Deadman Bay
PATRICK WAYLAND
For Karen
Copyright © 2015 Patrick Wayland
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. First Edition.
Table of Contents
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THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
~~1~~
Edward Tache would be homeless in three weeks and no one cared. After years of talking about it, his parents had finally sold the house and moved to a retirement community in Sarasota. Edward hadn’t even known where Sarasota was until his father said Florida – and was it really possible to sell a house in New York, pack and move there in six weeks? His father had warned him, but it was one of the many wishful thoughts he always had like promising to buy a Leer jet after winning the lottery. Edward, needing to see it with his own eyes, had taken the train up to White Plains from Brooklyn.
The denim blue trim of the two-story colonial was more faded, weathered than he remembered it being when he had last seen it six months earlier. Stabbed into the lawn, an orange real estate sign with the word SOLD across its top bar swung in the February wind as if waving him over, as if the vacant house needed his company. Edward walked around to the back, peeking through windows. He couldn’t remember it ever being so tidy. Empty. The house he had lived in since he was six was now dark inside, but he could see that the furniture, the paintings, and the shag carpet that he’d rolled on with his old dog Gremlin were gone. He stood on his haunches looking through the dining room window before turning and squatting on the back patio. Edward cursed his father as he took out his cell phone to call him for the second time that day.
“You really sold the house.”
“Well,” his father said in the form of a long sigh. “I’m sorry about the timing.”
“I thought you’d keep the house for me.”
“No, it doesn’t work that way. You need a job if you want to live in the city.”
“I do have a job, volunteering at the WCC,” he said, a spark of pride warming him over the coldness seeping through his coat. For six months, he had worked at the Women and Children Center. There he spent four hours most days of the week, teaching painting to boys and girls while their mothers worked, and helping prepare lunches at the charity’s day shelter. He got to teach art to children and cook and his boss was appreciative of the simple fact that he showed up every day. For Edward the work was ideal except for one detail. It didn’t pay.
“Son, I do commend you on that and I think it’s wonderful that you like it, but at some point you need a job that pays the rent. What about Uncle Lew’s offer at the warehouse?”
“What? What are you saying, Dad? Are you joking? You’re joking, right? A warehouse job? That’s what my master’s degree has earned me? Stacking crates, carrying bags of rice like some Shanghai dock worker. You want me to act like some peasant coming in from the fields—”
“Ed, he pays over minimum—”
“Dad.” Edward’s voice broke. “Over minimum by, like, two bucks – it’s like you don’t know anything about what I do.”
“Ed, I do know what you like to do. But…” Something clanked like a gong on the other end of the phone line. His father might have been preparing a pan for cooking or filling a pot with water. He could hear the phone rubbing against material as if his father had it pinched between his shoulder and chin. “Sometimes it’s about getting down to the nitty-gritty and doing what needs to be done.”
“What needs to be done, huh? I have to be out of my apartment in three weeks – can you at least keep the house a few more months for me to live in?”
“That house no longer belongs to us.”
Edward pressed his palm hard into his temple before wiping it down over his cheeks and chin as if he were removing something plastered over his face.
“What am I supposed to do?” He repeated the question, raising his voice.
There was a long silence before his father answered. “Son, you’ve sung all summer, and you can dance all winter.”
Edward knew the quote. It was from one of Aesop’s Fables – The Ant and the Grasshopper. The story had been in a thin children’s book filled with woodcut print pictures and, until he left for college seven years earlier, the book had been in his old room. After he got an apartment in the city, his mother had packed it in a box with a number of his things and put it in the attic. He had never asked her where all his books, cards, magazines and toys went, but he had run across them while looking for an old art magazine he needed for a class. Now, he wondered where that particular book was. Had they carried it down to Florida, sold it during a garage sale, put it in storage or thrown it out?
“Dad, I’m going to be living on the street. Does that bother you at all?”
“Edward, you can find a job—”
“I’ve looked. There are no teaching jobs right now.”
“Have you looked at other jobs?”
“Other jobs? I have a masters in art – there are no other jobs.”
“There are. Call your uncle.”
“Are you joking? You really don’t give a shit, do you?”
Edward looked out across his old backyard at the tire that hung from the leafless oak tree in the middle. The tire used to be bigger. In eighth grade, Carla Bruestein and he had played on that swing. She had kissed him on the lips before running away. The next day, he told everyone at school that they had ‘done it’. A week later, he’d gotten into a fistfight with her older brother. Next to the porch was the brick grill that he had helped build. His parents and he often skipped church on Sunday, but Friday night, no matter what the weather, was barbecue night… every Friday night Edward stood beside his father in front of that grill. He remembered the smells more than anything. Barbecued briskets drowned in sauce, hotdogs, corn cobs rolled in aluminum foil, sweet onions, sautéed chicken, buttered garlic bread crisping.
“Ed, you got to do what you got to do,” his father finally said.
“OK. Is that so? Well, dad, I need to borrow some more money. That needs to be done.” Edward looked down the edge of the patio. There where the icy grass met one wood plank, a cats-eye marble lay half buried in the dirt. One forgotten item. One piece of evidence that there had once been a boy living and playing in this house. Edward could hear his father breathing. He had stopped working on whatever he had been preparing. A few seconds passed. Edward began to wonder if they had been disconnected until his father clicked his tongue.
“No more money. Edward, your mother and I believe in you. We love you. And we know you’ll do the right thing.”
Two seconds later anger pumped through him. It was like a car switching gears.
“What? You’re not listening – you never listen to me!”
His father took his time answering. “Goodbye, son—”
“You don’t give a shit about me!”