Family Man (14 page)

Did it make me a bad person if I didn’t?

I tried instead to think about Vinnie, who had stayed with me for half the night while I dozed in the warmth of his arms. He’d promised to call me later, and I clung to that vow, the only bright moment ahead of me.

It was shortly after noon when he called. “I wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. Before he could ask about my mom, I said, “Thanks so much, Vinnie.”

“No need to thank me.”

“Well, still.”

“Is there anything you need?”

“No. No, I’m fine.”

“Well, at least let me take you out for pizza, since we never got to finish our date last night.”

Our date.

I wanted to say yes, but there was no way in the world I could take him up on the offer. I still had a shift to cover at the restaurant, plus a paper to write when I got home, and another early shift at the coffee shop the next day. “I have way too much homework, Vin. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Just tell me when I can see you again.”

Was it pathetic how much the protectiveness in his voice made me melt? I actually found myself smiling. “I have Thursday off.”

“Thursday it is. I think it’s well past time we got the fountain out of the way.”

My smile hurt my face it was so big. “Probably so.”

“Call me whenever you want, okay? No matter if it’s day or night.”

“I will.”

“Promise me you will.”

I could fall in love with him, I realized. I really could. Maybe I was already there. “I promise.”

By the time I got back to my house after work that night, my mom was home from the hospital. She was on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, a cup of tea in her hand. She was in full apology mode.

I braced myself, knowing I didn’t dare buy one word of it.

“Trey, I’m so sorry—”

“Save it.”

“It won’t happen again. I promise.”

“I don’t want your goddamn promises. You never keep them anyway.”

“Honey, I was just so lonely. And I’d had a bit to drink—”

“No kidding.”

“—and I must have taken my pills earlier in the day, but I forgot, and I guess I took them again. I don’t know—”

“Mom, forget it, all right?” I turned at the foot of the stairs to face her. “You’re sorry. I’m sorry. Gram’s sorry. We all know how it goes.”

She hung her head. “I didn’t remember taking them.”

She looked so old, and so beaten. She had so little. A couch. A TV. A bottle. Lots and lots of bottles. Everything else was gone. Granted, outside of my father’s death, it was all gone because of her drinking. It was her own fault.

That didn’t make this single moment any easier.

I felt a hint of something—something I hadn’t felt for her in a long time—a hint of sympathy.

Once upon a time, things had been different. She’d been drinking then too, but I’d been too young to understand. All I’d known then was that some days she was confused and clumsy. On the other days, she was my friend.

I’d told Vinnie how she’d taught me to aim for the 100s in skee-ball. At least once a week we’d go to Orecchio’s to play, or go out for ice cream, or maybe go to a movie. Back then, she’d tried so hard to make up for the fact that my dad wasn’t around. But as I got older, the drinking got worse. She became more of a hermit too.

In those days, I’d wanted to understand, but she began to embarrass me more often than not. She’d show up drunk at my school events. Back then she’d had a job, and more than once, her boss had called me to come and get her because she’d gone to work drunk. Of course, she ended up being fired.

That had been a turning point. Even in high school, I’d worked part-time. My grandmother hung on to her job as a secretary at the junior high for as long as she could. She could take shorthand and had designed their entire filing system. The problem was, those skills were no longer needed. After forty-five years of work, they looked at her as nothing but a dinosaur who couldn’t understand how to use a computer. They’d forced her into retirement only three months before my mom lost her job. Suddenly, working part-time wasn’t enough. I was the sole breadwinner in the family.

My mom had other jobs after that, but none of them ever lasted. The drinking became a daily thing. I was seventeen the first time she ended up in the hospital.

I’d thought maybe it was my fault.

I’d thought I could help her or change her.

Of course, I’d learned Al-Anon’s three Cs later: I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, I can’t cure it. Coddling, threatening, bargaining, begging. None of them worked.

Neither did anger or indifference. That was the part I struggled with.

She was still on the couch, crying quietly. I couldn’t control her, no.

But I could control me.

“Do you still have the stuff for chicken parmesan?”

She looked up at me, her eyes red and swollen. “Yes.”

“I need to write a paper, but I really am hungry.”

She smiled at me, and I tried to tell myself it was worth it. “I’ll call you down when it’s ready.”

Chapter Seventeen

For the next few weeks, Vince found ample reasons to drop by Little Italy, particularly Loomis Street.

He texted Trey a lot, but he found those brief messages unsatisfying.
I’m fine
, Trey would text back, but those cold, impersonal letters on the screen of his phone felt empty. There was no tone, no way to look into Trey’s eyes to judge the depth of the lie. Instead, Vince took to seeing for himself. He couldn’t bring himself to go to The Rose, but he developed a severe early-morning latte habit, taking the EL down to Full Moon before heading up to Northbrook. It meant he was getting up almost as early as Trey, but it was worth it to see him every morning, to make sure he was okay.

Trey wasn’t at the house all the time when Vince stopped by, either off studying or working, but that didn’t bother him. He liked to sit in the kitchen with Sophia, chatting about his family, letting her reminisce about old times, urging her to go visit Frank at his bar. Every now and again he got her to go too, promising to mind her dinner in the oven and doing little fix-it jobs around the house. After he de-clogged the upstairs sink drain, he messed with the leaky pipe under the kitchen basin and bought new guts for the first-floor toilet so it didn’t run all the damn time. The fluorescent light in the basement laundry was next, and the bulb in the fussy fixture over the stair landing.

When he fixed the front porch steps, though, Trey gave him hell. He’d gotten the job done before Trey came back from work, but there was no mistaking the fact that he’d gone out and bought new treads, which was apparently well over the line.

He’d bought new risers too, but Trey hadn’t noticed those, so he didn’t share that bit of information.

“You can’t do that,” Trey protested. “You can’t just show up and buy us new stairs. And don’t give me that eyebrow either.”

Vince hadn’t realized he’d been giving eyebrow. He carefully schooled his expression. “Why can’t I fix your stairs?”

“Because you can’t.”

“I did,” Vince pointed out.

Trey’s ears were red, from anger or embarrassment, Vince couldn’t tell. “It’s too much. You shouldn’t have done it.”

“I’m pretty sure they weren’t up to code, and I’ve seen Sophia almost trip on them twice. It’s not a big deal. I’ve installed more stairs than I have pipes.” He gave Trey a sideways grin. “Did a stint in construction for my other uncle.”

Trey didn’t stop frowning, but he seemed to give in all the same. “Well, you still shouldn’t have, but thank you. Don’t think I haven’t noticed everything else you’ve been doing around the house, either. And is it my imagination, or are you trying to set Gram up with Frank?”

“Yeah. Don’t know if it will take, but I figured why not, can’t hurt anything.”

He loved the way Trey softened and came closer to him. “Is this your way of trying to get into my pants?”

Vince couldn’t tell if Trey was teasing or not. He suspected it was a mix, but he answered with complete honesty. “No, it’s my way of taking care of you. Though I wouldn’t say no to your pants, either.”

Trey smiled and punched him lightly in the arm, but he caught Vince’s hand and led him back inside.

Those wicked websites had become a regular feature in Vince’s evenings, and he was starting to make a mental list of things he wanted to try. He’d found a chat room too, which had been all kinds of education, and actually, a hell of a lot of therapy. It turned out he wasn’t the only almost-forty-year-old who’d worked like hell to tell himself he was straight and ended up figuring his shit out in the fifth inning. The chat room was a safe place to ask embarrassing questions, like how, exactly, did he go about having gay sex, because he hadn’t missed the creative cuts in the porn he’d watched. He’d learned more about lube than he’d thought there was to know about the stuff. He’d bought some too, and the last couple of times he’d masturbated, he’d started experimenting with his own ass. It was weird at first. Back when he’d fooled around in college, anal play had equaled gay in his mind. As long as he stayed away from that, he could call himself straight. Of course he knew enough now to know that enjoying anal contact had nothing to do with being gay or straight. It only had to do with being able to relax enough to enjoy it.

It was something he was learning to do rather quickly. He’d even bought a small dildo online although he hadn’t found the nerve yet to use it. He wasn’t sure he could tell Trey about that.

He wanted to, though. He wanted to tell Trey everything.

He wanted Trey to use that dildo on him. He wanted Trey to do a lot of things to him.

Except he was still scared out of his mind.

Mindy was in the living room when they came inside, watching television and swaying lightly from side to side. One glance in her direction had all the tension back in Trey’s shoulders.

Vince put his hand on them, massaging gently. “What do you say we go upstairs and neck in your room like a couple of kids?” he whispered into Trey’s ear.

As he’d hoped, this made Trey smile and lead him up the stairs.

Once inside, though, Trey made no move to make out, only began to pace in agitation in the space between his desk and his closet, and Vince sat on the bed, ready to listen to the frustration he knew was about to pour out. He didn’t have to wait long.

“My mom’s an alcoholic.”

Just like that. No preamble. No sugarcoating it. Vince did his best to look unsurprised.

“She’s been drinking again. Not long ago she drank so much she almost died, and now she’s back at it. God. I just want to pound something.” Trey shoved a hand into his hair, messing it up, tightening his fingers inside the golden strands. Vince kept still, waiting, and Trey eventually went on. “I hate that you know.”

That one threw Vince. “Why? Did you think I was going to be a dick about it? Didn’t you think I’d want to help you?”

Trey’s cheeks colored as his rage simmered up to boiling. “I don’t
want
help. I don’t want to have to
need
help. I want to be normal. I won’t be, though, not until—” His face became a mask, and he turned away from Vince.

Normal. Vince wanted to laugh. Yeah, didn’t they all? And wasn’t he a dick, worried about what people thought about him dating a guy and looking up gay sex on the net—how that wasn’t normal. For Trey that was fine. He only wanted to have a mom who wasn’t on the bottle.

“Has she tried AA? Or—”

“God, yes. Of course, although not for years. I did it too, for awhile. Al-Anon, you know. The part for families? But it just pissed me off more. Here she was, sitting at home getting wasted, and I was the one trying to work meetings into my schedule, memorizing the twelve steps and reciting the serenity prayer and trying to accept that there’s a fucking ‘higher power’.” He laughed bitterly. “What they don’t tell you is that God has nothing to do with it. Alcohol is their ‘higher power’.”

“Honey, I’m so sorry.”

“What I hate most,” Trey went on as if Vince hadn’t spoken, gripping his desk chair and staring out the window as he spoke, “is how she uses it as her excuse. I know she was upset when my dad died. I know it was hard as hell on her. I found out a few years ago she was on pills even before that, but Dad getting shot only made things worse. She went from a little bit depressed to complete basket case. They gave her Valium like it was candy. The year I was born they came out with Prozac, but her doctor was old school and didn’t like it. They finally got her onto it when I was in middle school, but it was too late, I think. She was popping pills constantly. And drinking. And by then she was so agoraphobic she couldn’t go anywhere unless she was drunk or high. Not even the grocery store or the mall.”

Jesus. “You mean she got drunk, hopped on the EL and got her groceries?”

Trey’s laugh was so brittle it nearly broke in half. “Are you kidding? She drove. If we had a car, she’d still drive, but we sold that years ago. This was after she’d been fired the last time, and Gram had told her she had to start helping around the house—getting groceries and running errands. So Mom would wait for me to come home from school, and then she’d drive us to the liquor store. She’d down three cans in the parking lot so we could go buy stuff for dinner or get me the new sweats I needed for gym class. The crazy thing is, I didn’t realize then how fucked up that was. I only knew I was embarrassed about being at the mall with my mom stumbling up and down through the shops. And then I’d feel guilty for—”