Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (23 page)

“If you don’t like them, just say so,” he says. “They don’t send themselves, you know. I sure as hell don’t have to.”

I tell him I am aware of that. As it happens, we gave them away to our friends Steve and Julie, who just had a baby. Jenae hated those damned burgers. Frozen hamburgers stamped out in the vague shape of Texas is not something I need to find in my mailbox.

He turns to my mom with a bit of a cocky head-shake.

“How could anybody not feel like prime rib?” he says, though he himself didn’t order it.

My mom doesn’t answer. I don’t say anything.

He sighs.

“Tonya doesn’t like prime rib either,” he says. “I guess you and Tonya have a lot more in common than you might like, Patti.”

I am not a fighting man. Like most scrawny teenagers who grew up in the eighties watching Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Chuck Norris movies, I had a fleeting love affair with karate. Despite the rhetoric of inner peace, balance, and discipline that they sell to parents, all I ever got out of it were savage ass-kickings by lonely adults with acne scars and too much time between their shifts at Domino’s. That, and a few promising but impractical seven-second death holds. My karate experiences explain a lot about my martial style. I either go down like a little pansy or punch you in the larynx. Guys I knew in school and around the neighborhood were always getting into fights for fun. They would bloody each other up and then walk over to the Dairy Queen together for Peanut Buster Parfaits as though nothing had happened.

“Excuse me?” my mom says.

Here we are, my mom and I, on vacation ostensibly to get away from Grandpa and all his bullshit, and he foists himself on us because his fair beloved decides she’d rather spend her weekend with someone she’s already divorced from. And now, because Grandpa’s all messed up with whatever it is he’s going through, he decides to take it out on us, as though we’re the ones being unreasonable.

“What the hell kind of a thing is that to say?” I ask. My speech is measured and precise. I have rarely blown up in real anger, never mind actually punched somebody in the throat, and I don’t know that I’m looking forward to it.

“Well, I just think that your mom and Tonya have more in common than you realize.”

“For Pete’s sake, Dad,” my mom says. The waitress drops off some bread and a bowl with butter that has been balled with an ice cream scoop. I throw back the rest of my Scotch and motion for another.

“You both like that new Alan Jackson album,” he says, smiling. “And then you both like cheap vodka. And Vegas—you both like Las Vegas. And me, right?” He’s smirking, but he chokes back a sob. “You both love me, right?”

“Oh, for the love of God, Dad,” my mom says. She digs into her purse, pulls out a Kleenex, and tucks in it Grandpa’s hand. “What is the
matter
with you?”

“I’m leaving,” he says. He gets up unsteadily from the table and fishes around in his pocket for his keys, thinking, apparently, that he drove. “Where the hell are they?” he says. “Did you take my keys?”

“What are you talking about?” I say. “We didn’t take your car. You didn’t drive. And you can’t drive. You’re in no condition to drive.”

“What the hell do you know?” he says. “I’ll do whatever I damned well please.” He staggers backward, braces himself against his chair, turns around, and heads for the bar.

Just to make sure, I check my pocket. I have the keys. For a second I wonder what would happen if I let him have them. Would he solve the problem that he has become?

“In a million years,” Mom says, “I never would have thought it would come to this.”

She stands up, tosses her napkin aloft, and goes to fetch her father. The napkin catches the air momentarily, like a little parachute. Or a flag of surrender.

The waitress returns with my Scotch. “Everything all right?” she says.

“Dandy,” I say. “Just keep ’em coming.”

After a few minutes, Mom returns with Grandpa. She has her arm around his hunched shoulders, looking like a Red Cross volunteer delivering aid to the victim of a natural disaster, not a daughter returning her father to a table at a nice restaurant in a popular vacation destination. All they’re missing is the scratchy gray wool blanket and a little white nurse’s cap for mom.

I am grateful we didn’t bother ordering appetizers. Our waitress brings our steaks out on a tray. She sets it down next to our table and stands back, trying to determine if she can safely negotiate our theatrics, but we’re drained for the time being, so she tucks our plates in front of us and scoots away.

“I just love her too damned much,” he says and has been saying. He’s trying to cut his steak, but with his poor eyesight and the low light he can’t tell he’s using the wrong side of his knife. “Too goddamned much,” he says.

My mom takes his plate from him, cuts up his steak in little cubes, and puts it back in front of him.

“I am so thankful that Gram is not around to see this,” she says to no one in particular.

No one can find any of our three room keys. After all we’ve had to drink, we’re lucky we got back to the hotel at all, but getting there and not being able to get in is no relief whatsoever.

“You don’t have the key, Patti?”

My grandpa is thoroughly confused, lost.

“
No,
Dad,” my mom says. “
Nobody
has the
key.
”

Everything we say tonight is addled with italics.

“I thought you had the key,” he says. “I had mine a minute ago. Didn’t we just do this? Weren’t we just here?”

We’re standing outside the hotel, it’s about eleven o’clock at night, and it’s dark and colder than you might expect in May. There are a couple more cars in the parking lot, but it still looks as if we’re more or less alone in this place.

I walk to the main door, but it’s locked again and my cell phone is in the room.

Surprisingly, I am not nearly as drunk as I want to be. I need a cigarette and some time to myself, at, say, a Franciscan monastery, but instead I am trapped outside our hotel room with my mom and grandfather, facing the prospect of sleeping in the Hyundai with them.

Then I remember the patio. Before we went out to dinner, we left the sliding door open to air the place out.

“I’ll be right back,” I say.

I jog around the dark end of the hotel, toward the eighteenth green. Cherry Hills is built into the hillside, making the parking lot and the entrance on the second floor, so out back I’m a story below our rooms. The only light in all of Door County is coming from our windows.

I jump up on the railing of the first-floor room and find that I am a couple of inches too short to reach the bottom of our porch. I prop myself against the beam and figure it’s either jump and hold on like hell or sleep in the car and bicker all night long.

I jump.

Fortunately, I’ve been rock climbing enough in Utah (much as everyone in Utah is a Mormon by osmosis, so too are we all climbers and backcountry skiers). I’m not much of a lead climber, but I really hate falling, so I’m pretty good at hanging on. The metal of the rail is cold, and I can feel it flex a little too much under the strain of my weight. I realize only as I bounce with the inertia from my jump that this is not what these decorative metal railings are made for. After having done all the work on the house, I also realize—a bit too late—that these rails are probably installed with inch-and-a-half screws into wood that has been exposed to the elements for years. In other words, there’s a good chance that I’ll rip the whole railing off the porch and end up wearing it on my face, like a grotesquely oversize set of braces.

But I don’t. I commit to my little operation and swing my feet up, get them under me, and stand up on our porch. I turn around before I go inside and watch the late-spring clouds sliding darkly across the sky like a network of scenery screens changing between the acts of a play. They move steadily and quickly, one in front of the other, and the dim new moon appears to be amid them and not where it really is—far, far away.

I go inside, grab the key, and retrieve what’s left of our family.

We sit watching Letterman at a volume that makes my teeth ache. We want to talk. We want to say things. We want to have things to say, but we don’t.

“I hope they’re having more fun than I am,” Grandpa says during a commercial for a new antacid.

I do not ask what he means. I know. He has only one subject left. It’s Tonya. Tonya and Tim. Tonya and Daphne. Tonya and her children. Tonya and her grandchildren. Tonya and her Mitsubishi. Tonya and her Harley-Davidson dreams. Tonya and her Jägermeister shooters. Tonya and her Alan Jackson. Tonya and her morals.

He starts crying again. His sobs shake his body, and only the ice jingles sympathetically in his glass. He gets up and leaves the room. He does not use the adjoining door.

I know for a fact that he doesn’t have a key. I let him leave.

My mom has fallen asleep and doesn’t stir even when the door slams behind Grandpa. She’s slumped in a side chair with a low back, and her head is tilted at such an unnatural angle that she appears to have fractured her spine.

Finally. I can go out to smoke. I pick up my phone, grab the almost empty bottle of Scotch and my rolling tobacco, and slide out the same way my grandfather left. He’s nowhere in sight and I really don’t care. I feel toxic and evil and over it all.

“Wish you were here,” I say on the phone to Jenae. “The weather’s beautiful.”

She knows it’s not funny. She knows it has to be
bad.

“Get good mileage?” she says.

For the first time since I arrived, I laugh.

I roll a cigarette, an affectation for which I have little use tonight. My hands are shaking, I’m so tense and agitated. The tobacco keeps spilling off the paper, disappearing into the gravel of the parking lot.

I imagine her, back in Salt Lake, curled up on our overstuffed red couch—the one we got from Grandpa when he moved out of his condo. We don’t particularly care for it; Tonya and Grandpa picked it out together because Gram was too sick to shop for a couch to make her more comfortable.

I light the cigarette, inhale, and almost fall over from the rush. Every cell in my body at once deflates and then puffs back up in a wave of chemical adjustment. It is not, nor does it feel, healthy.

Jenae asks me where I am. She sounds concerned. I imagine she should be.

“I’m sitting in the parking lot with my cigarettes and not nearly enough booze to get me through this night.”

I know it sounds ugly. It was. If only there were spent shell casings, dirty needles, and ransom notes to tell about too.

“Oh, honey,” Jenae says. She means it. This is what she is best at. The kind of comfort that keeps me alive.

But she’s too far away to do anything about where I am for more than the time being, and I want to cry, to scream, to get ripping drunk. I want to fight. I want to kick and punch and bite and claw my way through to something that will pass for the truth. I want to find the truth and head-butt it in the nose, sending bits of its broken nasal bone back into its brain like bright streaking meteors irreparably penetrating all that mushy gray matter once and for all. I want to hit my grandfather between the eyes and tell him he is a fucking moron and he’s destroying what little remains of our family. I want
damage.

“Please don’t go anywhere tonight,” Jenae says. “You don’t sound well.”

I finish off the rest of the Dewar’s in a swallow, take the bottle by the neck, and rear back to chuck it over the hotel.

But I don’t throw it. Despite my rage, I’m too worried about the prospect of somebody being there—somebody who happens to be practicing his putting at midnight or walking his little Jack Russell on the golf course, looking for lost balls. And then there’s the whole prospect of the bottle breaking and then there would be this broken glass all over the eighteenth green and somebody would have to pick it up and it would be a pain in the ass and they would hate themselves and their boss and their job and their lives because that is what it all comes down to: some sorry kid from Waukesha can’t get his shit together and so he’s got to make life onerous for everybody else.

I set the empty bottle down on the pavement and start crying. It does not feel like relief.

“Oh, baby,” Jenae says. “Baby.”

After a few more cigarettes I go back inside. Grandpa is moving away from his door, back toward the deserted reception area. He’s shuffling his feet, barely picking them up, and it makes me feel violent all over again.

“What are you doing?” I say. It’s not as mean as I want it to be.

He looks up, sees nothing but darkness ahead of him, then realizes that it’s me and that I am behind him. He turns around. It’s very metaphoric.

“My key,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “You don’t have one. Where the hell have you been this whole time?”

His shirt is untucked and there is either water or spit dribbled down the front.

“I,” he says. “I . . .”

“Hush,” I say and take him to his room.

Everyone is in bed, but I cannot bear to close my eyes or otherwise finesse my way to sleep. It is 1:47
A.M.
and then it is 1:53
A.M.
and all I can do is count my blinks. I do not want to watch TV. I do not want to read. I am not drunk, but neither am I sober. I want nothing. I want a void. I contemplate giving myself what I would hope to be a partial lobotomy with a Ticonderoga number 2 pencil. It is 2:28. It is 2:36. I want safe passage to morning, but it is apparently too late to buy a ticket. It is 2:48. It is 2:48. It is 2:48.

I manage to stay in bed until just before five. I cannot think of the last time I woke up this early. Not by
hours.
But nothing could lull me into sleep this night. There is stillness in Grandpa’s room. My mom is silent in her chair. She has not moved all night. I forget: this is different only in venue from her usual tedium with Grandpa. This is her life.

I am such a dick.

I put on shorts and a T-shirt, grab a key, and leave. The sound of the door closing behind me is sweet as a first kiss.