“Never thought it’s where I’d wind up, and—you know—I still have thoughts about going back to school, but that won’t pay the bills, and this does. Never thought I’d know so much about feasibility analysis, site layout, gas pipeline routing, grading, drainage, storm water management…”
“So you like it?” Like a salute, he put a hand above his eyes to block the setting sun.
“I do. Plus it gives me time to read. At this point, my apartment’s just a bed and books stacked to the ceiling, you know?”
With a shudder and a rattle, the screen door of the house thwacked open, the storm door closing mechanism no match for the arm that threw it wide.
“Kid! Get away from that man. What’d I tell you about stranger danger.”
Mr. Clifton guffawed, and Dan went to hug his father.
When his dad hugged his sisters he held them by the shoulders first, looked them in the eye as if deciding about how they turned out, and then wrapped them up like he wanted to kill their husbands for taking them away. With Dan, he always took his hand in a crushing shake. Then the other arm looped around the back for three hard slaps. Each pat vibrated his lungs.
“Cam!” Dan’s father called. “The worst of the kids is home!”
As his dad shook hands with Mr. Clifton, because he literally could not converse with another man without a firm handshake first (even if it was a neighbor and friend of nearly thirty years), Dan could hear his mom racing out of the house, throwing the storm door almost as hard.
“You little stinker, come here.” A fierce hug and about twenty face-peppering kisses later (“My little man, my little man!”), she pulled away. “You come home and go see Clift first? Before the woman who pushed your damn watermelon head out?”
“Cam, get off the kid. You’re giving him an O-dee-pol complex.”
The older Dad got, the more he looked like himself, handsome somehow, improbably, despite pits of old acne scars and a rough Scots-Irish face leathering further and further. He needed to put more sunscreen on his scalp where the white fuzz had thinned down to the sunspots. Maybe his gut had swelled, but there hadn’t exactly been a washboard there in living memory. His gold tooth, tucked in place of an incisor he claimed to have lost in a bar fight in Saigon, threw a dull shine over an otherwise browning row of teeth.
Mom had colored her hair a lighter, summer shade, and her aging was still a graceful retreat. In school, all his friends had given Dan never-ending hell about how hot his mom was. Above her blue top was an expanse of pink skin and one hard mole. They must have been up to see Heather in Cleveland. Mom loved to get sunburned on Lake Erie. She held his cheek, studied him, tears pushing at her eyes, and Dan felt guilty about not coming home more often.
Arms crossed, Mr. Clifton beamed at them. “How long are you planning to stay?”
“Just a couple days.”
“Unless I kidnap him,” said Mom.
“Here’s the thing you gotta understand about Daniel,” said Dad, putting a finger in the air. “And I tell this to Cam all the time: the point of having kids is to get them the fuck outta your house. Now I hear all these stories about kids coming back home to live with their parents. Back in my day, that’s called panhandling. Bums do it.”
Again, Mr. Clifton cracked up. There was a little kid element to the two of them, Dad always trying to get his friend to shoot milk out of his nose at the lunch table. Mom had once told Dan and his sisters, “Your dad gets his jollies pretending to be the toughest mother-effer in the world, but that’s all it is: pretend.”
Dad was a door gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam. He came home and married a girl fifteen years his junior (she was sixteen when they started dating). He’d always been a bit of a schizophrenic character, which Mom attributed to his inability to make up his mind politically. He still swore that the U.S. could’ve beaten back the Viet Cong and won that war had it not been for the media and the flower children. According to Mom, Dad voted Nixon in ’72, skipped ’76, went hard-core for Reagan in both of his races, then voted Dukakis over Bush in ’88. He then proceeded to vote twice for Bill Clinton and twice for George W. Bush. He maintained that Clinton was “the greatest president of my lifetime” and was furious when Obama kept Hillary from the White House, casting outraged votes for McCain and then “Pattycake” (which was his inexplicable nickname for Mitt Romney). First and foremost he was an old-school union guy. Retired now, for Dan’s entire childhood he commuted up to Ohio Metal Working Products in Canton. His truck was still wallpapered with bumper stickers for the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers.
Dan spent his childhood wishing to be his father’s son but by disposition channeled his mother: bookish, too nice for his own good, hearing from the other St. Vincent de Paul parishioners how sweet he was. It didn’t seem possible he could ever be his father—a man who regaled even his daughters with stories of how he once fought a guy with a chain and a trash can lid in an alley (Mom called these his “tall Paul tales”). It took him a long time to understand what Mom meant about Dad being pretend. He was too young to see it when Mr. Clifton’s wife, Rosa, passed away from cancer. To a young boy, the wonderful woman next door who stuffs you full of baked goods and comments on how handsome you’re becoming every time she sees you is an invincible figure. Dan was very young, and she went very fast. He vaguely recalled the duality that fell over their little corner of Rainrock Road: utter sorrow and utter rally. Mom and Rosa had been young mothers together, and he remembered her trying to explain the death of her friend at the dining room table. Dan, Betty, and Heather sat there while Mom’s pretty face crumpled—the first time he ever saw her cry.
“Do you get what’s happening?” Heather asked him afterward.
“Course,” he sputtered, but he thought maybe he didn’t.
At the wake, he spent most of his time with Kimberly and J.D.’s younger cousins, all of them chasing one another in backyard tag, not understanding that dividing their teams based on skin color was inappropriate until J.D. came out and integrated them. When he went inside, Mr. Clifton was telling a story about Rosa and had everyone laughing through their Kleenex. Dan asked his mom if Dad was pretending not to be sad. She said that, no, he was sad: “He just has a durable heart.” And he saw how Dad took care of almost everything: coordinated with the caterers, the funeral home, directed family from Cincinnati who weren’t familiar with the screwy rural roads. He helped set up and tear down, cleaned the whole house afterward, and was at Mr. Clifton’s, Kim’s, or J.D.’s side every spare moment. Later that week, Dan watched from his bedroom window—Dad and Mr. Clifton sitting on the porch, passing what he thought at the time was a cigarette. Dad put his arm around Mr. Clifton’s shoulder, and he could see his babysitter’s father shaking. They ate many dinners with the Clifton family that year. Dad cracked jokes, and Mr. Clifton could still laugh like life had never cheated him.
Night edged over the heat of the day. The sweat clinging to the small of his back finally began to evaporate. Mom returned from the house with beers. She carried them out, two in each hand. Rolling Rocks, of course.
They stood in the driveway by the hoop, sipping from the emerald glass.
“You keep missing the ruckus, Dan. DEA raided that little shitbox motel by the square,” said Mom.
“The Cactus Motel,” Mr. Clifton offered.
“Folks running heroin out of it! Unbelievable.” Dad slugged back the Rolling Rock. He used to only drink Budweiser until those commercials with the frogs came out. He’d said, “Welp. Can’t drink moron beer,” finished the rest of his Budweiser that night and, as far as Dan knew, had yet to touch another.