Roni’d been cleaning, breastfeeding her son, and wiping dog slobber off the floor for the better part of the day. When her son vomited breast milk all over both himself and her, she was already running late to pick up her husband’s college friend from the South Shore. Roni changed the baby’s clothes, put him in his swing, jumped in and out of the shower for thirty seconds, threw on her husband’s old FBI SWAT training t-shirt, put her five-month-old son into his carrier, and grabbed her keys. “Jesus Christ,” she said under her breath but didn’t stumble on the guitar that her dog must have knocked down again with his big wagging tail.
She pulled her wet hair up, picked up her son in his bulky, crash-test-rated car seat, dragged it through three rooms, shoved her feet into some old wedge flip-flops, and rushed through the laundry room toward the garage.
She tried to think about what she’d say to Brandon’s friend. She couldn’t remember if this was the guy that ended up going to the police academy at the same time as Brandon or if this guy worked with her husband at the stromboli place for five years. She should know. So she couldn’t ask. Maybe she could ask him whether he had any good stories on Brandon from when they first met. She definitely wanted to clarify which guy this was before she got back to the house to make their dinner.
Either way she was about to miss his train if she didn’t hurry. Hopefully she could catch mostly green lights on the way there and be at the front of the line of cars picking up commuters. She hurried to the garage steps as best she could while lugging the awkward baby carrier because she hated being in the back of that Kiss & Ride line more than she hated being in a rush to leave the house. But at the foot of the garage stairs she just stopped.
Her navy sedan was backlit with blinding light off the cement. The garage door gaped.
She gripped the handle of the baby carrier but didn’t look down at her son. All the motion and momentum that had gathered in the past ten minutes dissipated to nothing. It wasn’t even worth hesitating. She took the first step and stood on the second step of the garage stairs overwhelmed by both knowledge and disbelief. It took brute force to move up one more step and stand immobilized on the third shocked but not surprised. She stared into the backseat of her car.
She didn’t hope. She didn’t pray. She just said to herself, “I really don’t need this right now.” She climbed the last step and stood on the garage floor. Her son kicked his feet in the carrier. She shifted the thing from one side of her body to the other.
Brandon’s friend’s train was due to arrive in ten minutes. But it didn’t matter. What choice did she have? She had to deal with this bullshit again. She set her son’s carrier down on top of a fifty-pound bucket of dog food and sent a text to her mom: What happened?
Then she walked around to the other side of the car to be sure.
Her husband’s motorcycle lay tipped over on the pile of recycling.
Yep.
God damn it.
The driver’s side passenger door was standing wide open and her father lay passed out in the backseat.
Roni felt nothing. She just wanted her dad out of her car. She wanted him not there at all. Inert like the mountain bikes, the garden hose, the lawn seed spreader, the broken fire pit, the black shelving, the bag of bulb fertilizer, the snow shovel, the weed whacker, the new wagon, and the crib box, she just blinked. She didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. She didn’t throw anything. She didn’t abandon her son. She didn’t kick the aging, tyrannic bastard.
She said, “Dad. Wake up. Get out of my car. I need to go. I need to be somewhere.”
He didn’t move.
She pushed her dad’s knee gently but firmly by shutting the car door against his shins. He didn’t notice. She picked up each of his legs and let them drop. They were deadweight. She poked him in the chest. He was nearly lifeless—didn’t respond to any stimulus. She tried to drag him out of the car but he was too big. She had trouble enough lugging her son around. There was no way she could move her father. It was an exercise in futility to even push isometrically against the accumulated weight, resistance, and friction of their intolerant years. She tried to shove her dad into the car but his clothes against the upholstery of her car seat created too much drag for her to overcome.
Her son started to cry.
She looked over at him, balanced there in a plastic safety device on the dog food. What was she even trying to protect him from? She hadn’t noticed any of the dog food scattered across the concrete floor, or that raccoons had likely been in her garage. Her recycling was chewed up and torn. There were scat pellets. So then she did feel something. Not disappointment, rage, or aggression having anything to do with her father’s being so exhaustingly who he was. No. She was infuriated that the garage door had been open all night and that wild animals got into her dog’s food.
She walked around the car to the big bucket of dog food and started rocking her son. He fell asleep fairly easily. She moved him off the dog food container and put him in the middle of the hood of her car. She got a blue-handled broom and dustpan to clean up what she could. She sprayed urine remover in all the places she found scat.
Her mother texted her back about what had happened with her father last night.
Roni read her mother’s explanation but did not respond. Instead, she texted her husband to say that she was going to miss his friend’s train. She gave no explanation to her husband, just told him to text his friend and let him know.
Her husband was livid and responded right away. He said, no, he wasn’t going to text his friend, that she just needed to go and pick him up, that there was no reason for her to be late, she was just sitting around all day, and that it’s not like his friend can just call a taxi—it’d cost a fortune if any ghetto cab even did show up. Her husband’s follow-up text said that he never should have given her any responsibility and that he knew she didn’t like his even having friends but that she had no right to leave the poor guy hanging.
She did not cry. She did not call her husband at work to scream at him about her father’s lying passed out drunk in the backseat of her car. What would be the point? He’d already worked a double. So she did not throw her phone down and stamp on it. She did not call her friend to get the name of that divorce lawyer.
She absorbed what she could and did nothing.
After twenty-nine years of listening to all her mother’s excuses she was not about to explain anything about this to her husband. She was too sick of all the reasons why. She did not respond to her husband at all. She just looked at her son on the hood of the car to be sure he’d be okay there for another minute and disappeared into the house. She returned with a plastic cup of water, walked around to the rear passenger door, and threw the water in her father’s face.
He blinked. He spit. She was patient and maybe a little afraid when she told her dad to just pull his feet into the car because they had to go to the train station. He reluctantly did it.
Roni took her son off the hood of the car and put his car seat into the carrier base in the backseat next to her father. She didn’t want her son so close to her father right at that moment but she had no other choice. She was just glad that her child was encased in plastic, that her father was not quite conscious, and that she’d be picking up her husband’s friend in a minute. She might not remember exactly how he and Brandon met but she knew he was a big guy trained for mortal combat.
Knowing that helped her breathe.
She got into the driver’s seat and adjusted her mirrors. Her father only momentarily met her gaze in the rearview mirror before he tilted his head back and put his hands on his forehead.
Roni said nothing.
She put the key in the ignition and turned it.
Nothing happened.
The car wouldn’t start: the battery had run down with the dome light shining all night.
She texted her mom to ask if she could go get her husband’s friend at the train station. Her mom immediately responded to say she couldn’t because she was almost at work already and plus she didn’t understand why her daughter was always so unfeeling about everything that happened and never cared what her mother was going through. Roni should really not give her any more stress right when she was so emotional after the events of the previous evening, and even if she might have maybe considered doing a favor for Roni, even if she were perhaps available for another twenty minutes, she wouldn’t do anything right then because she was so mad at Roni for not even responding to her explanation in the other text.
Roni deleted the text message from her mother and got her son and his carrier out of the car. She left her dad rolling around in the backseat and walked to the house next door. She wished she had grabbed the diaper bag or at least a blanket. She wanted to be more prepared. But it was too late. She rang the doorbell.
Her neighbor answered. Roni extended her son’s carrier and said, “Can I borrow your car for a half-hour? I’ll fill up your tank.” Her neighbor didn’t say a word. She reached for the baby carrier, dug into her pocket, and handed Roni the keys.