The Rich Part of Life
Page 39
“A. Lot. Of. Exes,” I said, and shut the light off.
Returning to the room, I found an appropriate space at the foot of the bed and lined my feet up for my free throws. I did this sometimes. Sometimes this helped. (Note: in my prime, high school, when I could run a five-minute mile, party half the night and still make it through a three-hour practice, then come home and play two hours more in the driveway, I was an excellent free-throw shooter. I couldn’t play defense much, couldn’t jump, had trouble fighting through picks, but I could shoot, as my teammates used to say, and as my still high-school record of forty-three straight free throws could attest, “like a motherfucker.” I attributed this less to form and ability—though both were pretty good—than to an otherworldly focus that allowed me to shut out the noise, my thoughts, my past, present, and future, the universe, when I stood at that line. My coach at Marist High, Coach Leahy, amazed and confused by my one-trick-pony act, once asked what I thought about when I shot, and I gave him a pure and truthful answer: nothing.)
So I squared my shoulders, aligned my feet, bounced the imaginary ball exactly three times, stared at the imaginary basket hanging over the door of the bathroom, and waited for my mind to empty, the nothingness to come. I then shot, and when I did, I saw the arc of the ball, saw it rotate, saw it sail through the air, saw the bottom of the net sweetly flick as if an angel had just breathed on it.
I made ten straight, and while this helped muffle the drumbeats in my head, I was still too wired for sleep, so I searched for other diversions. Other than my bourbon, I had brought only two with me: a CD—Exile on Main St., by the Rolling Stones—and a book, a dog-eared paperback, Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon. I couldn’t envision a circumstance that would allow me to play the CD, since Ethan hated all music except for Christmas carols, which we listened to to the brink of madness year-round, but the book, I thought, would be a good companion. I pulled it out and slid into bed next to my man.
Blue Highways is a memoir of a middle-aged man’s solitary and somewhat desperate trip through the back roads of America. Over the course of his journey, he stops in offbeat towns and meets offbeat people while searching for internal change after a failed marriage. I had read it a number of times, and it fueled a desire in me to do the same thing: to travel, to see, to listen, to write, to rebuild.
For more than nineteen years, my life with Ethan had kept me from taking such a trip, but now here I was, making the most of things and my Marriott points. I opened the book and, for a while, disappeared into faraway back roads.
I had one of my Ethan-is-talking-normal dreams that night. I had had these dreams often when he was younger, but over time they had grown rare. Occasionally, however, they still came upon me during times of inner turbulence, so it was no surprise that I would have one now.
Once again we were back at our home in Wilton, sitting on the deck, having breakfast. As always it was warm and sunny, but off in the distance I heard the first faint peals of thunder. When Ethan heard the thunder, he looked up from his bowl of cereal and spoke in the clear, sweet voice that existed only when I slept: “Where are we going, Dad? Where are we going?”
I woke immediately after hearing his voice, those words, that question, and lay still, pretending I was okay, convincing myself I was fine. But when I heard the sound of the Doubt and Guilt rounding the bend, picking up steam, I got up, made my way over to the foot of the bed, and searched for the free-throw line.
THE RICH PART OF LIFE. Copyright © 2001 by Jim Kokoris. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kokoris, Jim.
The rich part of life / Jim Kokoris.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-27479-3 (hc)
ISBN 0-312-30070-0 (pbk)
1. Lottery winners—Fiction. 2. Single parent families—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. History teachers—Fiction. 5. Boys—Fiction. I.Title.
PS3611.O58 R54 2001
813'.6—dc21
2001020253
D 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6