When Ryan showed up just before four, he caught his mother glancing at the clock. “I talked, Mom,” he said, “and then I met my sponsor and talked some more. I drank iced tea.” Ryan felt her watching him move for signs of trouble, listening for a hint of slurring. “Tomorrow he’s driving me to Glendale. There’s a place for me to stay.”
“A halfway house?”
“It’s temporary. It’s part of the rehab. My sponsor goes to his meetings there, so it’s all good. They’ve given me leads on jobs. One is even a tech job. Once I’m at work again, I’m back in my own place.”
“There’s always room for a techie like you.”
“Let’s hope that room’s close by. There’s riding the bus until I get my license back.”
“You’ll be great at an interview. They’ll see you have a good heart.”
“Whatever it is will be like starting over, Mom. It will be what I did fresh out of school.”
“They’ll be lucky to have somebody like you. You’ll be doing somebody a favor,” she said, but she glanced where the fingers of his right hand had been drumming the kitchen table. “This is your bad time, right? This is when you want to start in on the beer?”
Ryan pulled his hand back and crossed his legs to show her he was relaxed. “Sometimes earlier, Mom.”
“Your father drank nothing but the hard stuff with ice. Vodka by the quart. I always thought you were ok because you only did beer.”
“All the beer, Mom. The whole case or when I passed out, whichever came first. On my good nights, just a six-pack so I could sleep.”
“I hope you didn’t say awful things to anybody. Your father always had a mouth on him. He said ‘c-u-n-t’ all the time. I hate that word. It should be one you can’t say aloud. It should be an N-word.”
“I think it is, Mom. People call it the C-word.”
“Not in my house, they didn’t.”
“Did he say it the night you called the police?”
“No, but I could hear him thinking it.”
“I remember he just left and then didn’t come back. Like he’d surrendered.”
“He was gone for good because he was a coward,” she said. “I’m sorry you remember that. I wish I’d done it when you were half that age. If you had been four years old maybe you’d have forgotten all of it.” She paused. “I always worried about how your marriage would work out, and then I ended up worried you’d never marry.”
“I wore out my welcomes, Mom. Those women all had time to see behind the curtain.”
“Don’t you be putting yourself back there with somebody who’s all mouth like your father. He’s still strumming his cheap guitar and singing his mopey songs to the wind somewhere. I keep hearing him telling me how great we had it, how we’d only just begun. He’d sing it even, like we were the goddamned Carpenters.”
“There had to be something, Mom.”
“Oh, there was. He was so charming and handsome. It made him a wonderful waiter. It was the perfect job for him.”
“Waiting tables is a performance,” Ryan said.
“Yes, it is, and look at me, I was mesmerized. You know the way you feel when you’re watching a good magician? You know what he’s doing is impossible, and yet in the moment you believe it’s happening.”
“Don’t punish yourself, Mom.”
“I felt like I was in church sometimes. Where they make you feel awful about yourself, and then they ask you to sing about happiness like you mean it.”
“I remember going there for real.”
“Your father dragged us a few times when you were little. He thought it made up for his foolishness, but he was all lip synch when he got there.”
“Performing?”
She stared at Ryan as if she was trying to fix him in place. Memorizing. “Like he was serving us something,” she said. “Like he expected a tip for being normal.”
