He gave me a curious look. “You?”
“I thought about doing just about everything, just to get out of the car business.”
“If you hate it so much why do you do it?”
I raised both hands. “To give you guys this.”
His expression gave me the impression he thought I was a fool. Maybe I was. Moving here, making manager, buying into this neighborhood, none of it had brought us happiness in the end. Just a different set of problems. A bigger set.
Benji stared at the TV, watching the captain yell at one of his men. “Once I knew I was probably getting kicked out, I started thinking about what I wanted to be before I got the Navy itch.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the memory that conjured. “You wanted to be Popeye.”
“I still want to be Popeye,” he said. “Lots of people in Braddy’s Wharf make a living fishing, you know.”
I took a sip of my sweet tea, which was watered down now from the melting ice. “It’s a hard life, Ben.”
He shifted in his seat like I was making him uncomfortable. Well, tough, I thought. Better to be uncomfortable in your warm, paid-for house than laying in the gutter, penniless five years from now.
“What isn’t?”
“There are easier ways to make money. A lot more money. That’s all.”
He rolled his eyes. “Money isn’t everything.”
“You say that because you’ve never lived without it.”
He let out a breath like I’d sucked the life out of him. Seems I was getting good at doing that to people lately. “I kind of thought you’d give college some more thought. You have a business sense about you like no one I’ve ever seen. The right school could really help you hone that.”
He buried his face in his hands and ran his fingers through what little hair he had. “I thought we buried the college discussion when I left the first time.”
“Okay, okay, just throwing things out there.”
He turned to look at me. “Well, stop throwing. This is my life, not yours. You’re the businessman, not me.”
“Well, if you’re going to make your living fishing, you have to be one too.”
“I just want to fish.”
“Well, life doesn’t work that way.”
He turned sideways to face me. “How does it work, Dad? Tell me. I get married, sell out for a big house in a snooty neighborhood, fight with my wife while my kid listens through the wall wondering when the divorce is going to happen, then get a little something on the side so I can feel better about selling out my dreams?”
I clenched my jaw and felt short, angry puffs of air shoot from my flared nostrils. I wasn’t about to discuss my alleged shortcomings with my kid. “You may be a man, but you’re still my son. You’ll show me respect as long as you live under my roof.” I realized then that what made me so angry was that he was exactly right.
He snatched up the remote and flipped the channel, replacing the fishing show with a cartoon. He slammed the remote on the table, knocking the battery from it. It rolled off the table onto the rug. “You know what the Navy taught me? You want respect, you earn it.”
Twenty-Nine
Kyra stayed out so late with her sister and their designer-slash-musician friend that I had fallen asleep on the couch by the time they got back. Rather than take a chance on learning that my wife had remembered more of my indiscretions, I pretended not to wake up when I heard them come in. Although a person would need to have no sense of smell whatsoever to sleep through my sister-in-law’s obnoxious perfume.
The next morning Kyra made an emergency appointment with Doctor Hershing, I’m sure to tell him what he already knew. Would she be angry at him for not filling her in, or would he even tell her that he knew? I certainly wouldn’t. Not with her temper.
With Benji, Kyra, and even Larry mad at me, I was desperate for advice and, if I was being honest, a little sympathy. So I visited the two people obligated to give it to me.
“She said that?” my mother asked from the other side of her table.
Alfred took a sip from his cup, then shook his head like he’d lost his best friend.
I wrapped my hands around the warm mug Mother had just set in front of me. It smelled more like pumpkin pie than coffee. “I know it’s bad.”
She bent to pet the elderly Persian Alfred had rescued from the SPCA the week before. He looked like he had mange with his spotty shave job. Mom had finally given up on trying to brush out his knots. He purred like an engine as she stroked him. “Ya think?”
“Thanks, Ma, you’re really making me feel better.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, did you come here so I would make you feel better?” She pulled the cat onto her lap. “I got nothing.” She turned to Alfred. “Hon, you have anything that might make this kid feel better?”
Much to both of our surprise, he said, “I think so, yeah.”
She looked at him so long and hard it seemed to me she was trying to extract his thoughts through telepathy. Whatever she saw there seemed to satisfy her. “Why don’t you two take a walk? It’s a nice day.”
“Bah,” Alfred said. “Why don’t you go take a walk and leave us men here to talk?”
“With this hip?”
“Go shopping or something. Your hip’s always good enough for that.”
“I don’t want to go shopping. Do we need anything? No. Do we have any money even if we did? No.”
“Do you need money?” I asked, hoping she’d say no. It would only blow a hole in her pocket.
“Bah.” Alfred stood and picked up his walking stick, the head of which had been carved into a face that looked suspiciously like his. I didn’t know if the resemblance was coincidental or not.
He lifted his cardigan from the back of the chair and slipped it on. “Come on, junior.”
My parent’s apartment backed up to a walking trail that led to a park. As far as I could tell, they never used it. They seldom left the place except to shop.
Even though I had no desire to take a walk, we couldn’t have asked for nicer weather. It was a perfect seventy-two, without a cloud in the sky, and the scent of flowers and mulch filled the air.
Alfred walked alongside me, leaning on his stick like a cane. As far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with his legs. I think he used it for the same reason he wore his hair long. He may have looked like a Grateful Dead groupie, but he was more conservative than most Republicans. I suspected he’d been every bit the child of the sixties back when he met my mother, but he’d grown out of that persona long ago. Since she hadn’t, he probably decided when in Rome . . .
He stopped and pointed his stick to the brown grass to the right of us. “It’s starting to all look like one giant pee spot.”
It took me a second to figure out what he meant. “You mean how the grass dies from the dog’s uric acid?”
He chuckled. “Uric acid—yeah, smart guy. I say pee, you say the chemical derivative.”
“To-may-toe, to-mah-toe,” I said.
He smacked his lips. “I’d like to have a big ol’ ripe one of those right how. If mother nature don’t cooperate, I don’t guess we’ll be growing any on the patio this year. Your township have y’all on water restrictions too?”
“I don’t know. I think so.” I waited for a jogger to pass. “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“You Yankees always have to get right to the point, don’t you?”
I was born and raised in what I, and everyone else who lived here, considered the tip of the south, but my southeastern Virginia wasn’t as far south as his native South Carolina so it was all relative I guess. I wasn’t in the mood to argue. If he wanted me to be a Yankee, so be it.
We came across a black metal bench with Josh rules spray-painted in white across it.
Alfred looked at the graffiti before he sat. “I bet he don’t neither.”
“I think that’s safe to say.” I watched a couple swinging their little boy along the path between them. His mel
odic laughter made my heart ache. That used to be us, I thought, Kyra, Benji, and me, not so long ago. I prayed that family wouldn’t end up where we had.
A water fountain stood a foot from us, and I figured I’d get a drink while Alfred rested. It might have just been my imagination, but the water here seemed to taste so much sweeter than where Kyra and I lived.
As I pushed down on the pedal, cold liquid hit my lips.
“I ever tell you your mother cheated on me?” Alfred said.
Water spewed from my mouth. I wiped my chin and turned around. A man on a bike rode by, giving me a funny look.
“No,” I said. “No, you didn’t.”
“That’s because she didn’t. She knows I would have killed her.”
“Listen, Al, I’m too tired for nonsense.”
He tapped his stick against the ground. “Shush and let me talk.”
I sat on the bench beside him and we turned sideways to face one another. A sycamore tree cast a shadow over our feet.
“What happened to you two?” Alfred asked. His once-blue eyes now looked more gray from the cloudiness of age. “I remember the day you came home with this cheese-eating grin telling your mother and me that you met the woman you were going to marry. Your courtship was so fast it gave everyone whiplash. She and I both said it wouldn’t last a year. Now, look at you.”
I already felt miserable and he wasn’t helping. “Yeah, look at us.”
“My point is that you’ve been married twenty years. That’s a long time in this day and age. How many of those years would you say were good?”
He was starting to sound like Doctor Hershing. “All of them up until maybe two years ago.”
“So, eighteen—that’s 80 percent. How many marriages you think last that long and are 80 percent good if they do?”
His math was off, but I decided it helped nothing to correct him. “I guess I should be happy with what we had, huh?”
“No, you should try to make it twenty more.”
“She’s going to divorce me.”
He stopped and looked at me. “No, she isn’t. You know how many times in our marriage your mother threatened to divorce me?”
I figured the question was rhetorical, but when he didn’t continue, I finally shrugged.
“A gazookin, at least. I’ve threatened it too. People say stuff.”
“I don’t remember you guys fighting.”
A group of teenage runners buzzed past us like a swarm of bees.
“Our fights were more cold wars than nuclear ones.” We sat in silence for a few minutes before he continued. “In our forty years together, your mother and I have gone through more than our fair share of droughts, but we always get back to where we need to be.”
I began to wonder if maybe Alfred was right, that we were just cycling through and would eventually swing back around to contentment again. Still, years of resentment seemed like a little more than a simple dry spell. “Whatever love she had for me dried up years ago. This isn’t a drought, Alfred; it’s a desert.” Yes, that’s exactly what had happened. We’d both immersed ourselves in our separate lives. We stopped touching and talking . . . and until recently, even caring.
Alfred stabbed his stick into a fallen leaf. “Without the desert, an oasis is just another watering hole.”
“What?”
“I’ve seen the way she looks at you, Son. That desert’s about as dry as rain.”
I thought about this a minute and decided he was either saying what he thought I wanted to hear or else seeing what he wanted to. “Judging by how dry our rain is lately, I’d say you’re about right,” I said.
I waited for his bah. Instead he stood, a piece of the leaf still clinging to the end of his stick. “The rain stays away for a while, sometimes a long while, but it always comes back.” He turned his head suddenly. “You smell that?”
I sniffed the air. “Hot dogs?”
“Hot Dog Ronny’s, baby! You bring your wallet?”
I patted my back pocket for the familiar lump and nodded. “I thought you were a vegetarian.”
“Only when your mother’s around.”
He would have gotten a laugh out of me if I wasn’t so miserable. We started walking along the narrow strip of asphalt again, heading toward the smell of meat. “What I’m trying to tell you, Eric, is hang in there. She’ll come around. She loves you. I know that sure as I know that your mother loves me.”
“Sometimes love isn’t enough,” I said, “like with my father. He claimed to love Mom and me, but actions speak louder than words. I’m sure that’s how Kyra probably feels about what I did.”
“Maybe so. You know, maybe if you forgive your father, karma will let Kyra forgive you.”
It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. “I’m afraid I’m not much of a karma man,” I said.
“There ain’t a religion out there that don’t preach karma in one form or another. Christianity included. ‘Reap what you sow’ ring a bell?”
“I don’t think it works quite the way you’re implying.”
“Maybe it does, maybe it don’t; but since we’re on the subject, I think you should forgive your father either way. The people who need the most forgiveness ought to do the most forgiving. Your Bible say anything about that?”
“It talks about forgiveness,” I said.
“Good.”
When we approached the silver hot dog wagon with the Hot Dog Ronny’s logo spray-painted on the side, I pulled out my wallet. “How many you want?”
Alfred looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You know I’m a vegetarian.”
After staring him down, I apologized to the vender and turned back to my stepfather. “You just said—”
“Bah, I just like to pretend. My being a vegetarian makes your mother happy. If I go and eat that delicious tube of heaven, how would I look her in the eye?”
“So, why did you ask me to buy you one?”
“I just like to pretend,” he said. “Now pretend to be the man your wife married and go and give her the apology she’s waiting for.”
Thirty
I actually felt hopeful as I drove home to Kyra. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Alfred was right. She would be mad and hurt for a long time, but a flirtatious e-mail wasn’t enough to make her divorce me. She just wanted to make me suffer, and be sure that I knew how much I had hurt her.
She still wasn’t aware of the actual sex part, and she never had to be, as far as I was concerned. Danielle seemed to be over it, and the only other person who knew was Larry. He might hate my guts at the moment, but he, like every other red-blooded American man, knew the code—you didn’t rat out another man to a woman, unless she was your sister or mother . . . or you wanted her for yourself. None of which pertained to Larry’s relationship with my wife. At least it had better not.
So, all I had to do was give her a heartfelt and sincere apology, do a little groveling, and convince her that the flirtation was just a symptom of our sick marriage, which was the absolute truth. I’d promise her counseling, that Holy Land trip she’d always wanted to take, or whatever else she thought would help us move forward.
I expected her to be mad. I expected her to get even. I did not, however, expect her to be leaving to go on a job interview.
“Why shouldn’t I get a job?” she said as she looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of our closet door. She wore her hair pulled back into a fancy knot at the nape of her neck. Her white silk blouse dipped at the neckline, just enough to show off a few freckles and a shadow of cleavage.
“Why should you? It’s not like we need the money. Do I not provide everything you could possibly need?”
In the reflection of the mirror she gave me a hard look. “No, you do not.” Her voice cracked ever so slightly and I saw something in her eyes that told me she was bluffing. I knew that Alfred was right; she was going to forgive me.
She sat on the bed and picked up one of the heels sitting beside it.
She slipped it on.
“So, where are you applying for jobs?” I asked, still trying to figure out how to launch into my confession-slash-apology.
“Tambourine’s.”
“Are you going to wait tables?”
She clicked her tongue in disgust as she stood. “No, I’m going to wash dishes.”
“Was that a ridiculous question? You don’t have a degree. You have no marketable skills, except playing the piano.” The lightbulb finally went on. “But they already have a regular pianist. Besides, you don’t want to work there.”
“They fired him, and don’t tell me where I want to work.”
“I just think you could do better.”
She headed for the bedroom door. “My mother thought that too.” She turned and gave me a slow once-over. “So did my friends. Maybe I should have listened.”
The jab was meant to hurt, but knowing her state of mind shielded me from the full impact. I’d need tough skin in the days to come. As soon as I came clean with her, she’d be shooting darts at me left and right hoping to draw a little blood. If we were going to weather this, I couldn’t let her drain me dry or else I’d be the one wanting to walk. If we could get past it, we might just cycle back like Alfred said. I desperately wanted to get back to where we were just yesterday when I was still her samurai.
Sitting on the couch, I listened to her car back out of the garage. I hadn’t seen Benji all morning, so I decided to make another attempt at father-son bonding. I went upstairs and knocked on his bedroom door. There was no response. “Ben,” I called. “Benji, you in there?” I tried the knob, but it was locked. I shouldn’t have been worried—Benjamin was a solid kid—but still with his being booted from the Navy and then our fight yesterday, I was more than a little concerned. I banged harder, and then frantically. “Benji, open up!”
The doorknob turned and he poked his head out. He still wore the same clothes he had on the day before along with a five o’clock shadow. He looked confused as he pulled the earbuds out and let them dangle from his hands. “What’s up?”
“Did you hear me? I was screaming.”
He held up his iPod. “Sorry. Music.”