“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” he said, at last. “I’ve had it. If I retire right now, I can draw almost half of my pension. By Christmas, we could be living in the woods a thousand miles from the city.”
“Dream on.”
“I’m serious.”
“Then go ahead and quit. But first tell me how you’re going to pay Michael’s tuition at Occidental for the next four years on a partial pension. Don’t forget to add rent for him, because he won’t be able to live at home with you if home is a thousand miles away.”
“You mean, live with us.”
“No. I’ll still be here, chauffeuring Casey to performing arts school and working. You’re the only one retiring. I don’t have a pension to retire on.”
“You sound mad.”
“I’m getting there,” I said. The bubble bath suddenly looked ridiculous. “If you are serious, then you should have had this revelation before last week. We made a deal, you and me. Two years and five months in L.A., then we talk about going back to civilization. Tell me about pain in the butt: I jumped through hoops to get work down here, find office space, rent out my house, enroll Casey in a new school, move all our shit. We haven’t even found our way to the closest dry cleaner yet, so you damn well better not start talking about bugging out for another two fucking years and five months.”
“Whoa,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Exactly. Whoa.” I was steaming by the time I got to that point, but he had the beginnings of a smile for some reason. “Now what?” I demanded.
“Did you know your nipples get hard when you’re mad?”
“Did you know your dick gets hard when I’m mad?”
He looked down at the front of his boxer shorts, at the single eye peeking out through the fly. I reached into the fly, brought out that spying eye and kissed it.
“Either get into the tub,” I said, gently squeezing, “or lie down here on the floor. But do it right now.”
Mike threw back his head and laughed. “I thought you were tired.”
“Which will it be?” I stroked him.
“The tub.” He took me by the hand. “We just have time for a quick scrub-a-dub, though. My father’s coming over to meet you.”
Chapter 6
“You two get yourselves married yet?” Oscar Flint, Mike’s dad, winked at me over the top of his beer bottle, his first drink since he’d arrived, but certainly not his first of the day. “Or you just shackin’ up?”
“Give it a rest, Pop,” Mike said.
“We’re just shackin’ up, Oscar.” I was standing in front of the open refrigerator. I handed Mike a head of lettuce and a big, ripe tomato. “Anyone ready for another beer?”
“Not yet.” Oscar persisted: “I don’t know what’s holdin’ you two back. Hell, Mike’s already taken the long walk two times. He knows it don’t hurt none.”
“We don’t want to talk about it, Pop.” Mike was supposed to be making a green salad. He began chopping lettuce into tiny little bits with a very large knife. Wisely, Oscar moved toward the far side of the kitchen counter.
Oscar was a sturdy block of a man, not nearly as tall as Mike and Michael-they’re both six-two. He had heavy, square, working-man’s hands. His face was deeply lined, a road map of hard living and power drinking. He still had a full head of kinky red hair. I couldn’t see much of him in Mike except for a certain cast to his posture and the furrow between his eyebrows. And a few rough edges; sometimes rough edges give you something to hold on to.
I held my breath while I turned the chicken under the broiler. Then I picked up the bag of fresh corn on the cob and carried it over next to Oscar. He didn’t offer to help shuck it.
“It’s wonderful to meet you at last, Oscar,” I said, stripping an ear. “Mike has told me a lot about you.”
“I just bet he has,” Oscar chuckled. “We did okay, though, didn’t we Mikey? He tell you I had me a little body and fender shop over in Glendale?”
“It was a chop shop,” Mike said. “He was always getting raided by the DMV.”
“Worked a lot of hours,” Oscar went on, “but we scraped by, the two of us. ‘Course, with all the government regulation nowadays, you can’t hardly support a family with a small business like that. Deduct this, insure that, pay out to Social Security and unemployment and all that crap for your employees, pretty soon you got nothin’ left to buy groceries with. It don’t pay to run a business no more. Had to close the place down.”
“Pop, you never made a Social Security payment in your life.” Mike looked up at me from his lettuce pile. “He used to hire illegals, Maggie, and always paid them in cash so there were no books.”
“I don’t apologize for it,” Oscar said, cocksure. “Them Mexes was real good workers. Learned fast, put in a full day’s work. You can’t find hard workers like that no more. Everyone nowadays wants a free ride.”
Mike chuckled. “Nothing stays the same.”
“Now that’s the truth.” Oscar emphasized the point by putting down his empty beer bottle with a clunk. He looked over at me. “What line of work’s your folks in, honey?”
“My father teaches physics at UC Berkeley,” I said. “My mother was a concert pianist until her arthritis became too bothersome. Now she directs a musical conservatory in the Bay Area.”
“Well, la-di-da.” Oscar raised a pinkie and waved it at Mike. “Last wife’s a looker, this one’s a brain. At least, when you two get around to having kids, they’ll be musical.”
Mike glanced up. “We aren’t married and we’re not having any kids.”
“Mikey’s mom played the piano, too.” Oscar rattled on as if he hadn’t heard Mike. “He ever tell you? Big lounge out on Pico. Nice place, pretty good money, too. She did that till she lost her figure after the third kid. Then she went to slinging burgers at a drive-in down in Montebello. Almost in East L.A. What a dump. Biker hangout. That’s where she met the asshole she run away with. Moved her and Mikey’s sisters up to Merced. Guess she’s still there.”
“She died three years ago, Pop. Remember? We went up for the funeral.”
“Oh, yeah.” Oscar deepened the furrow between his eyebrows and thought it over. Seeming confused, he looked up at Mike. “Got another beer in that icebox, Mikey?”
“Sorry, Pop,” Mike said. “We’re all out.”
There were two six-packs behind the watermelon.
Mike seemed to be embarrassed by his father or something his father had said. That surprised me, because I thought I knew him better. With me, Mike had always been open about his hardscrabble upbringing, the scrapes his alcoholic parents got into, a few narrow misses with the law of his own. I wondered what nerve Oscar had touched.
All of us carry wounds from childhood that neither time nor accomplishment can heal. Now and then those old wounds get hit just right and they start to bleed, no matter how hard we try to keep them covered up. As I watched Oscar standing there, weaving a little in the middle of Mike’s shiny kitchen, I began to wonder if maybe he had brought with him the scary specter of the kid who used to bail his dad out of the drunk tank every Monday morning, the kid who signed his own report cards when he didn’t know where to find his mother.
I have made it a point to forget everything I learned in Dr. Hauser’s Modern European philosophy. But what came to mind out of somewhere was Nietzsche: “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Fine. But we can be strong and still hurt like hell.
I picked cornsilk from my fingers and went over to my tall, white-haired Mike. He was lost in thought, reducing the fat tomato to runny pulp. I touched his hand above the knife and he looked over at me, expectant, waiting for a question.
I stretched up and whispered into his ear. “I love you, Mike.”