Consume greedily, read the crossword puzzle clue. Six letters. Matt penciled in ravish.
It took him five minutes to realize the correct answer was devour. Which he should have thought of first, because the damn puzzle had a Halloween theme.
Matt tossed his folded newspaper onto the passenger seat of his truck. He was just putting off the inevitable, sitting out here at the curb. This was one of the main reasons he’d moved back to Harmony Springs, to be able to spend time with his family. He wanted to be here for the little things—like answering the door on Halloween, handing out candy so his mother didn’t have to keep getting up from her upholstered armchair in front of the television.
Shooting the shit with his father.
Right. Like that was going to happen. Well, he’d heard lectures on how much he was a fuck-up for his entire life. Why should Halloween be any different?
He rang the doorbell and pasted on a smile when he saw his mother’s shadow through the front door’s frosted glass. “Trick or treat,” he said.
“Oh, Matty.” His mother folded him into her arms. She was softer than he remembered, more padded, and she seemed shorter too. But she still smelled like Suave shampoo.
“I figured you and Dad could use some help handing out candy.”
“Well, I certainly can.” She patted her hair as she closed the door behind him. “Your father got called in to work.”
“On a Saturday?”
“He drew the short stick. It was some sort of emergency.”
“What sort of emergency does an accountant have on a Saturday night?”
“You know how it is. The management team trades off who’s on call. Some trick-or-treaters probably got a little overzealous with their pranks.”
Matt felt a flash of unease. If pranksters were going after Baked Rite, what might they do with the plate glass windows at American Discount? But this was Harmony Springs, not downtown Raleigh. No one was going to do anything to his store. So he forced himself to smile and ask, “What are you handing out tonight?”
“Snickers,” Mom said. “I used to get my own favorites, but then I ate whatever was left over. I figured I might as well get…” She trailed off, as if he couldn’t guess the end of the sentence.
“Jon always was a sucker for a Snickers bar,” he said, and he felt a flash of pride that he kept his voice steady.
Before his mother could answer, the doorbell rang. He opened it to a gang of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, masked bandits who shouted “Trick or Treat” like they had enough energy to power a major city. He distributed the candy with a smile and closed the door.
“So,” his mother said, when they had taken their seats in the family room. “How are things going at the American Discount?”
Matt started to answer with good news—any good news he could scrape together for Mom—but the doorbell rang again. This time, there was a trio of Disney princesses.
And so it went for the rest of the evening. Mom soon gave up on meaningful conversation; instead, they talked about little stuff—commercials on TV, the sermon Pastor Bill gave at church last Sunday, the menu Mom was planning for Thanksgiving. In between snippets of talk, Matt headed back and forth to the door.
The chaos finally died down around nine o’clock.
“I shouldn’t keep you,” Mom said. “You must have something better to do on a Saturday night than watch over your old mother.”
“I’m not ‘watching over’ you. I’m keeping you company.”
She put her hand against his cheek. “You always were my little man,” she said.
Matt told himself the tightness in his chest was because he’d sneaked too many fun-size Snickers. “This is one of the advantages of being back home,” he said.
“Could you do me a favor, Matty?”
“Of course.”
“Will you drop off a bag of candy for your father? He always enjoys seeing the trick-or-treaters. He has, ever since you and Jon used to get all dressed up. I don’t want him to feel like he missed out on everything, just because of some stupid emergency at the plant.”
Of course Matt agreed to take a handful of Snickers. He waited while his mother found a brown lunch sack, and he laughed when she wrote, “Boo!” on the front. He kissed her cheek as he said goodbye, and he headed out to his truck.
He was careful driving to the factory, keeping an eye out for trick-or-treaters who were more excited by the prospect of candy than by the routine of staying safe in traffic. Baked Rite loomed at the edge of town, a steel-clad hulk of a building. Matt remembered breathing the air as a kid and knowing when they were baking snickerdoodles, when they were churning out gingerbread men.
Tonight, though, there was no aroma of fresh-baked cookies on the air. In fact, the building looked deserted. Matt was surprised to find the factory parking lot empty. He’d expected a skeleton crew at least, someone who’d been around to notice the Halloween vandalism. But there was nothing. No one.
But that wasn’t quite true. His father’s black Buick was parked across three spaces at the far end of the lot, straddling the lines like a defiant stroke of victory in a giant’s Tic Tac Toe game. Dad sat in the front seat, staring at the darkened factory.
For a moment, Matt considered throwing his truck in reverse and backing out of the lot, heading home with his bag of Snickers and a lie. But if he didn’t face his father now, he knew he never would.
He turned off his engine and extinguished his lights. The candy was heavy in his hand, and it seemed like the walk to the Buick was a hundred miles long.
“What the fuck, Dad?” he asked as he closed the passenger door behind him.
His father barely looked surprised. Instead, he nodded toward the factory. “I come here at night sometimes. I tell your mother I have to work the graveyard shift. What accountant ever worked a graveyard shift? I go out on the factory floor and watch the machines.”
“The machines aren’t running tonight.”
But Dad didn’t seem to hear him. “They do what they’re supposed to do. No surprises. Dough gets rolled out, baked, cooled, packaged. Night after night after night.”
“Not on the weekend.”
That finally registered. Dad shot him a sullen look. “I didn’t want to worry your mother.”
“You know what would help her not to worry? Your being home for dinner. Your helping hand out candy, the way you have for thirty-three years.”
His father sighed and reached for his cupholder. Matt saw a glint of silver, and he recognized the flask. He and Jon had gone in on it together for Christmas the year Jon graduated from high school.
His father took a long pull before he offered the container to Matt. What the hell. This little drive-by couldn’t get much stranger. Matt took a swig. “Christ! You could peel paint with that.”
Anger flared in his father’s eyes, the belligerent rage of the drunk. “It gets the job done.”
“You’re scaring me, Dad.”
His father snorted. “What’s scary is realizing you made the same wrong choice every day of your goddamn life. What’s scary is realizing you didn’t prepare your boy for what he had to face. You didn’t keep him safe.”
Jesus. The last thing Matt had planned on that night was a heart-to-heart with a guy who was three sheets to the wind. But he kept his voice even and said, “There wasn’t any way to prepare Jon. He was fighting a war. No one could keep him safe.”
“I could have told him not to go.”
“He wouldn’t have listened. He wanted to be a soldier from the first time he saw your box of medals.”
“Don’t put his death on me!”
Shit. Matt ignored his father’s tight fists, focusing hard on scrubbing away all emotion from his voice. “I’m not blaming you. I’m not blaming anyone.”
“I focused on making you tough.” Dad was ranting now, his words tumbling out with an ease, a familiarity that let Matt know he’d recited them plenty of times in the past. “I put you in charge. I did everything I could to prepare you for the life you were supposed to lead.”
“You did, Dad. You gave me the strength to make my own choices. I made my own career.”
“You played a game! A little boy’s game!”
Matt snapped. “That ‘little boy’s game’ is letting me help every single person in this town. Maybe you’ve been too drunk to notice, but I’m bringing Harmony Springs into the twenty-first century. I’m making it easier for every wife, every mother who has to keep her broken-ass family moving forward. I’m helping every kid who wants to stay in school, who wants to learn more, see more, do more. I’m using my money, Dad. I’m using my brain. I’m doing everything you ever wanted me to do.”
“I wanted you to be the one over there!”
The shout echoed in the close space of the car. Matt tried to convince himself he hadn’t heard right. He hadn’t understood. But there wasn’t any other way to parse the words, and he could never make them go away.
He waited while his father breathed heavily, panting like he’d just finished fifteen rounds in the ring. When he didn’t even try to gasp an excuse, though, Matt muttered, “Jesus, Dad.”
“You were supposed to be the one who went,” Dad said stubbornly. “You were the oldest son. Like me. Like my father. Like his father. Jon never should have been in that transport. He never should have been hit by that IED.”
His father was crying now, little gulps that punctuated his words.
Matt didn’t care if he was drunk. He couldn’t listen anymore. Couldn’t hear anymore. He dropped the bag of Halloween candy on the floor by his feet and yanked on the door handle.
“Where are you going?” his father cried. “Get back here!”
But Matt didn’t turn around, not even when his father leaned on his horn. Instead, Matt marched to his truck and turned his key, all the time focusing on keeping his breathing even, on washing away the crimson glow behind his eyes. He flexed his hands around the steering wheel once, twice, three times, and he made certain his foot was steady on the gas as he eased across the parking lot.
But he pulled over a couple of blocks from the factory. He fished out his cell phone and called the police station, got Aaron Carter on the line himself. He made some excuses, offered up an apology or two. He tried to ignore the tone in the police chief’s voice, the tired familiarity as he promised to swing by Baked Rite, to make sure Dave Dawson got home all right.
In the end, Matt felt like a traitor, even though he knew he’d done the right thing. Dad wouldn’t see it that way, Matt was one hundred percent certain of that. But at least Dad would get home safe.
It was more than Matt had been able to do for Jon. His failure haunted him, all the way home.