I can practically smell the booze from the street, and the TV is cranked up much too loud. Dad’s yelling in a booming voice, though I can’t make out the specific words. He’s on a bender. My body immediately tenses. There’s only one reason my dad would be home, plastered, in the middle of a Monday afternoon, and it isn’t to make me an after-school snack. This can’t be good.
“Hank!” he says, trying to focus on me as I pull the front door closed behind me. “Have a seat.” He pats the sofa cushion next to him and nearly falls over in the process.
“Dad, what are you doing home?”
Monica comes out of the kitchen, dressed for work in a skimpy tube top and cutoff shorts. She is visibly stressed, and mascara trails down her cheeks. Why has she been crying?
She jiggles her keys in her hand and says, “I’m glad you’re home, Hank. Your dad got laid off today, and I didn’t want to leave him here alone. Not like this. But I gotta go.”
“He what?” This is so very not good.
“I don’t need you to babysit me,” my dad slurs at Monica. “Don’t you have a pole to twirl around? Stick to what you’re good at.”
She glares at him tight-lipped. “When your father gets drunk, he says a lot of shit he doesn’t mean.”
“Shit I don’t mean?” Dad’s eyes narrow. “Honey, wake up. You wrapping yourself around that pole is what made me notice you in the first place.”
“Dad—” I start to defend Monica even though I know it’s going to piss him off more. Mickey and I were never brave enough to say anything when he talked to our mother that way. I’m not going to make that mistake twice.
My dad does not like being confronted. Especially in front of other people. Even when he knows he’s wrong. He has too much pride to back down. But he has to realize that if he stops giving a shit about everybody else, eventually people will stop giving a shit about him too. I have a feeling this is about to be one of those times.
Dad cranks the TV volume from loud to ear-splitting, ignoring us both. Monica shakes her head. Her mind is already made up.
“Look,” she says to me in a low voice, “I made a tuna casserole. It’s on top of the stove. All you need to do is reheat it in the oven. Just get some food in him to soak up some of that liquor.” She bites back tears. “You take care of yourself, Hank. You’re a good guy. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”
She leans in and gives me a hug. That’s when I notice the suitcase by the door.
Her suitcase.
The green one with rainbow-colored ribbons tied around the handle that’s been sitting in the hall closet for nearly a year, ever since she unofficially moved in.
And it becomes clear that today she is officially moving out.
“What?” I’m seriously hoping I’ve misheard her. “No, Monica, wait. You can’t go!”
I grab her hand as she heads toward the door. I’m frantic at the thought of her leaving. She’s about the only thing keeping Dad sane. Without her, I don’t know what’s going to happen.
“I really care about your dad, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take how he gets when he drinks. I told him he needs to stop, but lately he doesn’t seem to care about anything or anyone else. And now this. I told him if he wants to be with me, he needs to get his shit together. If he does, he knows where to find me.” Tears run down her cheeks. She angrily brushes them away. “I’m sorry.”
“Look, he doesn’t mean it, Monica. When he sobers up, he’ll be his usual self again. You know that. Please. Stay.” I plead with her, but she’s already got her hand on the doorknob.
“It’ll be okay, Hank.”
And just like that, she’s gone, and I’m standing there, jaw half open, staring at the back side of the door. I contemplate running down the driveway, throwing myself in front of her car, begging her to stay. Part of me wants to get in the car with her and never look back. But I can’t.
I slowly turn to look at my dad and see he’s lost in the television, his eyes at half-mast. If he notices that Monica has left, he doesn’t show it. From the lineup of empties in front of him he’s at least halfway through a six-pack and not showing signs of stopping anytime soon.
Dad belches and brings his beer to his lips for another swig; then he wipes at his mouth with the back of his fist. He grabs the remote and turns the TV down to a semi-normal volume. “Don’t you dare heat that crap. Smells like cat food! I ain’t touching it.”
“What’s going on, Dad?” I ask quietly.
“You heard her. I got fired.”
He starts flipping through channels. Suddenly, the house is filled with the proclamations of someone hawking a blender that does it all: slices, dices, and practically folds your laundry. Dad is riveted.
“Why?” I’m scared to hear his response.
He turns to me with narrowed eyes. “Because the sons of bitches at work set me up is why. And I caught them at their own game. I have a good mind to take them to court for violating my personal privacy.” He spits as he says the letter p.
This sounds serious. “What happened?”
“They set up these little cameras all over, see? Like government spies. My supervisor claimed he saw me sneaking a drink by my locker. I called him a liar. Then he shows me the goddamned video, so I called him a pervert with nothing better to do than sit around jerking off and watching his employees all day. Then he pulled out my flask that he stole from my locker without my permission, and he tells me I’m gonna have to leave. Twenty-one years of service and they let me go without blinking an eye.”
I can feel the blood drain from my face. Folks won’t exactly be lining up to hire Dad. I’m guessing there’s not a huge demand for alcoholic factory workers in their midforties with a high school degree.
“You should go talk to him,” I suggest. “Ask him to give you a second chance. Like you said, you’ve been there a long time. Maybe he’ll reconsider.”
He laughs, and he doesn’t let up, so finally I join in because I’m not sure what else to do. “You think life is like one of those comic books of yours, don’t you? Where justice prevails. Where the good guy friggin’ wins.” He erupts with laughter again, and then he starts coughing so hard that he drops his beer. As he reaches for it, he clips his temple on the edge of the coffee table and it draws blood. Now he’s cussing and throws the beer can across the room. Then he starts crying.
Like, really bawling.
It all happens so fast that I still have to wipe the smile off my face and shift gears. I run to the kitchen, throw some ice in a plastic grocery bag I find under the sink, and wrap it in a dish towel. I give it to him to put on his head and then grab another dish towel to clean up his mess. I know better than to talk to him, so I just keep working, keep trying to make it all be okay.
I sneak a glance at him. He looks like hell, his face all red with a smudged line of blood down the side and snot bubbling out his nose. The last time I saw my dad cry was when Mom and Mickey died. He did it mostly in private, not wanting to share his grief with me. Even now, I’ll hear him late at night when Monica’s working and he thinks I am sleeping. He’ll go into Mickey’s room and sit there in the dark and talk to my dead mother and brother. He tells them all the things he should have told them when they were alive and what’s going on now. Ironically, I am in the next room but he won’t say a word of it to me.
“Just leave it,” he says.
The knees of my jeans are now wet and beer-stained. I keep dabbing at the soaked carpet, but the dish towel is already saturated.
“I said, ‘Leave it!’” he booms, and I stand up, still trying to avoid looking him in the eye.
“Okay.”
He examines the bloody dish towel in his hand and then shifts his focus to the TV, flipping through the channels again like nothing’s happened. “You’re blocking the TV.”
I move aside as he settles his focus on some game show. I leave him be, picking up the beer can he threw and setting it on the hallway table. As I do, I catch sight of the stack of mail sitting there. I thumb through to see if there’s anything for me, not that I get much mail, but it’s envelope after envelope of unopened bills, some of them with ominous red stamps that say “Final Notice” in big caps.
It’s amazing, really, what with Dad’s anti-sobriety stance and his hair-trigger temper, that he’s been able to keep this ship afloat until now. I’m wondering how long Dad’s unemployment and my part-time, minimum-wage job bagging groceries are going to carry us. I try to tamp down the panic rising from my gut. I have a vision of living under an overpass, pushing a shopping cart of our belongings, holding signs at highway off-ramps, and talking to people who aren’t there. I can’t let that happen to us.
I can probably convince Mr. O’Callaghan to let me pick up a few extra shifts on the weekends, at least until Dad lands on his feet. That should scrape together enough to keep the lights on, even if we have to eat a fuck-load of ramen to get by. A kid at my school, Walter Zhou, brings ramen to school for lunch every single frickin’ day. He always has a smile on his face, so it can’t be all bad, right?
This is only temporary, I tell myself like a mantra. Everything is temporary. If I’ve learned anything since Mom’s and Mickey’s deaths it’s that the only thing you can count on in life is change. Except, of course, from a vending machine.
I look over at Dad one more time before I head upstairs. His eyes are closed. He’s fallen asleep. That’s probably good. Far be it from me to disrupt the peace.
I head upstairs and collapse into my desk chair, puffing out my cheeks as I exhale loudly. I’m not much of a pot smoker, but I’m half wishing I’d hit Vaughn up for a joint this afternoon, because I could sure use a little escape right now. I log on to my computer instead.
It seems so trivial in the face of everything that’s happened this afternoon, but I find myself on Amanda’s page. There’s my number listed as a finalist: 456. This whole thing is so damn superficial, yet making it to the next round feels like an achievement, and I am oddly compelled to see it through. I look over the next round of questions, and they don’t have anything to do with the incident. They’re more like questions you’d find on a dating website:
If you and I had twenty-four hours to do anything, what would we do? Would it be a wild and crazy adventure or a lazy, romantic day?
If you could describe yourself using only five words, what would they be? And how would you describe me?
Why do you think we’d make an awesome couple?
What is something you really believe in? How far would you go for a cause that is important to you?
There are, like, six more questions, but I stop reading. It’s as if I’m interviewing for a job that I’m qualified for, but I still need to have the right hobbies to get hired. If she’s really looking for the guy that set her lawn on fire, I’m it. But Amanda seems to be looking for her soul mate. And how I answer these questions determines my fate, her fate, the fate of our unborn children and grandchildren, maybe the course of the entire universe.
But the fact is, you can’t get the job if you never apply. And since you can’t lose what you never had in the first place, I throw all caution to the wind and answer each of her ridiculous questions with witty, charming responses that are guaranteed to make her laugh. At the minimum, it is an entertaining distraction from thinking about what happened downstairs.
This time when I hit Submit, I’m not even mildly nauseated. Maybe the universe will let this one tiny thing go my way. Maybe it will be a sign of better times to come. And if Amanda doesn’t choose me, it’ll make an outstanding story when I’m old enough to go to cocktail parties.
There are so many things in life that you simply can’t control. You just have to accept them, even if they don’t make sense. This is one of them.
None of it matters, and all of it matters too much.