? It was this last thought that sent a bolt of adrenaline through Bobby, waking him fully and banishing his hangover, other aches and pains, and guilt to the background.

Duh. The ringtone, programmed into his iPhone, belonged to only one person—his mother, Michelle, in Seattle. Bobby had given her “Party All the Time” as a ringtone one drunken night as a joke, because he could think of no one less likely to party all the time than his staid mother.

Bobby sat up in bed, the sheets dropping from his sweaty frame, trying to ignore a stabbing, ice-pick-style pain behind his right eye, and groped for the phone on his nightstand. What time was it in Seattle, anyway? Bobby quickly calculated. It would be a little after 2:00 a.m.

He felt a nauseating clench in his gut. This couldn’t be good.

Glancing down at the smiling face of his mother on the phone—blunt-cut blonde hair, a turned up nose, the dark brown eyes, looking decades younger than her current age of sixty-three—made him feel even sicker.

“Mom?” he whispered to the darkness, suddenly afraid of pressing the button on the screen that would connect them.

More to quiet the inane rhythm of the tune than for anything else, Bobby pressed Accept only a moment before he knew the call would have been sent to voice mail.

If Michelle was calling in the middle of the night, the last thing she would probably want to hear was her son’s voice, informing her that he was not available right now.

“Mom?” Bobby said again, this time into the phone.

“Thank God you answered! I wasn’t sure you wouldn’t be asleep, and then you wouldn’t pick up, and I just don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t picked up. But you’re there, and we’re talking, and that’s a good thing. Actually, the thing I prayed for. Oh, son, it’s sweet to hear your voice.”

Bobby cut her off before she could babble any further. This wasn’t like his mother, who was usually found in the phrase dictionary next to “calm, cool, and collected.” “Mom? Mom, you’re babbling. Is everything okay?”

There was silence on the other end of the line, then a very embarrassing, wet-sounding snort. Bobby listened to his mother draw in a great, quivering breath. “No, sir,” his mother finally said. “Everything is not okay, not okay at all.”

Before she started off on a crying jag or babbling again, Bobby brought her to the point. At the same time, he felt a chill course through him, as if he knew already the words his mother would eventually utter. “What’s going on, Mom?”

“It’s your father.”

“What about him?”

“He’s dead.”

The words hung in the air, oddly casual, as though she had said he’s in the bathroom or he’s playing canasta or he’s a Republican.

“Dead? What do you mean? Dad’s only sixty-two.” Bobby knew his follow-up response made little sense, but it was true—this was not a call he expected to get at this stage of life. “Did I hear you right?” Yeah. That must be it. She said he’s red, meaning he somehow got a sunburn, or he’s fed, meaning he downed the leftovers from that night’s dinner.

“Oh, Robert! Of course you heard me right.” The anger in her tone seemed to usurp her despair. “What else would I have said? For heaven’s sake. Your father got up a couple of hours ago to use the bathroom. The next thing I know I heard a bang, like something heavy going over. I got up to check on him—” And suddenly she stopped talking; the despair returned full force. When she was able to speak, her voice was like a little girl’s, high-pitched and choked by sobs. “I called out, ‘Bob? Everything okay in there?’ and then I tried to push on the bathroom door to open it.” She sobbed. “I tried to push on the door. I tried to push on the door.”

“Mom?”

“I tried to push on the door, and it wouldn’t open. It wouldn’t open because—oh God!—he was lying there on the floor, blocking it. By the time I could move it enough to poke my head inside, I saw him lying there, white as a sheet, eyes just staring up, but not at me. You know? He had a heart attack is what they’re saying. A massive heart attack.”

This had to be a dream. This couldn’t be happening. Bobby didn’t know what to feel. Should he cry? Should he lie back and smile because finally his father, his perfectionist father for whom nothing was ever good enough, was finally gone? Should he…what?

He experienced nothing but a strange numbness that left him set apart, as if this whole scenario were happening to someone else. Aside from feeling devoid of thought or emotion, he felt weird physically, like his head had expanded to two or three times its normal size. His arms tingled. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he had a heart attack now? Part of him almost wanted to press the End button on the phone, just fall back on his pillows and go back to sleep.

But he couldn’t do that!

What about his mother? “Mom? Mom, I’m going to hang up now so I can check into getting the soonest flight I can to come home. Where are you now?”

“I’m at the hospital.” As if to confirm her statement, Bobby heard a page in the background.

“Okay. Okay, I’ll give you a call when I have my flight information. I’ll rent a car and either meet you at home or down at the hospital, whatever the timing is.”

“Thank you, Robert. I need you here.” His mother’s voice was weak.

“I know, Mom. I’ll get there as soon as I can. Talk soon.” He was about to push End when he hurriedly added, “I love you.”

But his mother had already hung up.

*

Bobby peered out the window of the plane to look at the snow-blanketed peaks of the Cascade Mountains and saw, in the distance, the ethereal majesty of Mount Rainier. The brilliant sunlight poured down relentlessly, illuminating the cold, harsh landscape shimmering with crystalline snow. It was beautiful, Bobby thought, but it was a hard, cold, and unforgiving beauty.

He returned his gaze to the issue of Entertainment Weekly he had brought along for the trip, trying for the third time to read a profile of Channing Tatum. His concentration never allowed him to do more than gaze at the pictures.

He was almost home.

Soon the plane would be descending, and views of vast expanses of slate-blue water, hills covered in firs, and Seattle’s skyline would come into view, and then it would only be an hour or so until he saw his mom again.

Home.

The word echoed, strange, in his mind. What did it mean?

Home, where they knew Bobby was forty, as opposed to the early thirties he told all his conquests back in Chicago.

Home, where he had grown up surrounded by mountains, tree-covered hills, and water just about everywhere one looked—including up.

Home, where his mother now lived, a new widow.

Home, where his right-wing, Christian fundamentalist sister, Dawn, lived with her husband and three kids in the northern suburb of Snohomish.

Home, where he was not the confident, successful, handsome, well-built man he was now, but a scared little boy who was made fun of nearly every school day for being a sissy and who hid out in his room, reading books far too adult for a child. (Rosemary’s Baby in third grade, really?)

Home, where he had grown up living in a fantasy world bolstered by TV soap operas and sitcoms.

Home, where he was his mother’s favorite man and chief confidante.

There were a lot of definitions, and none of them were good.

Bobby wanted to march right up to the cockpit and tell the pilot to just turn this plane around and head back to O’Hare. Mr. Robert Nelson, Jr. (also known as Bobby) was not going to Seattle today. No way. No how. No, sir!

The beautiful patch of the Pacific Northwest where he’d been raised simply held too many painful memories, and with what was waiting for him, he knew he would only be making more.

He slumped back in his business-class seat before leaning forward so he could peer down the aisle at the blond flight attendant with whom he had flirted earlier, to catch his eye. When the guy—with his spiky hair, blue eyes, and perfect body barely contained by his uniform—saw Bobby looking, he grinned and hurried up the aisle toward him.

Good Lord, are those shoulder pads? Are your shoulders really that broad? And that basket! Is there a sock stuffed in there?

Maybe he has a layover in Seattle? Bobby wondered and then chided himself. Your father is dead.

“Can I get you something?” The blue eyes peered down, locking with Bobby’s gray ones, and Bobby couldn’t help but think the question was a loaded one. Bobby held up his glass, along with holding up his own inclinations to flirt, to see if the guy would be amenable to hooking up once the plane had landed, and asked, “Could you get me another vodka cranberry?”

“Anything you want.” He hurried away, and Bobby craned his neck to watch the rise and fall of the firm bubble ass as it made its way back to the galley.

What the hell is wrong with you?

*

By the time he had claimed his bags and rented a car (an unassuming Toyota Camry in burgundy), Bobby was exhausted. He made his way north on I-5 toward the city. No matter how much he traveled, or how far, he never ceased to be amazed at how draining simply sitting for several hours in a confined space could be. Add that to the trauma of losing a parent, and he supposed it made a great deal of sense that he was tired, that his eyelids burned, aching with their need for slumber. Or maybe what he really wanted was oblivion.

As Seattle’s skyline came into view with its iconic Space Needle, Bobby wondered what kind of scene awaited him at home. Instead of the warm feeling of homecoming he thought he should be having, Bobby experienced only anxiety as he spotted the familiar landmarks, the Sound, the shipyards, the city, now grown even larger with new skyscrapers he’d never seen and the addition of Safeco Field. Bobby gripped the steering wheel tighter to compensate for the sweat seeping now from his palms. Again he was seized with an urgency to take the next exit, turn around, head back to the airport, and hop the next plane bound for Chicago.

But he couldn’t do that. He had a funeral to attend and a grieving mother to comfort.

Home.

There was that word again. Bobby felt a pang in his heart because he wasn’t really sure if he could define the word, especially not now, not this afternoon, as he headed toward a condo his parents had bought after Bobby had moved away from the “Emerald City” to set himself up in the “Windy City” some ten years ago.

Had it been that long? Bobby shook his head, knowing it had. There was always one reason or another not to make it back here. Work. More work. A long-planned vacation. A short-lived boyfriend who wanted to spend Christmas in Palm Springs. Another short-lived boyfriend… Another…

And, really, this “home” to which he was headed was a place he had never even set foot in. Bobby had grown up in the airy hilltop neighborhood known as Queen Anne, in a red-brick house overlooking not only downtown and the Needle but Puget Sound as well. When his parents had sold the five-bedroom Georgian-style home back in 2006, just before the real estate bubble had burst, they had made nearly two million dollars on the sale.

Bobby wondered briefly who now lived in his old house.

Now his parents lived in a penthouse condo on Dexter Avenue, just south of the Fremont Bridge and north of downtown. It was smaller, only a couple of thousand square feet, but no less luxurious than their Queen Anne home on Highland Avenue. Their condo had stunning views of Lake Union, Gas Works Park, and across the placid blue waters of the big urban lake, the neighborhoods of Eastlake and Capitol Hill. Leaning out from their balcony on clear days, one could view the eastern edge of downtown and Mount Rainier. On those same days, across the water, the jagged blue-gray silhouettes of the Cascades rose up.

Bobby knew all of this because his mother often sent him pictures. At first, they were actual photos, printed. Then, as his mother caught on to using her first laptop and twenty-first-century means of communication like email and social networking, he would get glimpses of their gorgeous condo views on his mother’s Facebook page. The message, implied or not, of all of these panoramic views always remained the same: come home; come see your family.

But Bobby was always too busy. Never mind that, during the last decade, work or pleasure had taken him literally all over the world.

And now death had forced his hand, and here he was, taking the Mercer Avenue exit that would bring him to his mother within only minutes.

The traffic was bad, and for this Bobby was grateful. It delayed the inevitable, and that was fine with him. As he sat in the tangled mess of Mercer Avenue traffic, he looked at the sky and tried to admire its colors as the sun set—tangerine, gray, lavender. Night would fall soon.

At least it wasn’t raining. The day had been a sunny one, obviously, and rare for March in this town.

He inched along and, too soon for his taste, was on Dexter Avenue, heading north to his parents’ condo. Correction—make that his mother’s condo. He took in all the new apartment buildings that had gone up along this stretch since he had lived in Seattle. He noted the dedicated bike lanes and within a mile counted at least a dozen bikers, probably on their way home from work.

Yes, he was in Seattle.

Finally, he spied the building he had seen so many photographs of. It was four stories, very modern, with clean lines, and its exterior had been painted a tasteful shade of beige. The building even had a name, Aerie, because it perched on a bluff above a greenbelt that was itself above busy Westlake Avenue, and then the harbor and the lake. Bobby remembered his mom telling him the Sleepless in Seattle houseboat was just beneath them, although trees blocked their views of it.

He found a parking spot only steps from the Aerie’s plate-glass front door and pulled in. This kind of parking—his friend Caden had called it “Doris Day parking” because it was always right in front of where you wanted to be, as it forever was in the wholesome blonde’s movies—Bobby seldom found in Chicago, where it wasn’t uncommon to circle a neighborhood for a half hour or more, only to park three or four blocks from your destination.

Again, Bobby realized he would have appreciated the delay. Instead, he turned off the car, sat there for a moment just trying to get his breathing under control. He pulled the sweat-soaked shirt from his back, despite the fact the temperature outside hovered around fifty.

“You gotta do this, and no amount of sitting here is going to make it any easier,” Bobby said in his best “chin up, shoulders back” manner of speaking. He took a deep breath, put his hand on the door handle, and swung his legs out onto the pavement—just narrowly missing a biker who barreled down the hill at top speed. “Watch it, dumbass!” the biker called over his shoulder.

Bobby sat for a moment, door still offensively open to oncoming bikers, waiting for his heart rate to slow. He flung his head back to the headrest and closed his eyes, but only for a second. Then he looked behind him and got out. He grabbed his Tumi bag from the trunk and started up the walk.

In the gloom of dusk, he spotted a man striding down the street toward him. A cold chill passed through Bobby, colder than the air surrounding him. The man’s bearing was almost military—shoulders back, spine ramrod straight, swinging his arms forcefully in time with his very purposeful and rapid walk—and Bobby sucked in a gasp.

It was his father. “Stand up straight, son! A man who slouches is a lazy son of a bitch, and that’s no one from this family!” Bobby could hear the man saying.

“Dad?” Bobby whispered, and for a moment, it all was clear: his mother had set up this elaborate—and macabre—ruse to finally get him to come home. He felt himself cowering a little as the man drew near.

But of course it was not his father. This guy’s hair, Bobby now saw, was snow white, and he wore tortoiseshell glasses. His father had still managed contacts and kept the gray carefully dyed out of his own head of thick auburn hair. And this man wore a Seattle Mariners T-shirt and jeans, attire his staid father wouldn’t have been caught dead in.

Caught dead in? Bobby snickered, ratcheting the laugher almost up to a hysterical giggle as he chided himself for his choice of words.

Stop it! Pull yourself together!

At last he stood at the front door, thinking it was odd that he would have to, for the first time ever, buzz his mother for admittance to the family abode. He located the Nelson name in the directory and punched in the code.

Just as he noticed the camera above him, Bobby heard the discreet click of the front door lock releasing. He pulled the door open and whispered, “Here goes nothing.”

He moved quickly through the lobby, heading straight back to his mother’s front door. Should he knock? He shook his head; knocking would just be too weird. He tried the doorknob and it turned easily.

Once he was inside, he didn’t have much time to admire the condo’s clean lines, elegant marble and dark wood décor, or the stunning views from the floor-to-ceiling windows that all faced east, showcasing the shimmering water, the Eastlake neighborhood lit up by the setting sun, and the Cascade Mountains behind it, looking gray, their tops shrouded in ribbons of silvery cloud.

He could only glimpse these things quickly, because his mother commanded his immediate attention. Bobby’s first thought was unkind, and he quickly stomped on it with shame. But it couldn’t be denied—it looked as though his mother had arranged herself on the living room couch as a portrait of despair.

Michelle Nelson had nothing out of place. Her fitted black slacks, white silk blouse, and Hermès scarf in tasteful shades of avocado, yellow, and cream all spoke of genteel elegance. Her legs were crossed, and Bobby noticed that her shoes, high-heeled pumps, bore red soles, a high-end designer signature. Bobby could not remember the designer’s name, only that the cost of the shoes would probably feed a family of four for a month. Michelle’s hair hung straight, blonde, and perfect to her shoulders. Now, as she stared down at her interlaced fingers, that hair hid her face. She didn’t look a day over forty.

She could be his sister.

But the perfect, almost serene composure was marred by his mother’s face when she looked up. This was one area she couldn’t keep together. Her eyes were moist, red-rimmed, with smudges of black mascara. Her lipstick had worn off, and she looked much closer to her real age. The lines of grief, not concealed by foundation and blush, were etched deeply into her face and emphasized by the obvious crying she had recently done.

She didn’t say anything, but simply raised her watery blue eyes to him as he closed the door and walked toward her.

He felt bad for thinking she had somehow staged this moment to create some sort of tableau of her grief. It was obvious from her quivering lower lip and the tears that sprung forth from her eyes upon seeing him that the sadness, the ache, were very real and very fresh.

Bobby dropped his bag and hurried to sit by his mother so that their shoulders touched. The two of them said nothing for several minutes. Bobby simply pressed in close, wondering if he should take her in his arms.

The Nelsons were not a big hugging family.

Finally, it was Michelle who spoke first. She extended her hand, closed fist, toward him. “I know he would have wanted you to have this.” The simple admission caused her to hiccup out a small sob, and she wiped at her eyes.

Bobby allowed her to drop what she held into his palm. He looked down to see the ring his father always wore, a square-cut ruby set in yellow gold—his birthstone. His father had had the ring since he was a young man. His parents had given it to him as a gift when he’d completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Washington.

Bobby fingered it, recalling it on his father’s hand, remembering it coming toward him as his father reached out to cuff him on the ear, and felt sick. That ring was a piece of his father, and Bobby felt an almost irresistible urge to simply fling it across the room. He would have done so if he hadn’t realized how much that act would hurt his mother.

Michelle said quietly, “Aren’t you going to put it on?”

Bobby peered down at the ring as though it were a foreign thing, like he needed an instruction manual to understand how to slide it onto his ring finger. Finally, because he could think of no way to gracefully decline his mother’s urging, he slid the ring on.

It would go only as far as his knuckle. The ring was too small, and this surprised Bobby: that he would have bigger hands than his hypermasculine father. By no stretch of his imagination would Bobby ever dream that his father’s hands were small, even delicate, yet the ring told that very tale.

“It doesn’t fit.”

“You’ll have to get it sized.”

Bobby nodded and slid the ring into his pocket. For now, at least, the matter of his wearing it was settled.

“Do you want to unpack? I put fresh towels on the bed in the guest room and clean sheets on the bed. Are you hungry? How long can you stay?”

“Mom. Mom—never mind that. Are you okay?”

His mother stared for a long time at the dying light outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, taking in small breaths through her mouth. Bobby could tell she was trying not to cry. He patted her shoulder.

“No. Not okay. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She looked at him then, her eyes pleading, desperate. “He took care of everything—the bills, the car, the house—how will I do all of that myself? I don’t know where to start.” She grabbed Bobby’s hand and held it tightly. Bobby looked down at the small hand, the bird bones, afraid to return her grip for fear of crushing them.

Of course his mother would be grieving the loss of order, of practicality, of being taken care of, as she had been her entire married life. Although she had gotten a degree in elementary education, she had never used it, never worked outside the home. Her occupations had been volunteering for charitable organizations and taking care of Bobby and his sister.

Of course she would not be grieving for his father—not the man. How could she? He was hard, self-centered, a son of a bitch, if Bobby didn’t want to put too fine a point on it.

His mother could never have really loved this man, who had essentially given her lots of material things but rarely showed her any real affection. Conversation between husband and wife in the Nelson household was more about instructing, complaining, and chastising than it ever was about sharing or kindness.

Bobby suddenly flashed on a summer day back when he was a little boy. His mother had gone to have her hair and makeup done for a party she and his father were attending that night. She came home—only a half hour late—beaming with pride at how gorgeous she looked, flushed with excitement for the party.

But one didn’t arrive late—ever—on Robert Nelson’s watch. He took one look at her, frowned, and said, “Too bad you went to so much trouble when it will only be the four walls who will appreciate it.” He had walked away. Later, he had gone to the black tie event on his own.

Bobby had comforted Michelle that night, telling her how beautiful she was and mixing her expert Stoli martinis until she fell asleep on the family room couch.

Good times…

It was almost on the tip of Bobby’s tongue to say something along the lines of You’ll pick up that stuff easy. Everything you need to know and do is all online now. I’ll show you, when Michelle interrupted the flow of his words by saying something that shocked him, that actually caused his world to be jarred two inches to the left, as if an earthquake had struck.

“I loved him so much. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”

Bobby didn’t know what to say. Those few words changed his entire perception of his parents, of their marriage. She loved him?

How could she?

Bobby had never felt more alone than he did at this very moment.

He got up from the couch and lifted his bag from the floor. “I think I’ll go unpack now after all. Okay if I take a shower? It’s been a long day.”

His mother looked up at him, eyes bright, questioning. But all she said was “Sure. Go ahead. The guest room has its own bath. I put new shampoo, soap, and conditioner in there for you. While you’re doing that, I’ll heat up some Thai for you. You like Pad Thai?”

“Sure, Mom. That sounds great.”

Bobby hurried from the room. For the first time since he had heard the news about his father, he felt like crying.

Almost.