Bill Warrington's Last Chance

by James King

  “Quite a ride you’ve got there, Grandpa,” she said when she went back into the kitchen.

  Her grandfather, his head in a swirl of smoke from the pipe, looked at her quizzically.

  “Your car. Might be the only one in existence more ancient than ours.”

  Her grandfather nodded.

  “That, young lady, is a 1982 Chevy Impala SS,” he said. “Best car I’ve ever had, and still has a lot of life in her.” He patted his pants pocket and looked at April. “Want to take her for a spin?”

  “No,” her mother said immediately. “God almighty, old man. She’s only fourteen.”

  Her father swatted at his pockets again, apparently looking for his keys. “All right, then, just up and down the drive.”

  “No!”

  April looked at her grandfather looking at her mother.

  “Why not?” he asked. “I used to let you do it. If memory serves, you were thirteen.”

  April smiled triumphantly, until a glance at Fun-Sucker Supreme told her that it wasn’t going to happen.

  “Go watch TV while your grandfather and I talk,” her mother said.

  “Come on, Mom.”

  “Go!”

  “Sieg Heil,” April muttered.

  But she did as she was told.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Marcy Warrington Shea tried to concentrate on the road, but she kept thinking about Hummels.

  She supposed it was because they were her mother’s and as old as any memory she could call up that she’d never thought of the tiny figures as tacky—in other homes, sure, but not there, not in that dining room, and not on that particular hutch. During most of her visits to her father, she eventually found herself picking up and replacing the boys and girls in lederhosen holding hands, waving hello or good-bye, or playing with the tiny brown dog. Doing so still gave her a feeling she couldn’t name, even after all these years. She would have done the same earlier if she hadn’t been in a state of shock at the septic shambles that had once been her home.

  She was glad Hank hadn’t been there. How would he have reacted? Would his opinion of her change, as if she were somehow responsible for her father’s living conditions? No, Hank wouldn’t have gone there. Instead, he would have encouraged her to think opportunity, to search for that diamond in the rough, to make lemonade from lemons. Marcy smiled. Hank was a walking gold mine of selling clichés and strategies. He’d probably suggest she make a features/benefits list, which is exactly what she’d found herself doing as she touched the figurines. Nice yard, good neighborhood, excellent location. The house was in desperate need of repair, but of course she wouldn’t actually say that. She’d say it was waiting for some tender loving care, a great opportunity to give it one’s own personal touch, make it a home of one’s own.

  A good realtor needs an objective eye, Marcy reminded herself. So she decided that if there were to be an open house, the Hummels would have to go.

  She punched the horn when it became clear the driver in front of her was oblivious to the fact that the light had changed. April, scribbling away in her notebook with her earbuds firmly in place, looked up. Marcy considered an apologetic wave to set a good example, but then the driver ahead accelerated slowly, extended his arm out the window, and offered Marcy his middle finger. April didn’t even attempt to suppress her laugh.

  You have to pick your battles, her brother Nick liked to say, as if that were some sort of one-stop solution to every new problem that cropped up—like her daughter’s increasingly frequent threats to run away from their crappy little house and its “gestapo bitch” to find her father. Marcy could deal with the insults and name-calling, but the thought of April running away from home terrified her. And the idea that April wanted to have anything to do with the man who had abandoned her, abandoned them, always enraged her. How did that bastard get canonized in her daughter’s eyes ahead of the person busting ass to give her a normal life?

  Marcy wondered if she’d been so incredibly disdainful at that age herself. Definitely not. By the time she was fourteen, her own mother had been dead for two years and her father—well, no one would have argued her right to give him a little lip now and then.

  Another red light, another lagger. This time, a tiny woman in a huge SUV, gabbing away on her cell. Marcy resisted the urge to honk, feeling her daughter’s watchful eye despite the feigned indifference. As she accelerated, she assured herself that April would just have to deal with the kind of parent who didn’t go along with the idea of a fourteen-year-old girl who’d never driven before driving her grandfather’s car up and down his driveway.

  It wasn’t easy to hold her ground, especially with someone as pigheaded as April, but she could handle it.

  She grimaced when she thought of those words. They were the same ones her father had used a little while ago, when he was putting the stuff back in the kitchen drawer. With his back turned, slightly hunched over, he’d looked like a kid being forced to put his socks away. Just haven’t gotten to it yet. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. That and the leaves. I can handle it.

  And then that goddamned wink. It sent Marcy back some thirty years, lurking behind the kitchen door on her hands and knees, preparing to surprise her daddy, who had just gotten home from work. But something in the tone of his voice—and her mother’s—had stopped her. She’d tried to listen, but they were keeping their voices low. She peered through the crack in the door and saw her father, leaning against the counter the way he had earlier today. He looked very tired. “Why did you have to say that?” she heard her mother ask.

  “The guy was a jerk. Wasn’t happy ordering everyone around—he had to insult them, too. I only said what everyone else wanted to say. Lucky I didn’t deck him.”

  “But how will we manage, Bill?”

  “Don’t worry,” her father had said, moving away from the counter and straightening up as he faced his wife. “There’s always a sales job out there for someone with brains and some get-up-and-go. I can handle it.”

  Marcy made a left on Grandview—a little too sharply, apparently, because April shot her a dirty look before quickly turning away to avoid further eye contact.

  “A smile would come in handy right about now,” Marcy said, but April didn’t respond. The only sounds in the car now were the tinny, rhythmic noises that were busily ensuring that her daughter would one day be deaf to her for good.

  Gotta pick your battles.

  When they got home, April made a beeline for her room. Marcy threw her keys on the kitchen table and plopped onto one of the chairs. She was debating whether to cook something, order a pizza, or suggest to April that they go to the diner when the phone rang.

  “Hello, beautiful.”

  It was corny, but Marcy was grateful. “Hello, Hank.”

  “You sound tired. Feel like talking about it? Say, over some nice veal marsala and a bottle of red?”

  “Actually, I think the talk I need to have tonight is with my daughter.”

  “Ah, the joy of the teen years. Say no more,” Hank said. “Rain check?”

  Marcy smiled. “Rain check.”

  She hung up and thought of the woman who had “warned” her about Hank. It was during Marcy’s first office meeting with all the associates. Hank was making a presentation on the importance of always “talking benefits” when describing the features of a house. Marcy listened carefully. After all, the man drove a Lexus and mentioned, none too subtly, that he lived in a 3,600-square-foot condo at the marina. “Hankering Hank,” he called himself, attributing his success to a never-ending hankering for sales. The woman sitting next to her—Marcy couldn’t remember her name—who’d leave the agency just a day or two later, leaned over and whispered that Hank’s biggest hankering was for other realtors. Female realtors. Marcy was startled to see Hank, at that moment, wink at her. Her immediate inclination was to flip him off. But this job was too good an opportunity to piss off a heavy hitter—at least right off the bat. Besides, maybe he hadn’t winked a
t her. Maybe it was a wink at the audience, a little public-speaking technique to show how comfortable he was in front of groups. She forced herself to listen to his message: Think buyer perspective. Think sales. Think commissions.

  She did so now, even though she felt guilty about it. But what was the point of ignoring the inevitable? She guessed that she could get her father a 150K, maybe 200K for his house. With a 2.5 percent commission, that would mean . . . Oh, hell, she’d figure it out later. The more immediate challenge would be to convince him to move into an assisted-living facility before it was too late and the only option would be a nursing home. His mind was still sharp, but he was obviously losing the ability to take care of the place. Assisted-living feature: no lawn. Benefit: no worries about mowing and raking and shoveling. Feature: smaller living area. Benefit: less to keep clean. Feature: communal dining room. Benefit: healthy eating, no TV-dinner crap.

  Sad, she thought. He used to yell at me if I didn’t hang up my jacket within thirty seconds of walking in the house. And god forbid it should fall off the hanger and onto the closet floor.

  Marcy got up and opened the refrigerator. Something smelled, but a quick check of the meat drawer—chicken cutlets thawing for the dinner that she now couldn’t muster the energy to cook—revealed that the source was somewhere else. She closed the fridge and checked the garbage, which she should have known would be the culprit. Emptying the trash was about the only thing she asked April to do every day—and every day, it seemed, she needed reminding. Marcy considered calling up to her to come and empty it, but the thought of even the smallest argument threatened to drain her completely. She pulled the garbage bag out of the wastebasket, tied it, and put a new liner in the trash can.

  Feeling the heat from the still-warm Camry engine as she squeezed her way to the trash cans in the garage, she tried to see the car through April’s eyes. Was it really that awful, that uncool? Tough. When she was April’s age, she wouldn’t have dreamed about being so picky about what she drove—or was going to drive. Good thing, too, since she ended up behind the wheel of the family’s Dodge station wagon throughout her teen years. April, of course, wasn’t interested in hearing about that. She wasn’t interested in hearing much of anything that didn’t have to do with her.

  Back in the kitchen, clearing and setting the table was not an appealing thought. She’d been balancing the checkbook earlier, and bills and receipts were spread across its surface. She’d also been reviewing some listings and collating materials for an upcoming open house. Sprinkled in the mess were a dozen or so grocery coupons she had clipped that morning.

  Ironic, Marcy thought. Less than an hour earlier, she’d been sitting at a table with a different kind of mess. And she’s the one expected to clean it up. Why was she the one the old man called? It seemed that during her visits, if and when he’d decide to string more than a sentence or two together and actually converse, it was always Mike this or Nick that.

  But it was always she who ended up tending to him, as she did tonight, listening to his harebrained request for a family reunion, blinking away the smoke in her eyes, ignoring his cranky insults and her own daughter’s Nazi cracks.

  Her illustrious older brothers? Nowhere.

  Marcy looked out the window. All that was needed to complete this happy moment, she thought, flipping through the mail she’d brought in that morning, was another missing child support payment from the man April so adored.

  Which reminded her. She checked her pocketbook to see if she had enough cash for dinner out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  April pressed the lock button on her bedroom door as gently as she could, hoping the telltale click wouldn’t echo in the hallway like a cannon and alert her mother to come running up the stairs and start pounding on the door, asking why this door was locked and saying, We don’t lock doors in this house and People who don’t have anything to hide don’t lock their doors and What are you doing in there, young lady? and on and on. And on. Living in this house meant having your every move monitored, like on reality TV—only instead of a bunch of cute guys, there was only her mother.

  She opened her laptop and keyed in her password to access her list files, which she kept in her algebra folder in case unwelcome visitors—such as her math- averse mother—nosed around. April used to think there was such a thing as privacy, certain rules you just didn’t violate. But then one day she came home from school and found her mother waiting for her in the family room, holding a joint in one hand and, in the other, the sock she’d found the joint in. How lame was that? Not just snooping in a sock drawer, but actually examining each pair. Lame and creepy.

  April began reviewing her lists. TITS (Things I Think Suck) included such things as cramps, zits, and boys who lie their asses off and still have girls chasing after them. All the items here had first put in time on PU (Patently Unfair), which at the moment included the fact that boys could pee whenever they had to no matter where they were, the age requirement for driving, paying premium dollar for crappy weed, and ridiculously early curfews. She also maintained a SOO (So Obviously Orgasmic) list of her favorite musicians, songs, and television shows, as well as SOIL (Signs Of Intelligent Life), currently empty.

  The file she worked on the most, the one she clicked now, was PITS (People I Think Suck). Time for some hard-core prioritizing: Heather Rosen needed to be added.

  Heather had been texting her all afternoon, begging her to call. It was so obvious that the only reason Heather wanted to talk was to tell lies about the party last night and the probably no more than seven seconds she spent within a hundred feet of Keith Spinelli. The messages had started coming in when April was tying up the newspapers at her grandfather’s. Call me. KS is 2 hot. Wher r u? U won’t bleve. Heather’s texting was so pathetically full of it since Keith Spinelli, April was sure, wouldn’t have anything to do with Heather Rosen, much less actually do anything with her. No way.

  So April had some choices to make. First, how high on the PITS list should she put Heather? Definitely in the top five, given that Heather knew, she had to know—despite the fact that April never actually said anything—that April kind of liked Keith Spinelli. That alone should justify the highest ranking. But putting Heather in the top spot was not a decision to be taken lightly, especially since the current titleholder—April’s mother—had been number one for sixteen straight weeks.

  April double-clicked on the Word icon and created a two-column table. At the top of the left column, she typed in her mom’s name; in the right, Heather’s. Her father had once told her, when she was trying to make up her mind about something—it was so long ago she had forgotten exactly what—to do a pros and cons list. The column with the most entries would win, although April soon discovered that sometimes one item in a column could easily outweigh all the entries in the other. Still, she felt duty-bound to justify any action she might take on this high a PITS ranking. She started on the left column. Beneath her mother’s name she wrote:

  • Nags the crap out of me. Constantly.

  • Calls my clothes slutty. Sometimes.

  • Won’t let me practice driving. Ever.

  • Checks with other moms for sleepovers. Always. And always embarrassing.

  • Wears clothes that emphasize her lard-butt. Often.

  • Suddenly starts crying but won’t talk about it. Ever.

  • Acts like talking to a guy will impregnate me. First time.

  • Doesn’t think I do enough homework even though I get straight A’s. Always.

  • Trashes Dad constantly but denies doing so. Always.

  April stopped typing. There was no point in continuing, as there was no way that Heather—no matter how many obnoxious lies she told—could unseat her mother.

  An instant-message bubble popped up on her screen. Heather, of course: R U there?!?!?!

  April checked to see if anyone else, like Keith, was online. Of course he wasn’t—anyone with half a life was out doing something interesting. Heather, case in
point, obviously had nothing better to do than lie about her pitiful sex life. And thanks to her mom’s insistence on visiting her grandfather for the first time in several centuries, April didn’t have anything interesting going on, either.

  April flopped on her bed and lay there, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling and at her Don’t Care poster—another sore subject with her mom, who wanted it taken down. She was constantly threatening to take it down herself, saying it was “inappropriate” to be lying in bed and staring up at a guy—“especially that creepy-looking guy.” But as usual, her mother was totally clueless. April wasn’t interested in Ian Max, the skinny cokehead with the trying-too-hard body art and piercings and the totally obvious and gross way he played the guitar between his legs. She concentrated on Roxie Reece, DC’s lead singer and current holder of the number one position on her SOO list.

  Her mom said that Roxie’s name made her sound like a pole dancer. April didn’t care. She loved the way Roxie sang without looking at Ian. Some groups make a big deal out of looking at each other and screaming in each others’ faces while they play and sing. Look, everybody! We rock gods are having all kinds of fun up here while you peons down there worship us. That wasn’t Roxie’s style. From the expression on her face, it’s obvious she is just into the music, into her song, and she doesn’t give a crap about the audience or how she looks or even about the no-talent guitar player standing next to her.

  April learned from an MTV special that Roxie came from a broken home in California, hung around some part of San Francisco called North Beach, and basically pestered the local bands to let her sing. Somehow, she hooked up with Ian Max and they got the group going. There was talk about Roxie and Ian, but April knew that Roxie couldn’t care less about that dickhead. Roxie, not Ian, had written their best song. Roxie was the one, according to Rolling Stone, who handled the money and bailed Ian out of jail whenever he trashed a hotel room or got caught with some sixteen-year-old. What did Roxie need Ian for? She didn’t. It was the one thing April didn’t understand about her. Why didn’t Roxie dump the loser?