But his life was with Mom. Mom and Dad, ’til death do they part.
You raised a hand, as if taking a vow. “I will never do anything that would make your father leave your mother. He’ll always be with her. He’ll always take care of her. He’ll always love her. I would never in a million years interfere with that.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t believe, couldn’t comprehend your reaction. People acted this way? People thought this way?
I wanted to yell, to cry, to grab you and do something violent to you. But my feet remained planted. My throat felt so thick and heavy I could hardly breathe. It felt like a nightmare, where you want to scream but can’t summon your voice.
You looked at your watch. “Bill needs me for a deposition. I’m already late.”
I didn’t move. You grabbed your stuff and walked past me. Me, the immobile statue, the stupid kid, the impotent, useless fiddler while Rome burned around me.
It was the last time I laid eyes on you for nineteen years.
Three months later. The day before Thanksgiving, 2003. I talked to my mother until she fell asleep in her bed, gently snoring, lying on her back.
Then I put on a coat and gloves and went outside for some air, onto the back patio. The temperatures had dropped, but I didn’t care. I always wanted fresh air after putting my mother to bed. I needed to smell something different, feel something different. I’d never been sick, really sick, so I couldn’t imagine what that was like. But I certainly knew how it felt to watch someone you love deteriorate.
I’d had some time to get used to it. It had been more than a year since her stroke. What made it harder, these last few months, was that I was going to school every day, starting college at the U of C, experiencing all the nerves and excitement and rigors of a new academic and social environment—starting my life, in many senses—while my mother was withering away at home with a shit for a husband.
The wind whipped up outside. I put my face into it, let it carry my hair, let it sink inside my coat. I stood there, eyes closed, for some time.
It was only when I turned to go back inside that I saw it. On a table next to our gas grill.
A bottle of champagne, empty. And two glasses, tinted red—flutes, they call them, but cheap ones, plastic, the kind you’d buy at a convenience store for a picnic or outdoor concert.
Except my mother didn’t drink alcohol, not since the stroke. She couldn’t.
Two glasses, not one. Two plastic, red-tinted glasses.
I walked over and stared at it. A bottle of Laurent-Perrier ultra brut champagne. I had no idea about champagne, if Laurent-Perrier was some fancy brand or something cheap—but I did know that it wasn’t the kind of thing you usually drank with your buddies on the back porch.
I wiped my mouth and stood and stared at the bottle, at those twin plastic glasses, for so long that my body started trembling from the cold.
Then I went inside and grabbed a plastic garbage bag. I returned outside and swept the bottle and two glasses inside the bag and tied it off, praying my mother never saw any of this.
I didn’t say a word to my father that night. I just went to my room and closed the door.
The next day. Happy Thanksgiving 2003!
“It’s just for one night,” said my father, drying dishes while I washed, my mother having been put to bed an hour ago. “This potential client was in a pretty bad accident—”
“Who has a meeting the day after Thanksgiving?” I asked. “And who stays overnight with that client?”
“I told you,” he said, opening a cabinet and putting away a serving tray. “The family lives in Kankakee, and it’s a long drive—”
“Bullshit.”
He turned to me. “What did you say to me, young man?”
“I said bullshit. You’re still seeing her, aren’t you? You promised me you wouldn’t, but—you are, aren’t you? You’re still with . . . Lauren.” Her name felt like poison on my tongue.
“Simon—”
“Yes or no, Dad?”
“Keep your—” He looked up at the ceiling. “Keep your voice down.”
“I found the champagne bottle and the two glasses on the back patio,” I said, spitting out the words in a hushed whisper. “I guess you forgot to toss the evidence.”
He seized up, remembering, scolding himself. It wasn’t hard to figure. The recycling bin’s in the alley. On a cold night, sometimes we just put recycling out on the back porch and walk it to the alley the next morning. Or we forget, like apparently my father had done.
“So what, Dad—she’s coming to our house? She’s sneaking in here after Mom’s asleep and I’m downtown late at school? What else are you and Lauren doing in this house, under Mom’s bedroom, for Christ’s sake, while she’s—”
“Listen to me, son—”
“Yes or no?” My voice rising. I caught myself, even as my father shushed me with a hand motion. I didn’t want Mom to hear. I couldn’t let Mom hear.
Three minutes to seven. Three minutes until lights-out in Grace Village.
Christian slows as he approaches Lauren’s house in his Grim Reaper costume. A rope is tied around his waist several times. A rope? That doesn’t come with the costume. Why a rope?
His costume fits him better than mine fits me. Mine, currently resting inside the pillowcase I’m carrying, nearly touches the ground when I wear it. But Christian is taller. The bottom of his robe only reaches the top of his boots. His Paul Roy Peak Explorer boots.
You and Vicky came up with a nice plan to pin this on me, Christian. But here’s the problem. As a wise man once said, If you’re gonna set someone up, it better be a surprise.
Christian turns up the walkway and disappears into the canopied front porch, a little brick cocoon that will blanket him in privacy when he rings the doorbell, and Lauren answers.
Don’t be long now, Christian.
The Thanksgiving dishes washed and dried, my father sat in our family room, elbows on his knees, staring at a glass of bourbon. Easier than making eye contact with me, standing by the fireplace.
“There are things that . . . a young man like you might not be able to appreciate,” he said. “Your mother and I, our relationship—I still love your mother and I always will, Simon. I always will—”
“But Lauren fucks you.”
“Hey, listen.”
I raised my eyebrows. I’d never spoken to my father that way in my life, but he had surrendered the high ground. “Okay, I’m listening. But that’s what this is, right? Mom’s in a wheelchair, and that doesn’t work for you, does it? You’ve got all this money now, you’ve dropped twenty pounds, you even have a new hairstyle. The New Slimmed-Down, Swingin’ Single Ted Dobias. And Mom doesn’t really fit into your plans anymore. You want some fun. And Lauren’s fun, all right.”
He raised a hand to his face. “You’ve always known how to paint me in the worst light.”
“Oh, it’s not that hard, Dad. Believe me.” I stood up. “This has to end right now. You and Lauren end right now.”
“That’s not going to happen, son.” On that point he was firmest, resolute.
I walked toward him, felt my lips quiver. “You’re going to leave Mom? Now when she’s unable to—”
“No, no, no.” He waved at me. “I’m not going to leave your mother. I’d never do that.”
“But you’re not going to stop seeing Lauren.”
He took a moment, then closed his eyes and nodded. “That’s right. I’m not. That’s my choice. It’s not yours, Simon. I’m sorry, but it’s not your decision.”