She knew it wasn’t all his fault. She remembered vividly what he’d been like when they’d first met. He was strong and he knew it, in all the ways that confidence is attractive and none of the ones in which it’s ugly. He radiated strength and authority, not with gross bravado but in a quiet I-am-possessed-of-a-power-that-I-need-not-use kind of way. Rusty was a general contractor, a good and honest and successful one. Aubrey had always used her mind for work, and she liked the idea of somebody who used their hands for theirs. Best of all, her husband had been the polar opposite of her older brother—Rusty was unserious, physical, and grounded. She’d loved him until he became unlovable.
The last few years Rusty’s drinking reached blackout level—which had apparently been the issue in his first marriage, and thanks so much for telling me, Cheryl Anne—and in the end that made it easy for Aubrey. Or easier, anyway. The guy she’d loved wasn’t there anymore, and this new guy wasn’t welcome. Slowly at first, and then seemingly all at once, the guy she thought she knew was into booze, drugs, rages, long hours lost playing poker, and she was fairly certain he was getting involved in some sort of minor crime; odd sorties at all hours to do God-knows-what with some sketchy buddy of his. No, Rusty had to go, so out he went, out of the house they’d bought together and out of the life they’d planned in such careful detail.
But the twist in the story, the kicker, the sting in the tail, as they say, was that Rusty didn’t take all his stuff with him when he went. He left Scott behind.
He didn’t actually leave Scott; it was more that Scott stayed. Rusty’s son from his first marriage was fourteen at the time, old enough to get into trouble, which he did, old enough to know that his mother lived too far away and didn’t care enough to take care of him, which she didn’t, and young enough to think that if he could just make a few smart choices about his life, he could free himself from the shit cycle of neglect and substance abuse that had consumed both his parents. Outcome pending on that third one.
Because they were both men, and Midwestern ones at that, Scott and Rusty didn’t sit down and actually discuss a new living arrangement. It was more that they came to realize it in each other’s presence at about the same time one morning. Specifically, that moment was fifteen minutes after Rusty had told Scott, “Get your shit and be downstairs. We’re leaving.” Scott did not get his shit or go downstairs.
Rusty looked up the ancient, rickety staircase that had been first on his punch list for four years—he was for sure gonna get to that one—and shouted. “You coming or what?”
Scott shouted back, through his closed bedroom door. “Fuck off.”
Rusty turned and looked at Aubrey, who was slouched sideways in the kitchen door, half in and half out, as if there were no room she wanted to be in right now.
“You put him up to this?”
Aubrey just glared at him. Give me a break.
Rusty turned back to the stairs and yelled up to Scott again. “You stay now, you’re staying for good.”
At this point, some teenagers would have shouted something incoherent and slammed the door. Others might have cranked up the volume on something by Death Grips, a rap group rivaled in their abrasiveness only by the sound of someone chewing aluminum foil in your ear. But Scott Wheeler just opened his door, walked to the top of the stairs, looked down at his father, and touched his forehead with two fingers of his right hand in an insouciant goodbye salute.
“Adios, asshole.”
Rusty picked up his bag and left.
At 10:47 that morning, Aubrey had been thirty-six, childless, newly single, and ready to accept whatever exciting adventure life held in store for her.
At 10:48, she had a fourteen-year-old to raise. Somebody else’s fourteen-year-old.
Hey, life, that wasn’t what I fucking meant.
It was home to Scott that Aubrey now raced. It was just after one in the afternoon, which meant if she hurried and traffic didn’t conspire against her, she’d be at the house by two, plenty of time to toss Scott’s room before he got home from school. She’d arranged for him to stay at a friend’s for the two nights she was gone, but she’d had no illusions about his true intentions, which had almost certainly been to spend the night with Caprice in the Aubrey-less house on Cayuga Lane. Scott had turned fifteen six months ago, too young to give up one’s virginity, in Aubrey’s opinion, but that was between him and his consenting partners. It was the substances she was concerned about.