and the line goes dead. I stand there in the kitchen, my bare feet cold on the black-and-white checkerboard tile, watching as, in my hand, the cell phone screen fades to black. I press the home button and swipe my finger across the screen. The phone prompts me for Esther’s password. Password? My heart starts to race. Damn!
I start pressing digits at random until I’m locked out of the phone altogether, the device disabled, and I’m stuck waiting an entire minute—sixty long, maddening seconds—until I can do it again. And again. And again.
I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, nor the brightest crayon in the box. I’ve been told as much before. So it shouldn’t surprise me in the least bit that I have no idea how to break into Esther’s phone without her password or thumbprint. And yet it does.
I placate myself with the simple fact that he promised to call back. The gruff voice on the other end of the line said that he would call back.
I’ll do better the next time, I tell myself. I will.
It’s evening at my house. I’m cooking. Pops is watching TV, feet on the old coffee table, a bottle of beer in his hand. He’s drunk, but he’s not wasted. He still knows his left hand from his right, which is a big accomplishment some days. He was awake when I got home from work this evening. Also a big accomplishment. Seems he managed a shower, too. He’d changed out of his striped shirt and no longer reeked of the god-awful cologne or the rank morning breath as he did when I left for work that morning. Now he just reeks of booze.
On the TV is a football game. The Detroit Lions. He screams at the TV.
There are chicken nuggets in the oven and a can of green beans warming on the stove. Pops wanders through the kitchen for another beer and asks if I’d like one, too. I look him in the blasted eyes and say, “I’m eighteen,” though I’m not sure that means too much to him. On the fridge door is a picture I drew about a dozen years ago of outer space: the sun, the moon, the stars, Neptune and Jupiter, in Crayola crayons. Worn along the edges, a corner missing, having fallen from its magnet about a million times. The colors are faded. Everything, these days, seems like it’s starting to fade.
Sharing the same magnet is a postcard from my mother. I threw it in the trash when it arrived in the mail, but Pops found it there, mixed up with lunch meat scraps and corn kernels, and pulled it back out again. This one’s from San Antonio. The Alamo, it says.
You shouldn’t be so hard on her, he’d said to me when he found the postcard in the trash. And then that line was trailed by the same one it always was when Pops talked about my mom. She did the best that she could do.
If you say so, was what I’d said before leaving the room. I wonder if it’s possible to hate someone and feel sorry for them at the same time? I felt sorry for her, sure. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother.
But I also hate her, too.
Pops is a lousy drunk, and the more he drinks, the more he thinks about my mother. About the way she left us all those years ago, without ever saying goodbye. About the fact that he still has their wedding photo framed and hung on the bedroom wall, about the fact that he still wears his wedding band, though she’s been gone a whole thirteen years. Since I was five. A little boy with Legos and Star Wars toys. That’s when she left.
If it was up to me I would have chucked that ring long ago. Not that I hold a grudge or anything, because I don’t. I just think I would have tossed the ring. Or pawned it like he pawned my high school class ring for booze. Instead, it becomes a hot topic of conversation in the many botched dates Pops has with the single ladies around town—a reservoir that is drying up quickly and will soon be completely sapped. Chances are he’s dated them all. Except for Ingrid, maybe, the agoraphobic, for reasons I don’t need to explain. Pops spends his dates at the tavern in town, getting loaded and talking about how my mother left him and me when I was five years old. It’s supposed to be a sympathy trigger, but instead he ends up looking like a patsy. Pops ends up crying and scaring the ladies away one by one, like old cans lined in a row for target practice.
He has no clue why he’s still alone.
It’s pathetic, really. But he’s still my dad and I feel sorry for him, too.
I dish the nuggets and green beans onto a chipped dinner plate and call him to dinner, where he lumbers in—beer in hand—and takes his place at the head of the table, the only chair from which he can still see the TV. “Catch the fucking ball!” he screams, smacking the table hard with the palm of a sweaty hand, sending his fork spiraling into the air before it crashes down to the ground. As he reaches down to grab it, he smacks his head on the corner of the wood table and curses. And then he laughs as his forehead swells and turns bright red.
Just another night in our house.
Tonight we don’t make small talk. Instead, I model good behavior, the way you’re supposed to use a knife to spread butter, the way you’re supposed to eat the beans with a fork and not your hands. I watch as Pops drags half of a dinner roll through the tub of margarine and think: no wonder this guy is still single. He had a lot more to offer my mother when he was young, employed and sober. Needless to say, he’s no longer any of those things. But the reason she left had nothing to do with any of those things, anyway. The reason she left? Motherhood. Me.
I try not to let this go to my head.
“They’re not French fries,” I say as he plucks the fancy-cut green beans up one at a time with a hand, drawing them to his mouth and chewing with his jaws open wide. “Use your fork.” He ignores me and screams at the TV, spittle flying out. Green spittle, like the beans.
He rises to his feet and hollers, “False start!” pointing a finger at the referees on TV as if they can hear. “What are you, asshole, are you blind? That was a false start.”
And then he sits back down.
I watch as he sits there at the table, eating his food. I note the way his hands shake. Pops has a tremor, whether or not he knows it exists. I know. His hands shake, the small, rapid movements when he’s trying to use his hands for something: picking up his nuggets, snapping the top off another bottle of beer. They remind me of my grandpa’s hands, though his only shook because he was old. There are times Pops’s hands shake so badly I have to open up his beer for him. The incongruity of it? The more he drinks, the less his hands shake, like some sort of paradoxical reaction. The hands find placidity when he’s completely tanked. Seems to me it should be the other way around, but still, the shaking hands are a good benchmark for me of how much he’s had to drink. It’s never worth asking how much he’s had to drink; he’s either too drunk to remember, otherwise he’ll lie. Tonight, not enough.
He stands up again quickly to chastise the coach who decides to run it up the middle instead of a sweep play. And then back down. And then up again when the ball gets knocked out of the running back’s hands and there’s an interception—this time managing to overturn his chair as he does. He watches in dismay as the Giants trot down the field with the ball. I don’t even have to turn my head to see the TV. He narrates it for me before tossing the other half of his dinner roll at the screen. And then he gets up to get another beer, damning to hell every Lions player on the field.
So it’s really no wonder then that when he says, “Squatters,” I don’t pay much attention. He’s talking about the TV. It’s someone’s last name, or some epithet he’s come up with for one of the coaches or players. Fucking Squatters.
“Did you hear me?” he asks, and that’s when I realize he is talking to me. His shirt is wet; at some point or other he managed to spill his beer. There’s a piece of green bean stuck to his chin. Classy.
I notice that Pops isn’t looking at me, and I turn in my chair, my eyes copying his line of vision, out the front window of our home and across the street.
And there I see it again, that light: on, off.
Like an involuntary muscle contraction. A charley horse. A twitch,