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“This is no way to live,” I mumble, and Jackie crosses the attic to slap me, knocking me backward and my laptop crashes to the floor, music and images ceasing, Dad suddenly gone all over again.

“Don't you say that!” she shrieks. “Don't you ever goddamn say that again!”

And with that she's gone, and I'm alone with Mr. Weber and the ringing in my ears.

 

TESTAMENT

We meet in Mr. Weber's home office for the reading of Dad's will. Jackie still has not spoken to me since shrieking at me in the attic, a shrill echo that I can still mentally conjure to allow me to recall her voice if I want to. Invoking Dad's last words in a threat to vanish was her breaking point; she's completely given up on me and I have neither the energy nor the inclination to dissuade her from doing so.

I assume that what Mr. Weber sees across his attorney's desk is a familiar tableau of broken families: sister not talking to brother, mother swallowing grief and regret, son completely lost as evidenced by their pantsless attic encounter. I worry about Mr. Weber, a decade retired and in no condition to muster the guile necessary to orchestrate the emotions he's about to trigger. He should at least stretch first so he doesn't pull something.

Instead he reads the will; a will never changed since before Dad's split from Mom, and certainly one that never considered the twin possibilities of armless son and divorced daughter; a will that leaves the house and its accumulated, valueless contents—somehow described as “worldly goods”—to his beloved wife who, at the conclusion of the reading turns to us and says, without a mean intent in her body, “Now, you both need to go.”

“Wait a minute; you're not even ‘wife' anymore, never mind ‘beloved.'”

“Actually, she is,” Mr. Weber informs us. “Your parents never divorced. And I can say personally, from conversations with your father, she remained very much ‘beloved.'”

“You never divorced?”

“I asked. He wouldn't. I thought we'd get around to it.” She redirects her attention. “Fred, can you help with the sale?”

“I can bring in the Bowmans. Brother and sister realtors, very well regarded.” Mr. Weber folds up the will and returns it to his file. “They'll be in touch.”

Mom rises and we do the same in succession, a joyless, three-person wave.

“Where are we supposed to go?” Jackie wails.

“Back to your lives. Whatever that means to each of you. Jackie, you have a husband. Yes, he's a lunkhead, impulsive and childlike—and not in an oh-he's-adorable-childlike way—but he was all those things when you married him. Yes, people change and grow. Look at me and your father—”

“One of those things is not like the other,” I point out. “Dad didn't leave to live in a yurt with a fireman.”

“If you've decided you don't want those things anymore”—she ignores me the way a hippo ignores flies—“then you leave. But you move forward, not back. The house you grew up in is no longer an option.”

“What about Aaron?”

“I don't need you to stick up for me.”

“You shut the fuck up,” she says without looking, but at least she's spoken to me.

“I thought this would be temporary, but you've demonstrated that it's not.”

“You thought I was a salamander?”

“We all thought you'd been dealt a terrible blow,” Mr. Weber joins in. “And that you'd come out stronger for it.”

“Sometimes, those things that don't kill you just ruin you instead. You know that, right? We're not all Randy Fucking Pausch.”

“Who's Randy Fucking Pausch?” Jackie wants to know.

“I'm glad you're talking to me again.”

“I'm not. Fuck you. And fuck you too,” Jackie snaps at Mom, and she leaves, and if there's a flicker of hurt Mom manages to bury it beneath the surface, an iceberg where nine-tenths of her disappointment swims.

Mom approaches me from my defenseless left side, where she smooths my hair and pats my head. “This is what needs to be done. I know this to be true.”

And then she too is out the door, leaving me once more alone with Mr. Weber and the ringing in my ears. At least this time, my pants are up.

“How about lunch? We should talk about what to do with that damn alligator.”

He punctuates his invitation with a slam of the file drawer, as Dad's final wishes return to mingle in the darkness among the wishes of other long-dead clients who no longer wish for anything.

 

HOMELESS

The house has been emptied of its contents, first picked over in a two-day estate sale (where strangers haggled over the evidence of our lives), then whatever remained hauled away by an estate liquidator (presumably to be rendered liquid). Jackie and I were first allowed a wordless, brief excavation of the house's pointless artifacts, an archeological dig through long-dead electronics, stacks of out-of-print magazines, and bundles of pens from restaurants whose kitchens have long since gone cold. Separately—as Jackie refused my proximity—we also unearthed some minor treasures: the owner's manual to the Lincoln Mark IV, Jackie's baby clothes, my old report cards reflecting mostly decent grades (except for the D from Mr. Madnick) alongside a serial run of
Unsatisfactory
s for behavior, self-control, and attitude, giving me the upper hand in any argument that I've changed since the accident.

Priced by our determined mother well below market with a thirty-day escrow, the house has sold quickly to a family with a sullen teenage son who would continue a tradition of attic sulking; so in the time it takes to receive a set of nonstick pans ordered from a late-night cable commercial (“allow four to six weeks for delivery”), I'm rendered homeless.

Jackie is already gone, forced back to California by Mom's inarguable mandate and her own unwillingness to watch her childhood home reduced to bones as if by African army ants. (Of the house's former occupants, only Ali is better off, having been taken in by Mr. Weber.) I'm fairly certain Jackie still isn't speaking to me, but I'm forced to try when I receive from Mr. Weber Mom's check for half the sum of the sale of the house and assume Jackie got the other half. She doesn't answer but texts back,
FUCK YOU
.

Off that fruitless effort I turn to Mom, seeking fruit. “You kicked us out of the house, sold it, and then gave us the money?”

“Why are you calling to tell me something I already know?”

“So basically, Jackie and I could just pool the money and go buy the house back.”

“I doubt that. No one moves into a house just to sell it back to the people they bought it from. That's the definition of pointless.”

“As pointless as kicking us out of a house and then giving us the money?”

“Now you both have a little something to help you move forward. If you decide to move backward instead,” she muses, “yes, you could both chip in some more on top of the purchase price and offer a profit incentive.”

“I understand how commerce works.”

“That would be up to you,” she continues. “I can't help what you do now. I can only help what I can help. The rest is out of my hands.”

I take with me as much of the attic as I can fit in the van, a wardrobe box of Dad's old suits and shoes, the basement painting of the racehorse, and a cluster of Mom's zinnias, pulled from the earth and stuffed into a pot sitting next to me on the passenger seat, silent as Dad under his grocery bag. I also have Dad's ashes, grateful to have not gotten around to scattering them around the yard for the squirrels to romp in. It would have felt bad leaving him behind like that.

Pulling away from the house a final time, just ahead of the moving van pulling in, I head to the Sunset Elks Motor Inn, a foolish gambit to get back at Mom by squandering her generosity at $79 a night ($89 on weekends). Clutching Mom's zinnias, I ask for a smoking room and am informed that all their rooms are smoke-free.

“That's okay,” I reply, only to be greeted with the kind of skeptical look once conferred upon me by Dad when I told him I had no homework. I'm given a key card anyway, and make my way to my room, bleak as a prison cell.

Soon I'm sucking up spirals of Moe Larry Hemp, engineered for the wakefulness presumably required of a Stooge. Waking up here in a lonely motor inn on my first day away from my lost home is going to feel crappy, and the only way to avoid that is if I don't fall asleep. I have no illusions that I can keep this up indefinitely but if I can stay awake for one or even two nights, then I'll either have accepted my situation or be too exhausted to care.

Nothing keeps me awake like bad television and I find myself compelled by a law-enforcement reality show where moronic car thieves are entrapped by luxury cars left unattended, keys inside, along with several hidden cameras. Despite being unlocked, this particular vehicle has its window smashed anyway, by an overeager perpetrator who then fumbles through the arm console for loose change before driving away, laughing to himself, only to have the engine cut off (the cops staking out the vehicle have a kill switch). Arrested and placed in handcuffs, the perp seems to enjoy being on television, and while I ponder the special type of criminal mind that delights in this kind of notoriety, I again hear glass smashing and wonder how they jumped to a second storyline so quickly. Then I realize the sound came from outside where my van is parked.

I race outside with the only weapon I can grab, and two mulleted youths flee at the sight of me, either because my remote control looks like it may be a gun or, more likely, they're terrified of the shirtless, one-armed, nub-tattooed madman who leaps without thinking, wild-eyed, from the safety of his crack den. When I awaken the desk clerk to report the attempted robbery, he sniffs the air in my room and is instantly unhappy.

“I said this was a smoke-free motel.”

“Hey, I have a prescription for this.”

“You also have a driver's license. That doesn't mean you can drive your car into your room and spin doughnuts. ‘Smoke-free' means smoke-free.”

I resist the urge to argue that if we're going to be so literal, “motor inn” might imply that I could in fact drive in here and spin said doughnuts.

“They tried to rob my van!” I shout. “And now the window's broken. I can't leave it unattended.”

“Right, because you're leaving.”

“Fuck you,” I tell him, slamming the door in his face, suddenly understanding how good that makes Jackie feel.

The next knock at my door isn't the desk clerk but the now-familiar face of the sheriff, without gas mask, visibly sagging upon seeing me and declaring, “Oh, for fuck's sake.”

We argue over my rights as a prescription-drug user and my entitlement as a paying motel customer to a safe environment; losing both arguments, I attempt a new one over the full refund due me if I do decide to leave—which I haven't yet said I'd do—only to lose that one too. Winless, I relent and head for the van when the sheriff stops me, gently prying the van's keys from my fingers as he reminds me that prescription or no, it remains illegal for me to drive under the influence.

That's when I discover that “Fuck you” doesn't universally lead to feeling better, although its current usage solves my temporary homeless dilemma. Instead of waking up on my first day away from home in a lonely motor inn, I wake up in the sheriff's holding cell where Will, armless once more due to the early morning hour, stares down at me through the bars, having come to pay my bail.

“I called your friend,” the sheriff explains. “Figured he owed you the bail.”

*   *   *

On the way back to the Sunset Elks parking lot, Will asks, “So why didn't you tell me you paid my bail? I thought they just let us go.”

“We were only in trouble because of me. That shouldn't cost you money.”

“I did think it was a little weird, just releasing us like that.”

“Aren't you used to being so pitiable, you get away with anything?”

“Not with cops,” he mutters as we roll into the lot to see my van, nearly completely ransacked overnight. Gone is anything of value, and worse, those things with no monetary worth I care most about, as evidenced by the handful of Dad's thirty-five-millimeter slides dotting the parking lot like oversized confetti. Dad's suits, too unfashionable to steal, are left untouched, his ashes spilled but salvageable. Mom's zinnias remain in the passenger seat where I dropped them before being relieved of my keys. But the mother lode most deliciously struck by the thieves is a month's worth of weed, Vicodin, and Valium. Instead of a reality show celebrating the dumbness of car thieves, the returning thugs found themselves winning contestants on a game show, probably weeping with joy and clutching each other as they jumped up and down, balloons and audience applause raining over them as their families rushed the stage under closing credits.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” I lie, so pitiably that Will offers to let me crash at his place “for as long as it takes,” and regardless of how ill defined “it” is, we both know that no guest's stay can reasonably be that long.

I thank him and tell him I'll follow to his place, climbing into the van and crunching a million tiny nodules of car window under my ass. I reach to turn on the CD player but it too is gone, and with it my
Dad Is Dead
mixtape, which I hope the thieves find more perplexing than enjoyable.

Screeching into reverse, I cut the wheel hard and take out a row of bushes, slam the car into drive and plow unlooking into traffic—who cares?—speeding forward, closing the distance on Will's rear bumper. He throws his one good arm up in the air, an asymmetrical shrug, and I can see him mouth the words
What the fuck?
in his rearview mirror, but I don't give a shit anymore, and there's nothing left to sedate me or placate me or otherwise-ate me. I want to shut out the roar of the blood in my ears and the world rushing in my broken window, so I plug in my earbuds and hit shuffle and the Judybats remind me that “Pain Makes You Beautiful.” So knowing what an absolutely breathtaking motherfucker I must be, I slow down.