Raising the Dad Read online

  “Looks like someone is catching a cold,” Rose smiled.

  * * *

  John graduated high school and the “summer of Don” commenced. Long weekends to Chicago, Lake Geneva, and other upscale destinations became routine for Rose and her boyfriend, and John overheard talk about a West Coast trip in the fall.

  By then John was sleeping with Becky Allerang, his girlfriend since the beginning of their final semester, so it was beyond stupendous to have the house to himself for days at a time. Mike was always on the road or crashing with a fan, and John took full advantage: sex in his own bed, parties as the urge arose, sleeping until midafternoon—the bachelor idyll of a minor league playboy. John earned decent tips bussing tables at an Italian place downtown, and college loomed in the fall with only slight foreboding. Life was just too good.

  When one afternoon in early July John woke to find Rose and Don in the kitchen, legal-looking papers spread across the table and Rose signing her name wherever Don pointed, John noted mostly the smell of fresh cut grass breezing in through the window screens and the fact that they were almost out of toaster waffles.

  He and Don remained civil over the summer, although the rapport they shared in the early days of his mother’s relationship cooled. Don Huff was a self-made man, relentlessly focused on his business, and after the early glow of courtship with his mother faded, John saw that Don could be a prick. Toward the end of the summer, John took Don up on his offer to work at the Madison store, hosing down boats that had been on the lake for a test drive to earn extra cash for school.

  Out of Rose’s presence and master of his empire, John observed Don as a brittle and petty boss, yelling at his employees with a red-faced sneer. When Don let loose on John for failing to flush sand from an anchor winch, wrecking the motor, John walked out and decided he was done. Over breakfast a few days later, John met Don’s lecture about John not honoring his commitments with a dark scowl. College could not start soon enough.

  * * *

  When his mother’s calls stopped coming to his dorm room in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving break of his freshman year, John took it as a relief, not a warning sign. It wasn’t until he returned to Holt City for the holiday weekend that he learned that the feds raided Huff Marine, exposing tax fraud going back years. Prior to the market crash of ’87, Don wildly overextended himself in the store up north. When his stores started failing, he claimed sold assets on his taxes that he had actually just moved to another set of books. This false shift in his tax burden gave Don a cushion to retain the image of solvency, as did his habit of forging manufacturer rebate payments that were supposed to go to his customers.

  But as his debts kept mounting, Don started asking friends to lend him large sums of money, supposedly just to artificially inflate his asset sheet while he courted a new partner. This is what John came upon that July afternoon, his mother smiling contentedly as she signed away a substantial amount of the money Larry left the family. A woman in Middleton gave Don even more; he was sleeping with both of them. A third woman, who knew better, started making the calls that would bring Don down.

  John was not quite nineteen when he returned home to this.

  College had been excellent. Classes were going well, dorm life was a blast, and the week before coming home a pretty sophomore from St. Paul slipped her hand down his pants while snuggling beneath a blanket with The Simpsons in the common room.

  John would never hear directly from his mother what Don Huff did to the family; the extent of Don’s deception and the financial mess Rose got them into would come through country club friends who knew John was coming home for the holiday.

  Frank Kirschner, a lawyer who occasionally filled out a foursome when one of Larry’s usual golf mates couldn’t make it, sat John down for a talk in his office that Monday morning after John asked school for a hardship leave. Rose would be able to keep the house, Mr. Kirschner said with a positive smile that failed to calm John. He was horrified to hear that losing the house was even a possibility.

  But the money she gave Don was gone for good. He was headed to prison, and some of his customers were suing him over the stolen rebate money. Between that, back taxes, and lawyer bills, there would be nothing left.

  “The money your dad left you all, what’s left of it, is invested well,” Mr. Kirschner assured John. “So long as your mom stays healthy, I really don’t see any reason why she can’t maintain the life she’s been living for a very long time. We’ll just have to keep an eye on her expenses. It will mean some adjustments.”

  John’s mind was racing so he didn’t notice at first as his mom’s lawyer slid a sheet of paper across his desk. When he finally focused on it, he saw a list of college scholarships and emergency financial aid information.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Rose was still mum about what happened, and John was still not comfortable leaving her to get back to school. She slept all the time, and there was a leaden sadness about her when she got out of bed that made the old house go gray. Still a teenager, John didn’t know how to draw her out, to encourage her to unburden herself and let her know he didn’t blame her for anything—even though he did. He talked to the financial aid office at school, relieved to hear that his mother had paid his tuition through the school year. But after the spring semester, paying for school would be a challenge. He filled out student loan applications and scholarship requests to make it work, but they weren’t going to cover everything.

  * * *

  John slept fitfully in his old room one night when he heard a noise. He bolted awake alertly; because his mother wasn’t keeping normal hours, she often got up in the middle of the night, wandering aimlessly through the dark house. When he would sit with her, she said that her bed wasn’t as comfortable as it used to be.

  John sat in the dark to listen for the source of the noise. When he heard a male voice followed by a female titter, he stomped for the stairs.

  Mike was in the kitchen, giggling through an obvious dope fog as he prowled through the refrigerator. A slutty, leather-clad club chick sat at the kitchen table about to light a cigarette when John burst in, not self-conscious at all in his T-shirt and tighty-whities.

  “No!” he whispered fiercely. “No fucking way!” He yanked the cigarette from the girl’s hand.

  “What the fuck?” Mike shouted as the girl tried to process where her cigarette had gone.

  “Shut up! It’s three o’clock in the morning. Mom’s asleep!”

  “Gimme my cigarette!” the girl protested.

  “You have to go,” John insisted to her before turning to his brother. “She has to go. We have to talk. Why didn’t you call me back?!”

  “You’re not my father,” Mike scoffed as he grabbed for the cigarette. John shoved him back, grabbed the phone, and slammed it to the table.

  “Call her a fucking cab and get her the fuck out of here,” he hissed. “We have to talk.”

  * * *

  The night was bitterly cold. John knew that getting dressed and dragging Mike out into it was the best way to sober him up. They both shivered sleepily as they walked the neighborhood.

  “Fuck,” Mike said bleakly, the reality of what John told him seeping in. He angrily shoved John off the sidewalk, the frozen grass crackling beneath his feet. “Fuckin’ Don Huff, I told you the guy was an asshole!”

  “I know,” John said quietly, rejoining his brother as they walked. It wasn’t like what his mom was suffering with, but John was betrayed by Don, too. And he felt that, somehow, he should have known better. Should have protected her.

  “How much did she give him?”

  John knew the question was coming. Mike would find out eventually.

  “Almost one hundred fifty grand.”

  Mike stopped in his tracks. “What???”

  “He said it was just for a couple weeks, just to make it look like he had more money in the bank. So he could…” John trailed off. “He conned her, okay? It’s gone, and that’s it.�
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  Mike still didn’t move. Their house loomed at the end of the block.

  “So what’s left?” he asked.

  “Enough. There are some investments and her Social Security. There’s some insurance but it sounds like it’s not enough. We could sell the house if we have to.”

  A primal trigger tripped in Mike’s head. “Motherfucker!” he snapped, running for his car at the curb. His fury would not be contained with the toxins still running through him. John strained to hold him back.

  “You can’t get to him. They’re holding him until the trial. There’s nothing we can do.”

  Mike took sharp breaths of the cold night air through his nose, shifting in place like an angry, doped-up bull. John wished more than anything he could set Mike loose on Don Huff, to for once let his brother’s crude impulses be put to savage, satisfying use. But it wasn’t possible.

  Mike accepted this bitterly, then walked the rest of the way back to the house without a word. He was about to storm through the kitchen door when John grabbed him at the elbow.

  “Hey,” John whispered, pulling his brother back. Their mother sat at the kitchen table in her robe. They watched her from the darkness as she stared at a pile of unopened mail. A sigh eased into a yawn as she rubbed her eyes. She looked much older than her fifty-one years.

  John watched his brother watching their mother. He couldn’t get a read on where Mike’s anger was being channeled, and he couldn’t risk letting it be toward her.

  “Don’t let this be about the money,” John implored evenly. “Not tonight, she’s not ready.” Mike headed inside, revealing nothing.

  As the back door opened, Rose turned with muted surprise to see her oldest son. Mike had been on the road for over two months, but the weeks since Don was found out made time crawl through a deep sludge for her—it seemed Mike had been gone forever.

  She stood and walked quietly to him, her arms outstretched. Mike felt his mother crying softly into his chest.

  “Hey, Mom,” Mike said tentatively, the silence of the kitchen broken by the wall clock that kept the time since they were boys. “What’re you doing out of bed?”

  “I wanted to see you,” she sniffed. He gently broke the hug.

  “You need to get some sleep,” he smiled down at her. “We can talk in the morning.”

  “You’ll be here?” she asked urgently.

  “I’ll be here. Drag my ass outta bed after you’ve got the coffee on, we’ll hang out. Long as you want.”

  She silently commanded Mike to stoop down so she could kiss him on the cheek, and she went back to bed.

  Thirty

  At one time, it was a small gymnasium. Maybe when the hospital opened in the twenties, patients came to the dank room John stumbled upon in the old building for physical therapy. While too small for a regulation basketball court, a hoop still hung forlornly on a far wall. Its net was long gone, probably appropriated for the nest of the great-great-great-grandparents of the rats whose black eyes studied John from the shadows.

  Whatever its original intent, the room was given over to storage long ago. Walls and walls of ancient file boxes created a haphazard maze of clutter, many of the cartons split open from age and the weight of the stacked containers. Some towers of boxes collapsed, flinging paper records haphazardly through the long-abandoned room.

  The air was heavy with a musty, mildewed cloud of rotting paper, causing John to sneeze convulsively when he first came upon the room during his nightly explorations. When he encountered the door to the gym, sealed shut behind a heavy chain and padlock, the suppression of its secrets was sure to fire John’s curiosity.

  He finally returned one night with a bolt cutter to cut the padlocked chain, and he was disappointed to find that the room held merely decades’ worth of medical records. Stretched before John were cartons and cartons of the meticulously kept details of lives and deaths no longer of much interest to anybody.

  The faded scrawls on the crumbling boxes stretched back to at least the sixties. The farther the boxes stretched toward the far corners of the gym, the further back into time they reached. Sagging floorboards and the angry murmuring of immense-sounding creatures—he had met snarling, dog-sized possums and raccoons during his nightly tours—kept John from exploring too far into the room.

  Grabbing randomly at documents strewn across the floor, he found densely packed records made nearly unintelligible by complexly coded medical jargon, the faint legibility of carbon-papered typewriting, and the usual middle-of-the-night mush of John’s brain. Trying to read by flashlight, he quickly realized nothing could be gleaned from the dry, context-less hieroglyphics of the files.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until several nights later that John’s restless mind drifted back to those boxes he found. He sat with Larry, imagining his father’s work there in the old building. Had Larry ever assigned a patient to room 116? Weren’t the odds pretty good that Dr. Husted once stood in this very room—maybe countless times—dispensing medical miracles, long before he became its perpetual patient? John decided that he had.

  He welcomed into the room the vision of his young, vital father, perhaps a bit cold with his bedside manner but bringing authority and care to someone whose life may have depended on him. Some of his patients most likely didn’t make it. Maybe Larry stood there right in room 116 and watched a patient die, and then turned to find family members to give them the sad news.

  Because of the rote veneration that amassed around the memory of poor, dead-before-his-time Larry Husted, sometimes it was easy to forget that John’s father was just a guy who went to work every day and tried to help people get better and not die. If he came home from work a little cranky or withdrawn from his family, maybe he had his reasons.

  But then it occurred to John that Larry’s history in the old hospital didn’t have to be left to his imagination. Stored in all those decaying boxes, reaching back to the time when Larry first came to town, had to be the record of Lawrence Husted’s career. If Larry’s personal life was a murky patchwork of family photos, selectively calcified memories, and whatever pretend history John was making up about his father, the details of Larry’s medical service could probably be retrieved with fine specificity.

  * * *

  John borrowed work lights from his neighbor Burt, who tinkered with his late model Ford late into the night for years until his wife left with the kids and Burt switched his hobby to drinking in the dark. John also borrowed hundreds of feet of extension cords, patching them together and snaking them from Larry’s room to the gym. The power beyond the B wing had long ago been cut.

  When John fired up the lights, the rats and whatever else called the gym home stirred and spit in unified protest. Instantly, hairy blurs of fangs and infestation leapt from their nests, bouncing off John’s ankles and causing him to hop and scream like a dowager with a bat in her wig. He tore from the gym and retreated to Larry’s room, embarrassed and queasy.

  It wasn’t until after he gave Larry his final treatment and packed up for home that he remembered to unplug the work lights left burning in the gym after his hasty escape.

  Driving home on empty, predawn streets, he shivered to think of those hot lights bearing down on a room full of dry paper and cardboard, sparking a fire in the dead hospital that would have exposed Larry for sure. John pictured the firefighters, following the trail of extension cords back to Larry’s room and staring in bewilderment at the scene they uncovered.

  Thirty-one

  The next night John stopped at a secondhand sporting goods store on the way to the hospital, where he bought himself hockey goalie gear and the longest stick he could find. When the clerk asked him if he needed skates, John fancied a brief image of himself padded and blade-footed, towering over the gymnasium rats and severing heads and tails with mighty, sword-like feet. But he quickly realized he would just as likely tumble from the skates and be gnawed to death, leaving behind a hockey-costumed corpse his wife would be left to explai
n.

  Immediately following Larry’s eleven o’clock treatment, John suited up and wrapped his ankles, wrists, and neck in heavy lengths of duct tape to prevent rodents from crawling inside his several layers of clothes. Only after he sealed himself in and began to sweat did he realize that it might be wise to fire up the lights in the gym from the plug in Larry’s room and let the rats adjust to the intrusion of light for an hour or so before he went in.

  John plugged in the extension cord to Larry’s room, then lowered himself stiffly into the chair beside his father’s bed. He sat in silence, suffocating inside the hockey gear while watching the minutes tick off slowly on the clock on the bed stand. This would have been a really confusing time for Larry Husted to wake up to see what his son was up to.

  * * *

  Half of the boxes housed rat nests, many containing bubble gum–pink babies and a mother really unhappy to have her brood menaced. The first lid that John disturbed burst open like a jack-in-the-box, the rat flying out and sinking its fangs into his chest protector and refusing to let loose no matter how much John clubbed himself with the hockey stick. After that, he learned to inspect each box for gnawed-out holes that indicated something living inside.

  If the rats had taken over a box, the records inside were shredded and caked in decades worth of shit and piss. This simplified John’s quest as he skipped over the infested boxes. He decided to concentrate on files from the latter half of the seventies—after Larry’s rise to professional dominance began, before his work on the new hospital started to monopolize his time. If John found a box from those dates not full of vermin or black with mildew from years of water seepage, he’d carefully drag the box to the hall outside the gym. Despite grant writing projects starting to pile up, he knew he’d spend the next several nights seeing what was left of his father in those boxes.