I put a Stouffer’s frozen dinner in the microwave for supper—Grandma’s Chicken Bake, our favorite—and shook him awake while it was cooking. He sat up, looked around like he didn’t know where he was, then started to make these horrible chugging sounds I’d never heard before. He wove his way to the bathroom with his hands over his mouth and I heard him puking. It seemed to me like it would never stop, but eventually it did. The microwave binged. I got the Chicken Bake out, using the oven mitts that said GOOD COOKIN’ on the left and GOOD EATIN’ on the right—you forget to use those mitts once while you’re taking something hot out of the zapper and you never forget again. I blopped some on our plates and then went into the living room, where Dad was sitting on the couch with his head down and his hands laced together on the back of his neck.
“Can you eat?”
He looked up. “Maybe. If you bring me a couple of aspirin.”
The bathroom stank of gin and something else, maybe bean dip, but at least he’d gotten all of it in the bowl and flushed it away. I sprayed some Glade around, then brought him the aspirin bottle and a glass of water. He took three and put the glass where the bottle of Gilbey’s had been. He looked up at me with an expression I’d never seen before, even after Mom died. I hate to say this, but I’m going to because it’s what I thought then: it was the expression of a dog that has taken a shit on the floor.
“I could eat if you gave me a hug.”
I hugged him and said I was sorry for what I said.
“It’s okay. Probably I deserved it.”
We went into the kitchen and ate as much of Grandma’s Chicken Bake as we could manage, which wasn’t very much. As he scraped our plates into the sink, he told me he was going to stop drinking, and that weekend he did. He told me that on Monday he was going to start looking for a job, but he didn’t. He stayed home, watched old movies on TCM, and when I came home from baseball practice and noon swim at the Y, he was pretty much blotto.
He saw me looking at him and just shook his head. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I absolutely promise.”
“I call bullshit,” I said, and went into my room.
6
That was the worst summer of my childhood. Was it worse than after your mother died? you could ask, and I’d say yes, because he was the only parent I had left and because it all seemed to be happening in slow motion.
He did make a halfhearted effort at job hunting the insurance biz, but nothing came of it, even when he shaved and bathed and dressed for success. Word gets around, I guess.
The bills came in and piled up on the table in the front hall, unopened. By him, at least. I was the one who opened them when the stack got too high. I put them in front of him and he wrote checks to cover them. I didn’t know when those checks would start to bounce back marked INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, and didn’t want to know. It was like standing on a bridge and imagining an out-of-control truck was skidding toward you. Wondering what your last thoughts would be before it squashed you to death.
He got a part-time job at the Jiffy Car Wash out by the turnpike extension. That lasted a week, then he either quit or got fired. He didn’t tell me which and I didn’t ask.
I made the All-Star Shrimp League team, but we got knocked out in the first two games of a double-elimination tournament. During the regular season I’d hit sixteen home runs, I was Star Market’s best power hitter, but in those two games I struck out seven times, once at a ball in the dirt and once sucking for a pitch so far over my head I would have needed an elevator to make contact. Coach asked what was wrong with me and I said nothing, nothing, just leave me alone. I was doing bad shit, too—some with a friend, some on my own.
And not sleeping very well. I wasn’t having nightmares like I did after my mother died, I just couldn’t get to sleep, sometimes not until midnight or one in the morning. I started turning my clock around so I wouldn’t have to look at the numbers.
I didn’t exactly hate my father （although I’m sure I would have come to in time）， but I felt contempt for him. Weak, weak, I’d think, lying in bed and listening to him snore. And of course I’d wonder what was going to happen to us. The car was paid for, which was good, but the house wasn’t and the size of those payments was horrifying to me. How long before he couldn’t make the monthly nut? That time would surely come, because the mortgage had another nine years to run, and there was no way the money would hold out that long.
Homeless, I thought. The bank will take the house, like in The Grapes of Wrath, and we’ll be homeless.