Raising the Dad Page 22
Stanton firmly refused to allow John to be present. There was no way that the funeral home director, a respected man around town, would allow a family to endure such an indignity. Todd’s father would expect no less of him.
Todd would cremate Larry’s body after-hours. He offered to prepare Larry for viewing if the family desired, but John and Mike knew instinctively that they wanted their final memory of Larry to be the one in their mother’s arms.
Rose, they decided, had seen enough. In time, they would move Larry’s urn into John and Robin’s living room, where they would attempt to re-create a smaller version of the picture-filled family shrine Rose kept in the old house.
They knew that as her mind continued to fail and the disruption of moving her in with them caused her agitation, it would be healthy to provide her a quiet space where hopefully the photos and mementoes would comfort her where her memory couldn’t. If she ever asked how that urn came to be among the family collection, and who was in it, they’d figure out an explanation then.
* * *
“Mom, it feels like we should do something. For Dad,” John said in her living room, several days after Larry died. Mike was there, too. They still didn’t know what she understood but felt forced to delicately try to address it. “Maybe go out to dinner, the whole family, and just raise a glass to him.”
“That would be wonderful,” she smiled, touched by the suggestion. She looked to Larry’s portrait on the shelf. “He was a great man, your father. We were lucky to have him as long as we did.”
This told them nothing.
“Mom,” Mike said firmly. “Dad is dead. Really dead.”
“I know,” she said disapprovingly, offended by their need to tell her the obvious. “I was there.”
“When?” John asked, tempering his exasperation.
“When he died.”
In a perfect universe, this would be a delicious joke, Rose knowingly talking in oblique circles as she playfully drove her sons mad. As it was, John and Mike were beyond flummoxed.
John slid closer. “Are you talking about … a long time ago?”
She sighed and looked at one of the old photos of her with her husband. They were in a hammock somewhere, looking to be in their late twenties, before Mike came along.
Larry laid back contentedly, an arm cocked behind his head, while Rose lay beside him, her head on his chest. She smiled into the camera lens, while he drank her in.
“Everything was so long ago,” she said.
She unexpectedly brightened, as if turning a page. “We could go to the Sunset. Your father loved that place!”
“Okay,” John smiled.
“And Robin? And…?”
“Katie,” John said quickly. “Yeah, the whole family.”
“And we’ll tell stories. About your father,” she said eagerly, before wilting sadly. “I don’t know them anymore.”
“You gave us the stories, Mom,” Mike assured her. “We’ll give them back to you.”
She glowed at the idea.
* * *
Katie squinted in the dark and tapped on the chisel while John held the flashlight. As Robin predicted, the crudely etched new date on the headstone was turning out badly. Despite her talent and best intentions, this was an assignment that no artist could hope to pull off.
“It looks awful!” she sighed.
“It’s great,” John said appreciatively, pleased that she agreed to come do it with him at all. “Your grandfather would love it.”
Katie etched out the final 5 in the year as she mumbled, mostly to herself. “Could my family be any more bizarre?”
John smiled. “Quiet, you. You’ll bring your kids here someday, and you’ll tell them the whole story. They’ll think you’re the freak for having played along with all this.”
“Can I make up the parts that you’re never going to explain to me?”
He studied his daughter in the dark. “I would expect no less.”
Despite her dissatisfaction with her work, she applied careful attention to the job. As she finished, she blew away the remaining dust, then buffed the plaster with a fine abrasive sheet. John marveled at her determination.
After perfecting it as best she could, she sat back to assess the result. Grandpa now died at seventy-eight, not forty-eight. And he was back at the house, on the mantel.
She rested on an empty stretch of ground beside the grave.
“Is this where Grandma will go?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” John said, unprepared for the question but not thrown by the eventuality.
“Soon?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Things are going to be hard for her. But maybe not for a while.”
“Right,” Katie said. “Not too soon. But not too long.”
“Right,” John agreed, loving her for the simple way she crystallized his hope.
She yawned and then shivered in the cold night air.
“Come on, let’s get you home,” he said as he stood stiffly.
Fifty
Dean Durning hovered anxiously as John, Mike, Robin, and Katie made quick work of clearing out room 116, hours after returning Rose home following their supper club send-off for Larry. The harried administrator knew he was unlikely to see the old building brought down during his tenure, but at least its final resident had taken his leave. By dawn, it would be left to the rats and raccoons.
The family divvied up the memorabilia on the shelves. Most of it went to John’s living room, where new images and maybe new memories would surround Rose as she settled in with John and Robin.
Mike took the framed newspaper story about his band. John took the Lucite block commemorating the move into the new hospital. The brothers squabbled over the Donald Duck figurine, until Katie emitted a girlish giggle at holding it.
Soon there was nothing left but the hospital bed and the rotting boxes of medical records that John never returned to the gymnasium after he pieced together the Vicky Farragut story. Durning nudged a box with his foot and watched it crumble, the air filling with mold and dust.
“Jesus,” Durning said, clearing his throat as it clouded menacingly around him. “This stuff could kill you.”
John heard this with his ears, and then felt it punch him in the gut, and then staggered beneath its weight as the possibility announced itself:
It appeared that John might have killed his father.
The internal retelling of the tale would agitate and enthrall John’s mind for the rest of his life. If, as it surely appeared, it had been his digging through the hospital’s rotted files that ended his father’s endless life, that would be okay. Poetic, really. And funny, kind of. If you were willing to go there.
These mad rationalizations would come in time; in the moment, what John might have done to his father ricocheted against the insides of his skull as the others left him behind.
The last to leave room 116, he forced himself to tamp down this new information just long enough to properly acknowledge the pure, uncomplicated silence he was leaving behind.
Then he closed the door, and thought it all over.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Professor Ann Angel, the writing track faculty of Mount Mary University, and the talented and inspiring students who experienced this work in its earliest form. While merely scrambling to meet an assignment deadline as I pursued my graduate degree, they encouraged me to spin a thirty-year-old dream (literally) into a short story, then a thesis project, and finally the book you now hold in your hands. Only took an additional eleven years.
Thanks also to early eyeballs along the way, who read partial or “finished” drafts and never failed to send me back to work with new ideas and encouragement. A special shout-out to the well-read dames of the Wauwatosa Enablers, who made Raising the Dad a book club selection when it was only a fat stack of pages and gave me a spark when I really needed it.
Boundless gratitude to Marcia Markland, who responded to an honest-to-God cold query at the pr
ecise moment I came to think I had expended all publication options for a book of which I am so proud. Thanks, Marcia, and your able associates Quressa Robinson and Nettie Finn.
To family, friends, colleagues, and total strangers who have said kind things about any of my writing in any of the outlets that have been kind enough to give me a platform over the past thirty-five years: you have no idea how validating your approval has been.
And most of all to Pam, always my champion and my strength. The whole wide world opened up to me the day we met.
Also by Tom Matthews
Like We Care
About the Author
Tom Matthews wrote the Costa-Gavras film Mad City, starring Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta. His previous novel, Like We Care, was published to great acclaim. Matthews is also a journalist, feature writer, and social commentator, whose work has appeared in publications across the country. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Acknowledgments
Also by Tom Matthews
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
RAISING THE DAD. Copyright © 2018 by Tom Matthews. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Kerri Resnick
Cover illustrations: suit © Nancy White/Shutterstock.com; hat © Nancy White/Shutterstock.com; tie © PYRAMIS/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Matthews, Tom, 1960– author.
Title: Raising the dad: a novel / Tom Matthews.
Description: First edition. | New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017045657 | ISBN 9781250094766 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250094773 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dysfunctional families—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Fathers—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | GSAFD: Black humor (Literature)
Classification: LCC PS3613.A8276 R35 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045657
eISBN 9781250094773
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First Edition: April 2018