Raising the Dad

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  In memory of

  Gip and Jeanne Matthews

  One

  They came blinking into their new fluorescent-lit freedom with hollow, dusty stares. Having served their time with the county for drug offenses or battery convictions or any one of a million knucklehead schemes supposed to deliver them to lives much plusher than this, they were set loose to try again. About a third of them had family waiting. A third of those got warm embraces, while the rest met shrugs and listless escorts back to the parking lot.

  Almost all stopped first at the county-run snack bar for cigarettes. While waiting for his brother for almost two hours, John Husted calculated that with the county markup on cigarettes being at least fifty cents above retail, each ex-con immediately reimbursed the system a tiny portion of the cost of jailing them.

  Those who knew John Husted best sometimes told him that he overthought things.

  The de-incarcerated came one by one, ambling down the bleak linoleum hallway to rejoin society. Each clung to a sad paper bag that held their belongings.

  “I hope he brought me something,” John’s mother, Rose, said expectedly as she strained to see around all the bodies in front of her.

  “He hasn’t been on vacation, Mom,” he sighed. “Remember? Mike’s been in jail.”

  His mother’s memory began failing alarmingly after John’s brother got sent up eleven months earlier. Along with all the other frustrations this presented John, the worst was having to remind her over and over again that her eldest son was a convicted criminal, this time put away for possession and a gun charge.

  Her dementia still played games with her; catch her on a good day and she’d remember the sad news about Mike. But when rattled or tired, the most basic memories drifted away from her and came back in confused tatters. If they came back at all.

  Every time John explained Mike’s situation to his mother, the look on her face gently went from despair to blissful acceptance. As if to think, “I am sorry to learn this about my son, but in no time at all I get to forget it all over again.”

  They scanned the parade of the freshly sprung, and there he was: big brother Mike, looking shabby but still clinging to a bit of his rock-and-roll swagger. The tattoos still snaked up his forearms, and the ratty rock star hair still framed a well-sculpted face made flinty by hard living. Now forty-five, Mike’s hair thinned up top.

  Mike signaled to his brother from across the room with a cool cock of his chin, but then his expression darkened as he saw their mite-sized mother standing at John’s side. She darted across the room and hugged him before he could deflect her, her cheek pressed to his scarecrow-like sternum.

  “I wish you had been on vacation,” she said quietly.

  Baffled by this welcome, Mike pried himself from her grip. John turned to steer the family out the door.

  “Hang on,” Mike said as he got in line to buy cigarettes.

  * * *

  They took a booth at Denny’s. Mike left jail flat broke and his mother paid for his cigarettes with the last few dollars in her purse. This was going to be on John.

  Mike shoveled half the breakfast menu into his mouth while his mother ignored her chicken salad and spoke excitedly. “It was between Mrs. Kerry and Delores Steddick, but the judges felt that the azaleas along the edging made the difference, with the colors. And those were my idea,” Rose boasted. “Mae told me that I had to be in the picture with her in the bulletin, but my hair—”

  “Ma, you told me this story,” Mike interrupted. “Like in every letter you sent me. You and Mrs. Kerry, kickin’ the other flower lady’s ass. I got it.”

  He sawed into another waffle, oblivious to the fact that his curtness caused his mother to withdraw and grow smaller. Mike was using the exasperated tone with Rose that John fought to control the past several months, not always with success.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Because Mike brought their family reunion to an awkward silence, John felt it was his job to find them a new topic.

  “Tell us about jail.”

  Mike stared a hole through his younger brother and ground his teeth as Rose revved back up. As John knew she would.

  “Your father would be so ashamed. He was a respectable man. And look at your brother. John has a good job, a lovely family. Never once a bit of trouble from him. What is wrong with you?”

  John wasn’t surprised to hear his mother play the Larry card. His father died thirty years ago, his ghost only resurrected after all those years to tell Mike how far he had fallen from his father’s expectations. Teenaged Mike and the old man fought bitterly right up until the day in 1985 when a sudden stroke killed Dr. Lawrence Husted. The loss crushed Rose and she never recovered a complete reattachment to her life and the sons she was left alone to raise. When John began to notice her memory slipping a couple years earlier, it was impossible to tell if this was a new crisis or just the manifestation of what had become a crippling frailty since her husband’s sudden death.

  Other than to nag Mike from the grave, Larry Husted didn’t come around much anymore.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Mike said. “I was just holding the gun for a guy.”

  “And the dope?” John asked snottily.

  There was a time when Mike would kick John’s ass for this, but John thought he could take him now. Mike was two years older than John and he had abused his body horribly since he was a teenager. Maybe Mike knew this as he scowled into his sticky bun.

  “Well, I want you to go see Mr. Lennox,” his mother pushed on. “He told me he might be able to find you some work, out of respect for your father.”

  “I know, Ma. You told me in the car, like fifteen minutes ago. Geez.”

  “Sorry.”

  The waitress, pretty and probably not even twenty-five, refilled Mike’s coffee. He winked and she smiled, not finding him as skeevy as John would’ve wished. Mike the alley cat, back on the prowl.

  “Well, I have to go see a man about a horse,” Rose said brightly, throwing off the family prickliness as she rose from the booth. She always used this expression whenever she had to go to the bathroom, claiming her generation found it amusing while trying to be discreet.

  “What the fuck’s the matter with her?” Mike asked John once their mother was out of range. “Can she remember anything?”

  “She’s okay when she’s relaxed, when she’s poking around the house or arranging lunches with her friends,” John said. “But stress sets her off. She didn’t want to come today.”

  “So why is she here?” Mike asked with a pissed-off edge. “I told you to pick me up. I don’t need her seeing me this way.”

  “So don’t be this way,” John said. Mike accepted John’s attempt at shaming him with a sneer.

  “She’s not even seventy,” Mike said.

  “She’s almost seventy-five. I’ve had her in with her doctor. He thinks it’s Alzheimer’s.”

  “Fuck…” Mike sai
d.

  “She’s taking pills that might slow it down, but there’s no stopping it,” John said. “But it’s good, you getting out now. You can move back into the house, not pay any rent while you’re getting yourself together, and you can keep an eye on her. You need to learn to talk to her better.”

  Mike scoffed. “Hey, that’ll fly for a while, me taking care of her. But I’ve got plans,” Mike drawled. “Steve Hoover’s got a job for him and me that’s gonna keep me on the road pretty much full-time.”

  Mike had that self-centeredness of an addict that caused him to drop names as if John had been paying close attention to his schemes and committed the various players to memory. John had no idea who Steve Hoover was, but he assumed he was Jerry Boyd, and that Vasquez guy, and the cousin of that meth freak Mike had lived with for a few months who was going to make them all rich moving black-market baby formula. Steve Hoover was probably just the next scabby-souled bum who was going to lead Mike back to county lockup, if not worse.

  “She needs you right now,” John said. “I have been handling this on my own for almost a year, and I’ve got my own life to deal with.”

  “Well,” Mike sniffed, “I’ll do what I can. But, you know, I got my shit, too.”

  He refocused on his breakfast while John stared out into the parking lot. Mike flirted with the waitress some more. When the bill came, he grunted a kind of thanks at his kid brother.

  With the tab paid, they stood to leave. They stared fretfully toward the ladies’ room.

  Mike snagged the waitress. “’Scuse me, Debbie. I’m a little worried about my mother. Think you could stick your head in the john and make sure she’s okay?”

  The waitress smiled, touched by his concern. Mike managed to help his mother and turn his concern into part of his seduction. It’s a gift.

  They followed the waitress to the bathroom door, then waited awkwardly. They heard their mother’s voice echoing angrily from inside.

  “Can’t a woman go to the bathroom without being spied on?” she barked at the waitress as they emerged, then she turned her wrath on her sons. “What’s the matter with you two? Are you in such a hurry to send me home and get back to your lives?”

  John quickly grabbed their things. Rose yanked her coat away from him and began struggling to put it on, flustered with the eyes of the customers upon her. Mike and John caught the wordless signal from the waitress: their mother had been lost and confused in the bathroom. Being found out made her pride bristle.

  “Thanks,” John whispered to the waitress as Rose fumed and ice water doused Mike’s seedy growls of romance.

  “Yeah,” Mike mumbled to the waitress, suddenly laid bare as a guy old enough to have a mother old enough to suffer things like this. “Thanks.”

  Rose continued to strain to get her arms snaked through her coat sleeves until John finally took it away with a gentle firmness and she allowed him to help. They exchanged the silent sigh the two of them had been sharing more and more.

  He put his hand on her back and guided her toward the exit. Mike held the door.

  Two

  John and his daughter sat opposite each other, worlds apart. They were both on their laptops, seated together at the kitchen table so that John could idly cast an eye over every so often to hold Katie’s internet explorations in check. She was supposed to be doing homework, but he knew she had half a dozen texts going while allegedly studying for a social studies test. Her fifteen-year-old fingers danced out fevered teenage chitchat, her words that crude online shorthand: OMG GTFO WE F/F.

  Imagine what The Diary of Anne Frank would read like if she had had a Twitter account, John often mused to himself.

  He was supposed to be finishing up the federal grant proposal he had been writing for almost three months. His job was finding supplemental funding for Next Step, the nonprofit where John worked as the development director. Next Step provided transitional living for kids who had “aged out” of foster care, and John found the government agencies and foundations that wrote checks for such projects. He was expert at decoding the massive knot of institutional bullshit they spun to make sure no one got their help without suffering first.

  Lately, though, he spent these homework sessions getting lost in watching his daughter. It was easy; he could just glance past his screen, knowing she was too transfixed by her conversations to know she was being observed.

  Studying her intense gaze as it softly shifted from unguarded smiles to deep concern, he could see the whole range of adolescence play across her face. He should have coaxed her back to her studying but it was too pleasing, just being able to sit there and watch her be.

  He and Robin worried about her grades, and about new friends shaping her in troubling ways. An understated goth look had begun to creep into her appearance. It was nothing dire, just a new affinity for dark clothes and an unflattering thickening of black mascara around her soft blue eyes. Despite some new surliness, Katie was still a sweet but overweight teenager, just the sort to embrace a fashion trend that John thought was rooted in a kind of preemptive ugliness. Who could hurt a kid for her body size or her face or her lack of awesomeness when she willfully made herself ugly to all but those who defiantly wore the costume alongside her?

  John saw the older goths when he dropped Katie off at school, and their sneering commitment to the pose—the piercings, the tattoos, the whole Bela Lugosi-meets-the-Third Reich facade—struck him as nothing but the insolent armor of sad, wounded kids. It stung his heart to think that his sweet-souled daughter might be lost to such a joyless clique.

  He typed something, and then heard the gentle bing of a new text arriving on her screen.

  “Dad, stop,” she laughed before catching herself. “I know it’s you.”

  “No, it’s Johnny, your Samoan pen pal. You really should talk to him, I hear his family is loaded.”

  She shook her head. He typed some more and transmitted it across the table.

  She sighed, playing along: “Johnny wants to know how school was today,” she said.

  “Hmm, I was wondering that myself,” John said. “I often find myself thinking like a Samoan.”

  She typed a terse response. John’s laptop beeped. “‘Fine’?” John read from his screen. “Your day was fine? Johnny was hoping for more detail. Johnny wants to know if you’ve still got a crush on that Brendan kid. With the red Mohawk and the infected nose ring.”

  She shut her laptop. “I think I’ll go study in my room.”

  “Then you won’t need these,” he said, relieving her of her computer and phone and handing her her social studies book. “Take a cookie, you look hungry.”

  She gave her father that irked but tolerant teenage sigh, the one that John chose to believe said, “You do understand that mannerisms imposed upon me by my age and peer group prevent me from revealing that I am actually rather fond of you, don’t you?”

  * * *

  John was still working at the kitchen table when Robin got home. She taught ninth grade geometry at Emerson, the high school Katie attended and where John and Robin had gone.

  She was thirty-eight now. Her looks had taken on a pleasing overlay of age and experience, and John still thought that any fifteen-year-old male would be lucky to have such a woman etching a trapezoid on the whiteboard before him. He knew he should tell her that more often, but figured she would shoot him down as insincere for having deemed her less than centerfold material.

  “Hey,” Robin sighed with a familiar flatness.

  “Hey,” he replied.

  In every terrific romantic movie, in every great love story ever written, lovers whose hearts were fused as one never once greeted each other with a tired, emotionally detached, “Hey.”

  These were John and Robin’s “Hey” days.

  “Haven’t got dinner going yet,” he said. “I’m in the home stretch on this thing, I kinda lost track of the time.”

  “That’s okay,” she said as she took a jar of spaghetti sauce from the cupboa
rd and began filling a pot with water.

  They married seventeen years ago. John thought they had a marriage that worked. They had a nice house in a better part of town, they kept their bills paid, and they had a smart, mostly responsible daughter whose grades so far hovered around the B range. They weren’t the most passionate couple on the block, but all the grabby-hands marriages John saw up close—the attentive husbands, the giggling wives, the cloying hints of post-cookout whoopee when all John really wanted to know was how they wanted their steaks done—had all ended in divorce.

  Robin and John kept an even keel; they still laughed enough, and shared interests enough, and made love enough to make the marriage endure.

  Robin wasn’t convinced. She felt they had lost something, and she talked about them trying to find it again. A lot. One of the last times they went round and round about it, she said that the two of them were like co-managers of a successful business: they understood what their roles were, they came together efficiently when a crisis hit, and they kept their doors open when so many businesses around them failed.

  It wasn’t until bedtime that night, when John crawled into bed and recoiled at the frost radiating from his wife, that he realized she wasn’t making a flattering comparison. When she compared them to business partners, he actually thought they made a breakthrough. He may have smiled and said, “Right!”

  Her arms clenched tightly across her chest in bed that night, she continued her analogy with the observation that at the end of the workday, these two “managers” John admired seemed to go their separate ways, to increasingly separate lives.

  But it’s hard to keep a business going, John would think to himself. I’m proud that our doors are still open. That’s all I’m saying.

  While Robin waited for the water to boil she poured some wine and set a glass beside his computer. “Did you call your mother back?”

  “Mmmm, no.”

  “John…” she scolded.

  Months ago he changed his mother’s incoming calls to a custom ringtone, so he knew when it was her. At first it was the “Chicken Dance,” John insisting that he needed something frivolous in his head before he took on her increasingly emotionally draining calls. But Rose phoned so often that Robin and Katie threatened to kill him as that insipid polka burrowed itself into their brains, so he changed it to “Over the Rainbow.”