Second Chances (11 page)

So much for diplomacy.

The chairs were neatly folded along the wall and the main
room was empty. Quiet and peaceful, he realized. The room was welcoming and
calming. It was unassuming and comforting without being ostentatious.  
His brother had put a hell of a lot of work into the decorum of this place to
make people feel at home as soon as they came in.

Richard felt like an ass.  His brother hadn’t come to
him for money. He’d come to him for approval. For three years he ran this
clinic alone and Richard never once came to visit it.  A standing invitation
and not once did he find the time to come see what his brother had put his
life’s work into.

When Richard finally 
did
 come to see the
place, all he could do was accuse his brother of being selfish.

Maybe he could try to make amends later. Help him get a job.
His little brother did have a lot of skills and a lot to offer, he’d just
invested his life in a career that was hard to succeed in.

The government was perpetually looking to trim the fat from
their budgets, and the programs it chose were inevitably the ones with the
least support from millionaires. 

Keep the oil subsidies. Keep farm bill for big corporations
and tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy. Drop the AA clinics and mental
institutions from the cities where poor people lived.

Who knows, maybe Richard could—

There was a quiet knocking sound, and it took Richard a
moment to realize it was coming from the front door. He checked his watch and
saw that it was nearing ten o’clock. Who would be here this late, now that
everything was over with? 

He went over to the door. It wasn’t locked, but he gently
pulled it open.  Ben, the rail thin kid from earlier, was standing there.
From the looks of things, he had probably been crying.

“It wasn’t locked,” Richard said.

The kid looked startled.  “Oh, I’m…uh…sorry. I was
looking for Jason. The guy who runs the clinic.”

“He’s in the back.”

“Oh. Okay I guess I could come back…”

“Are you okay?” Richard asked.

The kid hesitated, as if unsure how to answer the question.
Finally, he shook his head.  “I don’t know.”

“It’s Ben, right?  Look, Ben, what are you doing here?
The clinic is closed and everyone left.”

“I, uh…uh…I uh…” the kid said, looking around nervously and
fidgeting.

“Spit it out.”

The kid glanced up the street one last time and then pulled
his jacket aside. The head of a bottle of whiskey stuck out of his pocket.

“Oh, Christ,” Richard said. 

As if that was a trigger, the kid burst out sobbing. 
Richard stepped out of the way and gestured for him to come in.  After a
second Ben stumbled inside, still sobbing, and Richard closed the door behind
him.

“What’s going on?” Jason asked, appearing from the back
hallway.  “Ben? Are you okay?”

Ben opened the coat again, showing the bottle. Jason hurried
over and took it from inside the kid’s coat. Ben didn’t object, just stood as
still as a statue like the bottle was about to bite him. 

“You didn’t drink any, did you?”

Ben shook his head.  “It isn’t opened.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I stole it,” Ben said.  “Shop up the road.”

“You stole it?” Richard asked incredulously.  “Do they
have cameras?”

“Why did you take it, Ben?” Jason asked, ignoring Richard.
 

“I planned to drink it,” Ben said, another tear slipping
down his cheek.  “I wanted to so badly and it seemed like a good idea.
Man, I’m not like you.  I can’t just turn it off.”

“We should call the police,” Richard said. 

Jason continued ignoring him. “But you didn’t drink any,”
Jason said. “You came here instead. Because you want to talk, right?”

“I’m calling the police,” Richard said, pulling his phone
out.

“No,” Jason said, grabbing Richard’s hand.

There was something in his tone that gave Richard pause. An
unquestioning iron he wasn’t used to hearing in his little brother’s
voice.  Jason wasn’t asking his opinion, he was simply telling him how it
was going to be. 

“No, I know the shop he’s talking about.  The guy who
owns it is a friend, and this isn’t the first time something like this has
happened.”

“I’m not getting charged with aiding and abetting,” Richard
said, but he did turn the phone off and put it back in his pocket.

“No one is getting charged with anything,” Jason said. 
“I’ll talk to the guy and return the bottle.”

He turned back to Ben.  “And then we will talk?” Jason
asked.  His tone made it clear that there was only one acceptable answer.

Ben nodded.  

“Keep him here,” Jason said to Richard, “and I’ll be back in
a bit.”

Then Jason grabbed his coat and disappeared outside,
shutting the door behind him.  Richard and Ben stood in awkward silence,
staring at each other. The kid wasn’t sobbing anymore, but his eyes were red
from the recent episode.  He looked small, frail, and young.  He
couldn’t be more than twenty-seven.

It looked like Richard wasn’t going to get home as soon as
he would have liked.

“Do you want to…have a seat?” Richard asked.  

The kid didn’t reply, but he didn’t object either. Richard
grabbed a pair of chairs from the wall and unfolded them beside the tables. He
sat in one, and after a moment the kid sat in the other.  “So, Ben,
right?”

No reply.

“Where are you from, Ben?”

Still nothing. Ben stared at his shoes and pretended like he
couldn’t hear. Richard shrugged and leaned back in his chair, wondering how
long Jason would take to drop off the bottle and get back. He hadn’t seen any
liquor shops up the way so it might be a little bit of a drive.  

He also doubted the place didn’t have a camera. Any
self-respecting liquor shop would have a few of them in key locations. If the
guy running the shop didn’t already know there was a bottle missing there was a
good chance he would notice before too long.

Then again, the kid might have been slick enough to get out
without alerting anyone. It was hard to say, but he was still glad Jason was
bringing it back. As long as cops weren’t involved it shouldn’t be too big of a
deal.

“I’m not really from anywhere,” Ben said suddenly, breaking
the silence.  Ben was still staring down at his shoes, seemingly talking
to himself.  “I don’t have anywhere to go, either.  I’m just sort of
here
.”

“Are you homeless?”

Ben looked up sharply. “What?”

“I don’t mean anything by it. You just have that look about
you.” 

“This is stupid,” Ben replied.  “I don’t know why I
came here. You guys can’t help me.”

He stood and started walking toward the exit.  “The
second you go out that door,” Richard said, “I’m calling the police and letting
them know you robbed a liquor store.”

“Man, you wouldn’t do that.”

“The hell I wouldn’t,” Richard said. He held up his phone
for emphasis and then slid it back into his pocket.  “You’re stuck here
until Jason gets back at the very least. So you might as well sit back down and
try to relax.”

Ben seemed to think it over for a second, and then with a
loud sigh he collapsed back into the chair. “This is stupid.”

“I’m not disagreeing. You want something to drink?”

“That a joke?”

“I meant water,” Richard said.  “Or coffee.”

“No, I don’t want any damn coffee.”

Richard poured himself a cup and took a sip. Still bitter,
but at least it would keep him awake.

“You sure? It could be a while and it’s still warm.”

“I said I don’t want any,” the kid said, folding his arms
like a petulant child. Richard poured him a cup anyway and set it on the table
next to him.

Ben just stared at him, arms folded and an annoyed look on
his face.

“This is stupid. I’m going to go.”

“I’ll call the cops.”

“Then do it. What the hell does it matter anyway?”

“Listen, kid,” Richard said, leaning forward.  “I’ve been
having one hell of a bad day, so you do not want to test my patience.  I’m a
lawyer, and if you make me call the cops on you I’m going to make it my purpose
in life to keep you in jail as long as I can.”

“What’s it matter to you?”

“It matters to me because my brother told you to stay put.
You aren’t going anywhere until Jason is back.”

“Fine,” Ben said, looking away.

“Why did you start coming to the clinic?”

“What?”

“A month ago. You just started showing up, out of the blue,
and yet you never talk during the meetings.  What changed a month ago?”

Ben eyed him. “Leave me alone.”

“I know kids like you,” Richard said.  “I did a stint
as a public defender when I started out in law, and I know the good ones and
the bad ones.  You aren’t one of the bad ones.  Dumb, maybe, but not
bad.  You wouldn’t have started coming to the clinic if something in your
life didn’t change. So what changed?”

“Man, drop it.”

“Did you start pissing blood?  Get into a fight?”

“I said leave it alone.”

“Rob a church? Beat up a schoolteacher?”

“I got a girl pregnant,” Ben said.  

He blurted it out, the words hanging in the air. They were
both silent for a minute.

“Happy? Now you know my story.  I got a girl pregnant.”

“A month ago?”

“No. Not now, I mean a few months ago and…look I don’t have
to tell you anything.”

“No, you don’t,” Richard said. “And quite frankly I could
care less, but I don’t get to go home until you explain why you’re here after
hours, so stop being a little jackass and tell me what happened to get you here. 
So you got a girl pregnant and she told you about it a month ago? That’s why
you started showing up?”

Ben sighed and shook his head.  “She didn’t actually
tell me…look, man, it’s complicated.”

“It usually is.”

Ben looked back at the floor. “I’m not good for a kid. I’m
no good for anyone. I don’t have a job. Or a house.  I can’t offer this
kid anything and I won’t be a good father.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look at me!” Ben said, holding out his arms for emphasis. 
“I’m wearing dirty clothes, I live on the street or in shelters, and I don’t
have a penny to my name.”

“That doesn’t make you worthless.”

“Yes it does,” the kid said.  “Makes me completely
worthless.”

“What the hell happened to put you on the street?”

“You want to know what happened? Fine.”

“Let’s wait for—”

Ben ignored him: “When I was a kid my Dad used to beat
me.  Not that often, just once in a while. Maybe twice a week. It’s the
only thing I remember about him from when I was little.  But, he didn’t just
beat me. He beat my Mom, too. I remember this one time, he came home
falling-down drunk and told me I was a little shit.  A good for nothing little
shit.

“My Mom told him to leave me alone. To back off because I
didn’t deserve to get hit. Hit her instead.  I think that’s the part that got
to me, the fact that she told him to hit her, just so he wouldn’t hit me. She
was always trying to protect me, but the asshole just didn’t care.

“It never worked, of course. He would end up hitting us
both, and then tell her not to try and control him. And she didn’t. That was
the thing. She loved him. Or at least she loved whatever version of him she imagined
him being. 

“After a while I think she just lost touch with reality. She
had lied to herself so long that she couldn’t even keep it all straight
anymore. It doesn’t really matter, because she never stood up to him.  He
would hit me, and she would watch, and then she would tell me it wasn’t my
fault, it’s just how he was.

“When I turned nine he just left.  Disappeared and
didn’t say a word.  Not even a goodbye.  I asked my Mom where he went
and she just said she didn’t know. She loved him and missed him and just didn’t
know where he went.

“Except that wasn’t the answer I was looking for. I was just
a kid, but I still wanted my Mom to be honest with me.  Did she throw him
out? Did he not love us anymore?”

Richard leaned back in his chair as Ben spoke. The kid
became more and more animated as he got into the story, barely noticing that
Richard was sitting there at all.

“Not that it really mattered to me, you know? But my sister
Lydia, she loved him. She was younger than me and Daddies little angel, so she
took it harder than I did when he left. She would beg and plead to know where
he went. 

“Mom wouldn’t even talk about him, just pretended like he
never existed, and we were supposed to pretend the same. I hate when parents do
that. I hate it.  We might have been little kids, but that doesn’t mean
‘because I said so’ is a good enough answer, you know? 

“Like I said,
I
didn’t care. All I remembered about
him was hitting me and hitting my Mom, so I didn’t really give a shit if he was
dead in a ditch or not. Probably found someone to take my Mom’s place and
never looked back.

“For Lydia it was harder.  She kept a lot bottled up
inside. You know, not talking much. She was a quiet girl and kept to
herself.  And she was smart.  Book smart from reading all the time,
but she was also a scared little girl who missed her Dad a lot.

“I never really realized just how bad it was before…” Ben
hesitated and cleared his throat. “She would come to me all the time and tell
me Dad was going to come home. ‘Dad’s coming back,’ she would say to me. ‘He
will come back, you’ll see.’

“I’d ask her how she could possible know, because we never
heard from him or about him. He was just gone.

“’But he will,’ she would say. And she believed it. ‘You’ll
see. He’ll come back and we can be a family again.’

“I never had the heart to tell her that it wouldn’t
happen.  I didn’t even have the heart to tell her how he’d hit me when I
was little. She was too young to remember. All I knew was that I didn’t want
that lying pathetic man back in my life. 

“I would just agree with her, and she would tell me that it
would go back to normal; that Dad would protect us and take care of us and
things would be good.  Things would be great.”

Ben fell silent for a minute, lost in his memories. Richard
listened to the kid speak, a flash of déjà vu hitting him. “But they weren’t,
were they?” Richard prompted, trying to keep the kid from brooding too much. 

“No,” Ben said.  “Not at all. Our Mom drank. A lot.  It
didn’t really start until I turned fourteen but all I really remember was her
being drunk. We would come home from school and she would be trashed. We would
go to bed, and she would have a bottle in her hand.  It was no wonder
Lydia idealized her Dad. She had to think at least one of her parents wasn’t
useless. 

“Mom was usually lying on the couch. She would get her
welfare checks and use it on alcohol, then get food stamps and trade them for
money for more booze. The only time she talked to us was when she was telling
us to get her things. Another beer. A towel. Something to eat.

“If we said no she would scream at us and call us
‘ungrateful little brats’. The only food we got was from school.

“I remember coming home one night after a school party,” Ben
continued, eyes on the floor and absorbed in the memory.  He chuckled. “I saw her
passed out on the couch. It was almost Christmas and she was wearing a skimpy
outfit. Something slutty, like a slutty angel or something. She’d gone to a bar
drinking and staggered home drunk.  

“Anyway, she kind of woke up when I came into the room and
told me to get her something.  I couldn’t tell what she was saying, she slurred
so much. I told her so, and she got pissed at me and tried to stand up.  She
staggered to the side and fell into a table, collapsing it and passing out. 
When she woke up the next morning, she didn’t remember it happening.”

“Did she ask about it?”

Ben shook his head.  “No, she never brought it up.  She said
she didn’t remember, but I think she knew. I think she was just too embarrassed
to admit it.”

Richard leaned back in his chair.  “Sounds harsh.”

“It was crazy, when I look back at it.  That Christmas Lydia
had just turned eight. She’d cut herself trying to make ornaments in the living
room, and Mom was drunk.

“I asked her why the hell she was trying to make ornaments. 
We didn’t even have a Christmas tree. But Lydia didn’t care. Her teacher showed
the class how to cut them out of paper, and she wanted to make some. She just
wanted to do something to pretend like it was a happy Christmas. Like it was a
real holiday and we were a real family. 

“I tried waking Mom up because the cut was really deep, but Mom
didn’t even budge. We ended up using super glue and tissues to close the wound. 
Lydia ended up having to have surgery on her hand later, which my Mom was
pissed at us for. She said it was Lydia’s fault for being stupid enough to get
herself cut, and she deserved it.”

Ben paused here and looked up at Richard.  

“How the hell are you supposed to make friends when your mom
is a drunk and your Dad left?  We were outcasts, shunned by everyone we met. 
I didn’t have any friends, and I didn’t really want any either. I was just fine
being alone, and if those assholes didn’t want to hang out with me that was
just fine.

“Everyone knew about our Mom, and some even called her a
‘whore’ at school. To our faces.  It hurt, because I still loved her.
Because she was still my Mom.  But Lydia…she just didn’t know what to do.

“I was sixteen when I started drinking. It only made sense,
when you really think about it. I’m not sure if I did it for attention or
because it was the only thing we had around the house.

“Mom never said a word. Maybe it validated her own
addiction.  I don’t know. 

“All I know is I started drinking, and I drank a lot. I
was good at it. I guess because it ran in the family. I dropped out of school
my senior year because I just didn’t care anymore.  What was there to care
about, at that point? I was failing most of my classes and skipping every other
day.”

Ben paused, rubbing a hand across his mouth.

“Ever drink?” he asked Richard.

“Occasionally,” Richard said.

“What’s your drink of choice?”

“Tequila,” Richard said.  “Top shelf.”

“Not me,” Ben replied.  “Whiskey all the way.  Scotch is my
favorite when I can get my hands on it.”

“Scotch is good,” Richard said.  “But a little too harsh for
me.  If I drink whiskey, it has to be smooth.”

“I can see that.”

“So you dropped out?” Richard said.  “That isn’t so bad. A
lot of people don’t finish high school.”

“Dropping out? No way, that was nothing.  Didn’t bother me
then, and still doesn’t bother me now. I was never that smart.

“Lydia was the smart one. She had a lot of talent,” Ben
continued, eyes falling back to the floor. “I suppose I can’t really say that.
Everyone always says that about family. Most of the time I assume people are
full of crap when they say stuff like that.  Everyone thinks that people
in their family are really smart, and truth is most of them aren’t.”

Richard nodded. “Fifty percent of all people are below
average.”

Ben shrugged. “Sure. All I know is Lydia was smarter than
me, and since she didn’t have a lot of friends she spent a lot of time studying.
She stopped talking about Dad and grew up from my little sister into a teenager. 
We knew she would go to college and be successful.  She had to, because
what else was there?

“When she got a scholarship for a full ride we were
elated.  Mom was thrilled. I was ecstatic. It was a small local college,
but when you think of how hard that is from our background, it meant the
world. 

“I remember she got the letter and she came running up to me
and gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek and she said ‘I did it, I did
it.’

“I was so proud of her, because it meant the world that she
was going to college.  She had so much to overcome, and she did.”

Ben hesitated, still staring at the floor.  Richard
thought to stop him but was afraid to interrupt.

“Her first year went fine.  The second one too. She was
on the Dean’s list and everything.  Getting straight ‘A’s and really
getting her life together.

“Her junior year, though, everything went to shit. She was
there for three months. A shy little girl in a world that was a lot meaner than
she could really deal with. 

“You have to understand, before college, we rarely left the
house, okay?  We were afraid to go out and do things because of our Mom, so we
weren’t really exposed to it all. And here she was at college on a campus
surrounded by people she barely understood.

“She wanted to fit in so badly.  She wanted to be
accepted, and she wanted to be needed by people.  

“I would talk to her once a week on the phone and she would
tell me all about school. I liked being the big brother, having her open up to
me. I liked getting to intimidate all the guys who wanted to date her. She’d
never let them meet me, afraid of what I might do, but I liked that.  I liked
looking after her and protecting her, you know?”

“I know,” Richard said. “I have a little sister too.”

“Yeah, so you know.  Anyway, I liked being happy for her. It
made me happy just knowing that she was doing okay.  I was getting to
experience it all through her, because I sure as hell was never going to
college.

“I would tease her and make fun of her and tell her that if
she was actually 
studying
 than she was missing the entire
point of college. She was supposed to be having fun.  I would tell her
college was about having fun and exploring. Go out partying.”

Ben stopped talking here, rubbing his eyes and sniffling.
His voice was choked up now, and he laughed a little; a self-deprecating laugh.

“I told her that. I actually told her to go out and party. 
I said: ‘sis, you need to go to more parties. Live a little.’

“I 
actually
 said that. I still look
back on it, and part of me wonders if it was my fault. Like I’m partly to blame
for what happened to her.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Richard offered. 

Ben looked up sharply, as though surprised Richard was still
sitting there across from him.

“Of 
course
 it wasn’t my fault,” Ben said
angrily.  “It was never my fucking fault.  If I 
knew
 whose
fault it was his head would be smashed in with a crowbar and he’d be dead in a
ditch somewhere,” Ben said with a sudden burst of anger.  

The anger ebbed just as quickly as it came and Ben shook his
head.  “The school said they couldn’t release the identity of her rapist
but that things were being handled by the local police.

“They told me Lydia had named somebody for it, pointed the
finger, but given her ‘traumatic situation’ they couldn’t verify it. They
recommended she take some time off from school because of the incident, but it
was really so the guy could finish graduating before she came back. They didn’t
want to ruin his time at school by having his rape victim on campus with him. The
school didn’t want to risk the two bumping into each other.