John and his daughter sat opposite each other, worlds apart. They were both on their laptops, seated together at the kitchen table so that John could idly cast an eye over every so often to hold Katie’s internet explorations in check. She was supposed to be doing homework, but he knew she had half a dozen texts going while allegedly studying for a social studies test. Her fifteen-year-old fingers danced out fevered teenage chit-chat, her words that crude online shorthand: OMG GTFO DTS 9.
“Imagine what The Diary of Anne Frank would read like if she had had a Twitter account,” John often mused to himself.
He was supposed to be finishing up the federal grant proposal he had been writing for almost three months. His job was finding supplemental funding for Next Step, the nonprofit where John worked as the development director. Next Step provided transitional living for kids who had “aged out” of foster care, and John found the government agencies and foundations that wrote checks for such projects. He was expert at decoding the massive knot of institutional bullshit they spun to make sure no one got their help without suffering first.
Lately, though, he spent these homework sessions getting lost in watching his daughter. It was easy; he could just glance past his screen, knowing she was too transfixed by her conversations to know she was being observed. Studying her intense gaze as it softly shifted from unguarded smiles to deep concern, he could see the whole range of adolescence play across her face. He should have coaxed her back to her studying but it was too pleasing, just being able to sit there and watch her be.
He and Robin worried about her grades, and about new friends shaping her in troubling ways. An understated goth look had begun to creep into her appearance. It was nothing dire, just a new affinity for dark clothes and an unflattering thickening of black mascara around her soft blue eyes. Despite some new surliness, Katie was still a sweet but overweight teenager, just the sort to embrace a fashion trend that John thought was rooted in a kind of preemptive ugliness.
Who could hurt a kid for her body size or her face or her lack of awesomeness when she
willfully made herself ugly to all but those who defiantly wore the costume alongside her?
John saw the older goths when he dropped Katie off at school, and their sneering commitment to the pose – the piercings, the tattoos, the whole Bela Lugosi-meets-the-Third Reich facade – struck him as nothing but the insolent armor of sad, wounded kids. It stung his heart to think that his sweet-souled daughter might be lost to such a joyless clique.
He typed something, and then heard the gentle bing of a new text arriving on her screen.
“Dad, stop,” she laughed before catching herself. “I know it’s you.”
“No, it’s Johnny, your Samoan pen pal. You really should talk to him, I hear his family is loaded.”
She shook her head. He typed some more and transmitted it across the table.
She sighed, playing along: “Johnny wants to know how school was today,” she said.
“Hmm, I was wondering that myself,” John said. “I often find myself thinking like a Samoan.”
She typed a terse response. John’s laptop beeped.
“’Fine’?” John read from his screen. “Your day was fine? Johnny was hoping for more detail. Johnny wants to know if you’ve still got a crush on that Brendan kid. With the red Mohawk and the infected nose ring.”
She shut her laptop. “I think I’ll go study in my room.”
“Then you won’t need these,” he said, relieving her of her computer and phone and handing her her social studies book. “Take a cookie, you look hungry.”
She gave her father that irked but tolerant teenage sigh, the one that John chose to believe said, “You do understand that mannerisms imposed upon me by my age and peer group prevent me from revealing that I am actually rather fond of you, don’t you?”
John was still working at the kitchen table when Robin got home. She taught ninth grade geometry at Emerson, the high school Katie attended and where John and Robin had gone.
She was 38 now. Her looks had taken on a pleasing overlay of age and experience, and John still thought that any 15-year-old male would be lucky to have such a woman etching a trapezoid on the white board before him. He knew he should tell her that more often, but figured she would shoot him down as insincere for having deemed her less than centerfold material.
“Hey,” Robin sighed with a familiar flatness.
“Hey,” he replied.
In every terrific romantic movie, in every great love story ever written, lovers whose hearts were fused as one never once greeted each other with a tired, emotionally-detached, “Hey.”
These were John and Robin’s “Hey” days.
“Haven’t got dinner going yet,” he said. “I’m in the home stretch on this thing, I kinda lost track of the time.”
“That’s okay,” she said as she took a jar of spaghetti sauce from the cupboard and began filling a pot with water.
They married 17 years ago. John thought they had a marriage that worked. They had a nice house in a better part of town, they kept their bills paid, and they had a smart, mostly responsible daughter whose grades so far hovered around the B range. They weren’t the most passionate couple on the block, but all the grabby-hands marriages John saw up close – the
attentive husbands, the giggling wives, the cloying hints of post-cookout whoopee when all John really wanted to know was how they wanted their steaks done – had all ended in divorce.
Robin and John kept an even keel; they still laughed enough, and shared interests enough, and made love enough to make the marriage endure.
Robin wasn’t convinced. She felt they had lost something, and she talked about them trying to find it again. A lot. One of the last times they went round and round about it, she said that the two of them were like co-managers of a successful business: They understood what their roles were, they came together efficiently when a crisis hit, and they kept their doors open when so many businesses around them failed.
It wasn’t until bedtime that night, when John crawled into bed and recoiled at the frost radiating from his wife, that he realized she wasn’t making a flattering comparison. When she compared them to business partners, he actually thought they made a breakthrough. He may have smiled and said, “Right!”
Her arms clenched tightly across her chest in bed that night, she continued her analogy with the observation that at the end of the work day, these two “managers” John admired seemed to go their separate ways, to increasingly separate lives.
“But it’s hard to keep a business going,” John would think to himself. “I’m proud that our doors are still open. That’s all I’m saying.”
While Robin waited for the water to boil she poured some wine and set a glass beside his computer. “Did you call your mother back?”
“Mmmm, no.”
“John…” she scolded.
Months ago he changed his mother’s incoming calls to a custom ring tone, so he knew when it was her. At first it was “The Chicken Dance,” John insisting that he needed something frivolous in his head before he took on her increasingly emotionally draining calls. But Rose phoned so often that Robin and Katie threatened to kill him as that insipid polka burrowed itself
into their brains, so he changed it to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Between the ring tone and Caller ID, John didn’t always pick up when he knew it was his mother. If she left a message he’d listen to it instantly and he’d call her right back if it was even remotely urgent, but so many of her calls were just because she was lonely or she had to tell John something that she told him five times before. He was falling behind in his work, indulging his mother every time she beckoned. It made him feel shitty, but he felt that he needed to allocate his time better.
His mother called twice the night before, each message simply, “Call me.” But he hadn’t yet.
“I’m stepping back,” he said in response to Robin’s disapproving tone. “Mike needs to deal with this stuff. If it was important, she would’ve said. Or he’d have called by now for me to take over with her.”
“How do you think he’s doing with her?” Robin asked, sipping her wine from the other side of the room.
“Fine. I guess. But it’s only been a couple weeks. Hopefully this Steve Hoover thing doesn’t come through.”
“Who’s Steve Hoover?”
“The next piece of shit who’s going to knock my brother’s life sideways.”
“The Vasquez guy.”
“Si.”
Robin went to change her clothes, levelling an arching eyebrow of disapproval at her husband as she left the kitchen. “And you’re leaving her to fend for herself with dirtbags like that hanging around.”
He sighed and tapped the screen of his phone.
“Hi, Ma.”
“Where have you been? I called you all last night,” Rose asked.
“Sorry. I just got caught up in this project that I’m working on, and by the time I heard your message it was too late to call. How are you? Is Mike taking good care of you?”
“Oh, sure. We’re already like a couple of old roommates.”
John’s ear was honed to hear hints of unease. Something was bothering her.
“You sure? Is something wrong?”
“Oh, it’s just… He had some friends over last night, they were up later than me. They’re so loud.”
“You want me to talk to him? It’s your house.”
“No, don’t make trouble. It’ll be fine. Listen, I called because Walt Bolger wants you to call him.”
“Walt Bolger? Doctor Bolger?” John asked. “Why?”
Walt Bolger and John’s father were partners as young doctors at Holt Memorial Hospital. On the day in 1985 when John’s father had his stroke, it was Dr. Bolger who found him on the floor in the office adjacent to his and fought to save him. Nearly a year later, it was Dr. Bolger who sat Mike and John down and told them that their father finally had to be let go, that while
his body lingered on there was no chance of him ever regaining consciousness.
Dr. Bolger had to tell the boys this, because over those 11 months their mother pretty much broke down, unable to handle the brutal turn their family had taken. Other than bumping into him around town a handful of times since he moved back to his hometown in the mid ‘90s, John consigned Walt Bolger to that raw-nerved part of his memory that tapped into that precise moment in time when he knew his family would never be the same.
“You must’ve misunderstood him,” John said gently to his mother. “He was probably calling to talk to you. Could he have been confused?”
Dementia, John was learning, was grabbing hold throughout his parent’s generation. The brain misfires, and all of a sudden Walt Bolger’s calling his dead friend Larry to set up a tee time.
“Why would he be looking for me?” John asked.
“He says he has something to talk to you about. He wants to meet you for lunch. He was your father’s best friend, so you call him tonight.”
“Did he give you any idea-”
John heard the stereo blast to life at his mother’s house. Furious metal. Mike music.
“What?” she shouted into the phone.
“Ma, tell Mike to turn that stuff-”
“Okay, bye.”
She hung up. John stared at the phone, and then called up a phone book. He was apparently having lunch with the guy who pulled the plug on his old man.