“What’s with the food basket?” I ask, pointing.
“The warden,” he says.
“Huh?”
“Pastor John Logan,” he says. “Lives next door. My mom’s — your grandma’s — best friend. Your granddad’s too, I guess. Hasn’t left me alone for half a second since your grandma died. Doesn’t take hints too well. As long as I’ve lived here, he brings me my mail, like I can’t do it myself. And now that I’m sick, he keeps bringin’ me tuna fish. I fuckin’ hate tuna fish. Wish he’d mind his own business and let me die in peace.”
I wince.
He smiles a bit and picks at his scalp with his thumb and forefinger. “Sorry. Gotta work on my tact. Not used to visitors, I guess. I just … The guy’s a relic. My dad — your granddad — he was a piece of shit. I don’t need the pastor man coming around here feeling sorry for me. My father left over thirty years ago. I’m over it. Piece of shit. Gone. Good riddance.”
We have more awkward silence.
“I’m not sure what I’ll do here this summer,” I finally say. “I mean, I’m here to help — I mean, visit, obviously.”
“Well, sure,” he says. “But you have to do other things. Maybe you could run a lemonade stand? Five cents a glass?”
I know he’s joking, but I’m not in the mood to laugh. “Probably,” I say. “I’ll probably just do that.”
I stand to look at the pictures on his wall. One is a shot of a large, curly-haired woman with a round-faced boy standing in front of her, squinting at the sun. That must be my dad and my grandmother. Another, amber-tinted in that way that old photographs sometimes are, is a portrait of my grandmother posing with a man who must be my grandfather. I look closer, and I realize it definitely is, since he looks like me — long-faced, with the same high cheekbones, dark eyes, and lanky build. In another one, my dad, maybe ten, stands in front of my grandmother, who is flanked by my grandfather and another chubby, freckle-cheeked guy my granddad’s age. The two men have hands on my dad’s shoulders, and he has a goofy smile on his face. I close my eyes, trying to figure out how you get from there to here, to this sad room, all alone.
I turn back to Dad to ask him a question, and that’s when I see it, behind the blue-green vase on the floor. A glass with brown liquid in it. I look at my father, who sees me see it. He stares at his feet like a kindergarten kid caught chewing gum.
I pick up the glass and sniff it. It smells like paint varnish. I stand in front of him, waiting for him to look up at me. He doesn’t.
“Somebody must have left this here. Like your last visitor,” I say.
He nods.
What I should say is, Because obviously you were not just drinking this, since you have cirrhosis of the liver, right? And people with cirrhosis can’t drink alcohol. Instead, I say, “What’s the world coming to, all these inconsiderate people not cleaning up after themselves.”
He chews on a fingernail. I want to continue, You know Mom and me, we came here to take care of you, right? We flew here? We rented a car? I forfeited my summer? But as I stand above him and watch him chew his cuticle, I can tell that even if I said it, he wouldn’t be able to, as my mother would say, hear it.
His voice is barely above a hoarse whisper. “People are the worst.”
I turn away and take the glass out of his room and into the kitchen, where I pour the contents down the drain. “They really are,” I yell back to him. “You better tell those friends to stop coming around here.”
He coughs, and I see he’s followed me out. I feel my throat tense up. He’s short of breath from the ten-step walk from his bedroom.
“I’m a drunk, Carson.”
“Shocking,” I say, and I start opening his cabinets to see if he has more bottles. The first cabinet has Corn Pops and about twenty boxes of instant Jell-O. The next one has ramen noodle soups, a twelve-pack. I go through a few more and I don’t see any alcohol. I wonder if my mom did a sweep while I was at the zoo.
I open the cabinets under the sink, and behind the dishwasher detergent and garbage bags, something catches my eye. Two bottles. I push the garbage bags out of the way and pull out a Johnnie Walker and a Jack Daniel’s. I stand up, turn around toward him, and hoist them forward like evidence. My jaw is so tight that it’s hard to breathe.
He sways a bit on his feet like he’s not too stable. “I’m a drunk. So was my dad. Hey, maybe you’ll be one too someday.” He stares at the ceiling.
I exhale deeply. I want to say so many things to him. I want to say, You know, I didn’t really expect it would be like in the movies and you’d be all sorry for not being in my life and barely ever calling. But I did kind of think that maybe, just maybe, you’d try a little harder. Because you’re right. You’re going to die. And this is it, Dad. This is your last chance. And it’s my last chance too. So maybe think about that — how you can be a little less of a total fucking asshole, okay?
But that’s not something I can say. I am physically unable to say it. I close my eyes and count to 217 by sevens. My head is pounding like something is trying to get out of there, a brain mouse trying to find its way out of a maze. I lift the bottles over my head and swing them back and forth like I’m a six-year-old trying to be cute, but it’s fucking ugly.
“Need these for my lemonade stand,” I say.
His eyes glance my way and then over to the bare refrigerator door. It’s like he wants to object, but he knows not to. “Take ’em,” he says, as if he doesn’t care.
I wait for him to look at me again, and when it becomes painfully obvious that he’d rather study a closed Frigidaire than his son, when it begins to feel a little like I’m going to vomit up my heart, I exhale loudly. He turns around and hobbles back to his sickroom.
“I’m sorry, by the way,” he says. It’s hard to believe how small he is. He’s like a speck of dirt walking away. A talking wisp. “Really. I’m the worst father in the world. I truly get that.”
“They should have an award,” I call toward him. The words get caught in my dry throat.
He closes the door softly behind him. I stand there in the kitchen for a long time, the bottles still in my hands. Is that what happens to a guy without a father? He drinks and becomes that? Is that going to happen to me?
After a while, my mother comes through the back door and into the kitchen with groceries. “How’d your visit with your father go, honey?” she asks when she sees me standing there.
Normally I like to make sure I don’t say anything to upset my mother, but my voice is quaking and I can’t quell my sarcasm. “Fantastic,” I say, exhibiting the two bottles. “It was like one of those holiday movies. We sat around the table and ate a turkey, and then we toasted marshmallows.”
She puts the groceries down on the counter, then walks over to where I’m standing. She places her hand lightly on my shoulder. We are not a huggy people. “Are those your father’s?” she asks.
Top ten stupid questions of all time, I think. But I don’t say that. I nod.
She nods back, then removes her hand from my shoulder, then puts it back. “I truly hear underneath the sarcasm that you’re feeling pain, Carson. And I want you to know that I feel a lot of sadness as I think about how hard that must be for you.”
“Yep, thanks,” I say, fighting the impulse to scream, I’M RIGHT HERE, MOM! STOP TRYING TO LOCATE ME! STOP ANALYZING ME!
As I pour the contents of the bottles down the sink and she loads groceries into the cabinets and refrigerator, an image crosses my mind. It’s a mom and a young son, and the mom is, like, holding the son so close that he can’t breathe. She’s suffocating him. I watch the boy struggle to break free from his mom’s embrace.
And I think, What’s the opposite of suffocation?