by Joe Clifford
“You don’t have to. I thought I could bundle him up, take him down to the Little People’s Playground, play in the snow a bit.”
“Fine,” she said again, “but I still don’t want him eating sugar.”
“Fine,” I said, mimicking her, prying the box from her hands and flipping open the top. “You eat them then.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Like I can eat a donut.”
I grabbed a plump, powdered jelly, moving toward her. “Open up. You’re looking pretty damn thin.”
Jenny flushed and started backing up, lips cracking a smile. She’d answered the door in an old Pink Floyd T-shirt of mine, sleep-tossed hair, those long legs showing underneath, so smooth and touchable, bare feet tiptoeing on linoleum. This was when she looked best in my opinion, first thing in the morning, all rumpled, no makeup, no fuss, just-rolled-out-of-bed, perfect.
“Come on, Jenny. One bite.” I cocked my arm.
She started batting at me. “Knock it off, Jay,” she said, trying to look stern, but giggling. “I mean it.”
I had her retreated in the corner, pretending I was going to force-feed a jelly donut like those obnoxious couples do with wedding cake. I was kidding, of course, but I got her laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. Which made me start to laugh too.
I dipped and darted like I planned to grab her waist and pull her in, but she jerked away and slapped my hand, then held a finger to her mouth and pointed at the bedroom door, which I took to mean that Brody was still asleep.
He’d walked in when we were on the phone last night when he should’ve been at work. Maybe he called in sick or was sleeping one off. Maybe he didn’t work second shift anymore. What the hell did I care?
Hearing us carrying on, Aiden came running out of the living room.
“Da da! Da da!”
With his shaggy brown hair and big brown eyes, he looked just like his mother. Jenny reprimanded him to be quiet. But I didn’t give a damn if we disrupted Brody’s sleep. I scooped him up and hoisted him high, gave him a big squeeze and then lifted his shirt for a belly fart. I didn’t need any baby book to tell me belly farts always made a kid laugh. It’s like Dad 101.
As soon as I set him down, Aiden grabbed my finger and dragged me into the living room, where his mother had him set up with breakfast—scrambled eggs and sausage cut into extra tiny pieces—which he’d slopped all over the carpet in front of the TV.
“Oh, sugar’s bad,” I teased her, “but TV’s okay?”
“You try watching him without a distraction once in a while.” She flashed a pained smirk. “Especially when Mommy drank too much last night.”
I slowly shook my head, feigning disappointment. “Since when do you drink so much you’re hungover?”
“When you don’t do it often, trust me, it doesn’t take much.”
Aiden yanked my hand to sit down and watch cartoons, which weren’t at all like the cartoons I remembered. I grew up with the classics. Tom and Jerry. Bugs Bunny. Popeye. Actual cartoons. These were done by a computer or something. Everything was computers these days. God, I hated the damn things. Not that my view on the subject mattered to Aiden; these were the only cartoons he’d ever known, and he was transfixed, fuzzy glow from the screen flickering over his tiny features, eyes entranced, lit up wide.
I turned back. Jenny hovered over us. She had a big smile on her face. I was lying there, cockeyed, unable to get up or even make myself more comfortable because my boy wanted me there like that, and anytime I tried to move, he’d start shouting, “Down down,” which made Jenny tell him to be quiet or he’d wake up Brody, which caused me to laugh, and Jenny said to stop because it was only encouraging him to be bratty, but she was laughing a little too.
“What the hell’s going on?” Brody asked, rubbing his eyes. He stood shirtless. Badly drawn tattoos adorned his shoulders and flanks. The long hair that he usually had tied off in a ponytail hung loose, framing his sharp, angular features, face coated in scruff. “I’m trying to sleep.” Then he saw me. “Oh, hey, Jay. Didn’t know you was here.” He said it nice as he could, considering we’d just woken him up.
Brody snagged his smokes off the table, but before he could light one, Jenny shot him a look. He dropped the pack and crept up behind her, throwing his arms around her neck, kissing her as she squirmed. We locked eyes momentarily. Then he slunk back into the kitchen.
I pried myself from Aiden with a hair tousle and another promise I knew I wouldn’t keep and followed them. Brody scratched himself under the old pair of blue jeans he had on. He flipped open the donuts, sifting through them like a fat secretary on hump day, selecting a chubby custard and clamping it in his teeth; a gob of cream squirted out the side. When he stretched over the stove for a box of cereal, I got a better look at some of those tattoos. The usual badass wannabe assortment of skulls and crosses, hula girls and she-devils. One in particular made me curious, though. A big black panther. Clearly a cover-up.
When Brody had hooked up with the mother of my kid, I’d felt compelled to dig around. I learned that he used to ride with a motorcycle club back in the day. I didn’t know a lot about motorcycle clubs, but from what I understood they weren’t something you could quit like a factory job. I would’ve been worried for Jenny and Aiden’s safety had I not met the guy and thought he was such a tool. Plus, it’s tough to base anything on small town rumors. The long hair and ink, the motorcycle and tough-guy posturing? I considered him to be more a cliché than the genuine article. Brody had stopped riding altogether after he slipped on a patch of ice last winter and broke a few ribs. I had a hunch that the big panther on his biceps might’ve been concealing the club’s insignia, but I had no way of knowing for sure.
In the middle of the room, Jenny sat at the small, round kitchen table, hands cupped around a mug of coffee, which she kept blowing on even though no steam rose. She wouldn’t look at me. Brody kept shooting me glances. I could tell something was up.
“What’s going on?” I finally asked, after I’d had enough of the eyebrow twitching and panning back and forth.
“You tell him,” Brody said, splashing milk into a giant bowl of Cap’n Crunch, practically tittering with smarminess.
“Tell me what?”
Jenny still wasn’t looking at me. She wasn’t looking at him, either. Instead, she stared out the window at a blue jay perched on a power line dripping icicles, and continued to blow on coffee that wasn’t hot.
Brody shook his head with an overly familiar grin, as if suddenly we were part of the same fraternity of Man that women would never quite understand.
“Got me a foreman’s job down in Rutland,” he said. “Start in March.”
“You’re moving?”
I asked Jenny this, but Brody was the one who answered.
“Gonna look for a house down there,” he said. “As in, like, buy.” He leaned against the stove, slurping cereal like a twelve-year-old. “No more of this renting shit, Jay. Like pissing money down the drain, I’m tellin’ ya. Get a house, pay that shit off, and then you actually own something, y’know? Get some equality. Something to call your own.”
I didn’t bother correcting the dumb shit that he meant “equity.”
He pointed his spoon at me, milk dribbling down his chin. “That’s how you do it,” he said through a mumbled mouthful. “Ya hear me, bro?”
“When were you planning on telling me?” I asked her.
“I just found out,” she said, finally turning my way.
Brody let go a laugh. “Stop busting his balls! I told her, like, a month ago.”
“You said it was a possibility,” Jenny said over her shoulder, lips curled in a mean snarl, a look I knew all too well. “You didn’t tell me you actually got it till last night.” She spun to shoot me that same mean glare. “And you didn’t stop by until this morning, so you have no right.”
Aiden came running in, tugging at my hand to go play with him some more, and it made me feel like an even bigger asshole to have to sh
oo him away, but my heart was thumping deep in my chest. He didn’t need much encouragement; even little kids can tell when something isn’t right.
Rutland was easily three, four hours away, and if I couldn’t get over here now as often as I would’ve liked, with them just a couple miles down the road, when would I ever see my boy? Maybe it had been our own fault that Jenny and I couldn’t work things out, but this was going to affect Aiden forever. I was his father, and she hadn’t even told me. Instead, I’d had to suffer the indignity of hearing it from Brody.
Brody kept eyeing me, smirking as he slurped. It sounds weird, but despite the fact he was sleeping with my girl and helping to raise my kid, up until that point, I hadn’t even thought enough of Brody to hate him. He wasn’t a threat; he was just some dopey guy that Jenny was with because she didn’t want to be alone. A rebound fuck.
Jenny stared up at me. She was still trying to look angry, but it wasn’t working. The rims of her big brown eyes welled. I could see she wanted me to say something.
I pulled the envelope from my coat pocket and slapped it on the table. “That should catch me up,” I said.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Little People’s Playground sat perched on a hill next to the old police station, which had once been Ashton’s elementary school back in the ’50s, a dilapidated, brown brick building that now served as the town’s Community Center, where they coordinated Easter egg hunts and sign-ups for youth sports. In the summer, we’d pedal our bicycles there and climb the hillside to a secret fort—an empty utility shed that had been gutted by a fire—where this squirrelly, cross-eyed kid, Arnie Perkins, stashed his father’s old Playboy magazines in a rusted coffee tin. The fort was less than a football field away from the police station, tucked in the dense cover of musky New England foliage. We used to think we were so cool, real outlaws sitting up there, puffing away on stolen cigarettes, staring at dirty magazines as the late afternoon thunderheads would roll in.
Over the years, local businesses like McDonald’s and Chester Mc-Gee’s had donated old playground equipment to the park. There wasn’t a lot for kids to do in Ashton. The nearest Chuck E. Cheese was three counties away. The LPP wasn’t too exciting. Merry-go-round and teeter-totter, swing set, slide, a maze constructed from discarded tractor-trailer tires. I always enjoyed bringing Aiden there. I remembered my dad taking me when I was small. Felt like the memories I had of him faded by the day.
When we pulled up, there were so many kids there I thought they must’ve cancelled school. Then I remembered it was Saturday.
Trying not to let my stress affect Aiden, I did my best to remain upbeat, acting silly. A toddler doesn’t need to see his dad falling apart. I’m the one who’s supposed to have this shit figured out. On the way over we were singing nursery rhymes. I had him giggling, but honestly, that probably had more to do with the sugar from the lollipop I’d given him. His face was sticky with cherry. I kept a stash of candy in my glove compartment. His mother wouldn’t approve, but she wasn’t around, was she? And I wasn’t one of those fathers who bought into all that new-age parenting bullshit. No sugar. No TV. A forced regimen from the crib through college. My parents didn’t do that with us, and we turned out all right. Well, at least one of us did.
The snow that had fallen was the wet, heavy kind—perfect for snowballs and stacking—and several snowmen, in various states of construction, dotted the knoll. Two small boys, a few years older than Aiden, played on the merry-go-round, and he instantly gravitated to them. It’s funny watching how cliques form, even at age two. The boys were bigger and therefore cooler, and Aiden wanted in with the “in” crowd. Trying to fit in with the cool kids would never change.
They were good with him, helping him up, not being too rough. I figured they probably had a little brother at home. I scanned the grounds for a parent, but didn’t see one, which was hardly a surprise. Ashton, despite the squalor of the Turnpike and truck stop, was still the kind of town where you didn’t have to lock your doors. Where you could forget your wallet on top of a gas pump at the Mobil station, and it’d be there when you went back. Where you didn’t have to hover over your kids, and could let them be kids and play unsupervised in a park.
Watching Aiden play, I thought about the day he was born, seeing him for the first time, the overwhelming feelings that washed over me. I’d understood kids were an extension of you. Circle of life, The Lion King and all that. But that’s not it. They’re not an extension of you. They are you. Like, literally. I stared down at that tiny, squirming thing, crying and fussing, and when I looked in his eyes, I didn’t see pieces of me, I saw me. Actually me. This newer, better, cleaner version who would now be running the race, and my sole job as a father was to make sure he had the tools to succeed.
Driving Jenny and our son home from the hospital, I was gung ho, up for the challenge, confident I could rise to the occasion like my dad had done. Only I didn’t. I wasn’t him. I couldn’t get out of my own way. No matter how hard I tried to go all in, something held me back, like a governor on a motorbike restricting full throttle. I couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t a lack of love. I’d never loved anything so much in my whole life. But despite that love, I was unable to produce, which had made me feel like a failure.
“Cheer up. It’s not that cold.”
I craned my neck and saw Gerry Lombardi, Chris’ old wrestling coach, looming behind me. Bundled in a North Face ski jacket and gloves, unruly gray eyebrows poking like brush bristles. Shiny cheeks and crinkling eyes, he smiled kindly. The guy was forever smiling. He had these big horse teeth that bucked out, which made him appear to always be happy. Hell, maybe he really was. A broad-shouldered man like his sons, but older now, with a chronic bad back and abysmal posture, Mr. Lombardi appeared to be shriveling, hunched over, like an old lady with a dowager hump.
With strained, creaking effort, Mr. Lombardi sat beside me, gazing over the playground.
He motioned to Aiden. “Getting big, eh? It’s a fun age. I remember when Michael and Adam were that big. Just starting to find their way in the world, coming into their own, developing distinct personalities. Y’know, I could tell even then that Michael would go into some kind of public service.”
I glanced over skeptically.
“No, it’s true! The boy loved forms. When the UpStart kids would come by the house for pizza parties and sleepovers, Michael would make everyone fill out forms. A born bureaucrat.”
“He was writing forms when he was two?”
Mr. Lombardi squinted into the sun, cheeks pinking in the wind. “Well, maybe he was older than that,” he replied, softly. “And Adam? He loved to build things. Erecting Lincoln Log resorts, LEGO skyscrapers. I’d catch him bossing friends around, delegating responsibility. Like a little foreman.” Mr. Lombardi laughed to himself, like he was privately recalling a terrific, precious memory that he’d always hold close to his heart, the kind I was sure to miss out on.
He scowled at me. “There’s that look again.” He gestured toward Aiden, who squealed as the older boys spun him around. “It’s a lovely winter’s day. You’re here with your son. What could possibly be so bad? You hear all those boys laughing? Have you ever heard such a beautiful sound?”
I pulled my cigarettes, trying to smile. “Just got some bad news, Mr. Lombardi. No big deal.”
“Gerry,” he said, clamping a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry about your bad news. But—” he stabbed a stout finger at Aiden, “that little boy there makes it all worthwhile. Don’t you forget that!”
“I won’t, Mr. Lombardi. I mean, Gerry.”
He sighed. “Trouble with the ex?”
I shook the match head. “Sort of.”
“It’s so hard on these little ones coming from broken homes. See it all the time with UpStart. No matter how much parents love their children, it isn’t the same when Mom and Dad aren’t together. How old is he again?”
“He’ll be two in a couple months.”
“That’s a bit you
ng for UpStart. But in a few years, you might want to think about enrolling him. Getting to at-risk kids early is key. Wait too long, there’s the danger of drugs or gangs, or worse.”
“Aiden’s not ‘at risk,’” I said.
“You know, eighty-five percent of the boys in UpStart come from single-parent households. It’s true. Statistically, boys who grow up in a single-parent household are almost fifty times more likely to experiment with drugs before they are in high school. Did you know that? Fifty times! And we now know a large component of addiction is genetic.” He shifted his gaze to me, touchingly. “How is your brother?”
“Good,” I said. “He just opened up a business for himself, in fact.” Which was, technically, true.
Mr. Lombardi raised his bristly gray brows. “That’s great to hear.”
With much effort, he pushed himself back up, smiling over the sea of cavorting boys, before fervently gripping my hand. “You think about what I said.” He pointed at Aiden. “When you’re ready, you enroll your boy in UpStart. We’ll take good care of him.”
I don’t think I did as good a job of hiding my stress from Aiden on the way back. I knew Mr. Lombardi had only been trying to help—he was really active in UpStart—but it struck a sour chord. What if Jenny and I already were doing irreparable harm to Aiden, simply by not being together? I didn’t think a two-year-old child was in danger of ending up like Chris, but who knows how that works? Lombardi scared the hell out of me. I was a nervous wreck by the time I’d dropped off Aiden at Jenny’s.
Brody’s truck was gone. Jenny asked if I wanted to come in for coffee and talk. I told her I had to go to work. Then I gave my boy an extra-long hug.
I rang Tom and was in the middle of leaving a message, telling him that if anything came up, anything at all, I sure could use the work, when the call cut out. Didn’t matter. He’d already told me the score. But I needed to be moving, feeling like I was doing something. In times like these, doing anything is always preferable to doing nothing.
I stared out my fogged-up windshield, panning over the cluster of dumpy efficiencies and converted attic apartments like mine, the spattering of depressing bars and discount retail stores, all crammed into a claustrophobic downtown center. I’d lived here practically my entire life. Even when I went to stay with my aunt and uncle down in Concord after the accident, I was never really gone, taking bus rides back on the weekends until I was old enough to drive myself, calling my best friend Charlie to stay up on the latest. I attended all the Ashton High proms and homecomings. I could never escape Ashton. I had remained tethered to its earth like an old farmer rooted to withering, diminished crops, simply because I couldn’t think of anything better to do.