by Hannah Paige
“Sometimes I speak to elementary schools too. The occasional church or community center.”
“You know what I mean, Rick. That’s not success. You were at the pinnacle of your career, the pentagon. I mean, Rick. It doesn’t get more successful than that in our field. That’s the cush job. That’s success. Now look at you,” Mickey sighed and sat back in his chair.
“Oh yeah, thanks a lot for the judgment, Mick. How’s it feel way up there on your fucking high horse of hypocrisy? You think you’ve done so much better? How stable have you been since Darin died?”
Mick cocked his head, “Look, smartass, I know I wasn’t doing so well for—”
“Wasn’t doing so well? Mick, you were drunk by nine am, you didn’t leave the house for days, you wouldn’t even pick up the phone. Do you remember how you treated April? For years you wouldn’t even acknowledge that she existed because she reminded you too much of Darin. You blocked out your own daughter, treated her like shit. Did you ever stop to think about how thankful you should have been that you at least still had her?” Rick hadn’t meant to raise his voice, and he sat back in his chair, trying to force himself to relax. People didn’t like to see others react so severely in public.
Mick relaxed his shoulder, lowering his voice to a deep, gravelly tone, “April and I have made our peace. I know I was a real prick for a long time, losing a kid can do that to a dad, you of all people understand that. But at least I own up to my time as a first rate jackass. I pulled my head out of my ass a long time ago, and you should have been taking notes. I know that losing Grace—”
Rick shot out of his chair so fast the legs teetered. “Mick, I’m not talking about that,” his hands shook as he fingered out a couple of bills from his wallet.
“You have to talk about it at some point, Rick, you have to—”
“Mickey, if you tell me to move on, I swear to God I will break your arms and then you won’t even be able to get around in that chair of yours.”
Mickey flourished his arms out, “Now that’s what I’m talking about! Get angry, yell at me, scream, throw a chair maybe. You want to insult me some more? Go ahead, just do something!”
Rick stifled a groan. The ‘just show emotion’ advice was getting old. The shrink he’d tried for a year had said the same thing until Rick showed a little too much emotion and almost landed himself in jail overnight for ‘hostile behavior’. “Mickey—”
“April is having a barbeque this weekend. I mentioned that I was coming up here to see you and she wanted me to invite you. I tried to tell her that you were just going to be a real dick and decline the offer, but you know her—always trying to reach out to people. My daughter, the mender of fallen birds, and all that crap.”
Rick was about to lay down one of his standard excuses, but Mick didn’t give him the chance.
“Don’t say anything. Just think about it. If I show up at her house on Sunday and see you there, then great, you’ll have proven me wrong and April will be thrilled to see you. If I don’t see you…then you’ll have proven me right.” He started to roll away from the table.
“I thought you loved being right,” Rick wasn’t sure that Mickey had heard his low, husky voice in the bar.
But he had, “Not always, Rick. Not about shit like this.”
That night, Rick didn’t bother turning on the light when he kicked his shoes off inside his house. He heard the garage door rumble close behind him as he found his way to the kitchen. At the silence that remained around him, Rick felt his entire body constrict. Even after ten years of living with it, he couldn’t handle the kind of quiet that settled in a home after a child was taken from it.
Rick needed a drink. He opened the fridge and grabbed a beer, prying the lid off and tossing it into the trash. Following his evening routine, step two was to turn on the TV, loud.
“Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got. Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot. Wouldn’t you like to get away? Sometimes you want to go—”
The land line started to ring, cutting the sitcom’s theme off. Rick leaned over the back of the couch, lifting the phone off of its base, “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Mick, I just—What the hell is that noise? Are you having a party over there?”
Rick chuckled bitterly, “Yeah, Ted Danson just got here and Rhea Pearlman’s already on her second drink.”
“You’re hilarious. Now turn it down, I can barely hear you.”
Mick waited a second on the other line, while Rick obliged.
“Better. So, I just got back into town, stopped by April’s on my way home and told her that you weren’t coming to the barbeque over the weekend. She was very disappointed, I have to say. Very. Disappointed,” he let out a dramatic sigh.
Rick leaned forward on the couch, lifting his beer off the coffee table, “Why’d you tell her I wasn’t coming? You wouldn’t let me give you an answer at the bar.”
“Are you coming?” he asked.
“Probably not. I’m not sure yet. Wait, why was she ‘very disappointed’?” Rick mocked his stressed sigh at the end.
There was a deep cough on the other end, then, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because she’s single, you’re single. You’re both the same age. Ish.”
Rick paused, waiting for more clarification, “And?”
“Sweet Caroline!” he shouted, and cleared his throat, “It’s like I’m talking to a sixth grader. She’s got the hots for you, Rick. God only knows why.”
Rick rubbed his eyes, “Mickey, nobody says ‘got the hots’ anymore.” He took a sip of his beer, “And why is it so surprising that she might be into me?”
“Because you’re a Nixon-sized mess. You haven’t had a real job in ten years and have been living off of your benefits since. It would take a natural disaster to disrupt your daily routines. Although even then, I think you’d be digging through the rubble of your house to find the TV remote. You never get out, I don’t even know if you brush your teeth and shower on a regular basis anymore. You have the social skills of an introverted twelve-year-old who’s also an alcoholic.”
“Mick, not all of that’s true,” But even Rick couldn’t argue with most of it.
“Oh really? Excuse me, sometimes you swap Cheers for Seinfeld, my bad.”
“I’m not an alcoholic,” Rick said weakly.
“You’re not, huh? Why don’t you tell me how long you can make it without pouring yourself a drink, then? Can you make it a day, a week? How about an hour?”
Rick didn’t say anything and heard Mickey take a couple long breaths over the phone. The dim sound of Cheers started to fade in his ears as reality sunk in.
“Get yourself some help, Rick. Have a good rest of your week, tell Grace I said hi.”
“How did you—”
Mickey cut him off, “Tomorrow’s Tuesday. You always go see her on Tuesday. Tell her hi.” And he hung up.
And Rick was left alone, once again, in the quiet. He turned Cheers up but didn’t really pay attention to the characters’ dialogue. It was just noise, empty noise that carried through his house. He curled up on his side and fell asleep.
Rick’s alarm went off at four-thirty, same as it did every weekday morning. He heard it from the couch, where he had stayed all night, and had to fumble into his bedroom down the hall to turn it off. His bed was still made from when he had last slept in it, might have been a couple days ago, or maybe a week, Rick didn’t really know. He hit the button on his alarm and stumbled to the bathroom. He flicked the light on, blinding himself, and groaned once his eyes adjusted and he saw what was in the mirror.
Burnt charcoal-colored scruff covered his chin. Sideburns, once dark black, were greying around his ears. His skin was a pale tone, like spaghetti that had been cooked for too long. It had once been a glowing tan; when he gave the sun a chance, his skin colored quite easily. His eyes, too, were showing age. His eyelids sagged underneath, like wrinkled blankets and the top lids seemed to pul
l closer against his eyes, keeping them smaller, giving them less freedom than they once had.
Rick needed a drink.
He turned on the shower and while he waited for the water to heat up, poured himself a morning scotch, saving his last few beers for the afternoon. It was when he had made his way back to the bathroom and was slipping out of his clothes, leaving them in a pile on the tile floor and taking swigs of his drink when he could, that he actually heard Mickey’s words.
The water had heated up the bathroom and steam began to fog the mirror. Rick reached a finger up and copied the image of his morning scotch on the mirror. As he stood there and the steam started to creep into the fresh glass that he had exposed with his finger, the ice cubes he had drawn in the glass started to round out, their shapes fuzzing like worn velcro at the edges.
He gulped down the rest of his drink and, for the first time, was aware of the fact that it didn’t sting. The alcohol that slithered down his throat was as benign as water.
He pulled his razor out from the cupboard underneath the sink, where it had sat for days, untouched. The coarse hairs that had sprouted on his chin fell into the sink like salt and pepper shavings as he dragged the electric razor over his face. He climbed into the shower and let the water run down his back, felt his skin start to tingle from the scalding water. After, he towel-dried himself off and went back into the bedroom for some clothes.
People sometimes joked about military men being neat freaks, bouncing quarters off their beds, color-coding their closets (on the off chance that they had more than two colors to show), being especially particular about the shapeliness of their living spaces. While Rick had met his fair share of men that broke the mold, in his case, the jokes were true.
His closet was pristine; all of his shirts hung up side-by-side and the hangers faced the same way. His dress shoes, his everyday shoes, and running shoes—Rick couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched those—were lined up underneath the hanging clothes. He threw on a black shirt and jeans, then slipped on socks and shoes. He bypassed his keys, hanging by the garage door, and kept going to the kitchen. Rick had reached for his to-go mug—once used for coffee—and had the scotch bottle half-open when he stopped himself. He glanced up at the clock—six-thirty—and forced his hands to relinquish their grip on the bottle of alcohol.
Grace deserved better.
He opened the garage door in time to see the mail truck rattle past their house. Joan, the mail lady who had been delivering here since Grace had learned to read, was an early riser too, and made sure that Rick’s house was one of her first stops on her morning route. She had no idea that the little girl who’d once devoured the papers she delivered had stopped reading them ten years ago.
Rick padded across the driveway and stooped to pick up the newspaper rolled in yellow packaging. He started to unwrap the plastic on his way back to the house. Closing the garage door behind him, he headed to the kitchen where he threw the yellow plastic wrap in the trash under the sink. The headline on that morning’s paper read ‘Will We Ever Forget?’ and had pictures of the new memorial being built in New York. Rick shook his head in disgust. People just couldn’t leave an empty space alone. They couldn’t handle having two giant holes in the ground. Everyone seemed to feel the need to fill them.
Rick tucked the paper under his elbow and snagged his car keys from the hook by the door. He was halfway out the door when he stopped, against his better judgment, and looked back at the fridge. He sighed and jogged back into the kitchen, throwing open the door and grabbing one of the chilled beers.
With the newspaper and beer in hand, he hopped in the front seat of his truck and backed out of his garage, closing the door once again. The radio was on, Rick never used the CD player anymore, and the show host for that morning was kicking off ‘another half hour of oldies’. Rick turned it up and hung a right out of his neighborhood. He enjoyed driving this early in the morning. The streets were still quiet, it being before normal commute time and far too early for school-age kids to be out and about.
The town cemetery was just a few blocks from Rick’s house, a few streets down from the elementary school that Grace had attended prior to being relocated to her new living space. When he pulled up into the corner spot the sun was fully awake and starting in on heating the ground with its rays. It was still early, but New Jersey had lucked out that morning and was rewarded with some warmth.
Rick traipsed through the lot and saw the morning shift gardener pruning some of the shrubs that had been planted along the walkway. It had been the same hunched-over man in blue suspenders and a ball cap hugging the white hair on his head for the past ten years. He appeared to be so old that Rick was surprised he had been gardening at the cemetery for this long without becoming one of the tenants here instead. Of course, he didn’t know exactly how old he was or even his name. Rick had never asked. Grace would have though.
Rick walked past him without saying a word and spotted the pearl-white headstone positioned underneath a red oak tree. Sun peeked through the leaves, shining in irregularly shaped shards on the headstone. Rick stood before the headstone for a second. Her name looked so small, smaller than the last time he had come to visit her, and even smaller than the time before that.
He kicked a piece of dirt back into its place, cushioning a geranium that had been planted near her plot, and crammed his free hand into his jean pocket. “It’s a beautiful day today, Grace. You’d love it out here this morning. You’d probably be hanging halfway out the window with The Beach Boys turned up loud on the drive to school,” Rick paused, listening to the two birds nesting in the red oak tree. “Mick says hi. You remember Uncle Mick, right? Of course you do, you were always the one with the great memory. It was me that needed reminding.” He crouched down on his knees before sitting all the way down on the grass. “I brought you today’s paper. It’s interesting, I guess.” He lightly ground the beer into the grass, giving it a stable place to sit while he unfolded the paper on his lap.
Rick cleared his throat before beginning to read the front page, “The September 11th attacks will always remain ingrained in the minds of those that lived through that—” Rick’s voice trailed off and he quickly flipped the page, “Let’s skip to the politics page, that one was always your favorite.” He tried to give the headstone a weak smile, but not even one of those would come.
Rick spent the next forty-five minutes reading Grace the morning paper. He skipped over the funnies—he had learned a long time ago that the jokes were only funny if the person you were sharing them with could see the multicolored columns and characters—and finished with weddings.
Sometimes, on good days, he imagined Grace as she might have been at the same age of some of the women in the happy pictures: in a glittering white dress, her blonde hair pulled into a braid (it had been her favorite hairstyle since she’d learned to do it at camp in fourth grade). She would be taller, inheriting the genes that ran through both Rick’s and Tammy’s families. Her freckles would have become her, adding to her beauty instead of dominating her face, but her rosy, full cheeks would be the same: filled with optimism and hope.
Rick had to wipe his eyes after reading the last article, with his own image of his daughter fresh in his mind.
“I know, I know. I still cry at the drop of a hat,” Rick waved his hand and watched a tear dripped off of his finger. He remembered Grace teasing him about his schizophrenic emotional state. The first time they’d watched The Fox and the Hound, he’d cried his eyes out while Grace remained unfazed, claiming that the film was ‘completely unrealistic’.
“There’s a barbeque this weekend. I probably won’t go,” Rick’s gaze wandered to the unopened beer that sat at his side. He grasped it between his fingers and popped the top off, holding the cap in his lap, and took a long pull.
Can you make it a day, a week? How about an hour?
Rick drew his arm back, meaning to fling the beer at the big oak tree, but he couldn’t. He relaxed his s
houlder, letting his arm fall back to his side.
He shook his head, ashamed of how low he’d fallen, “I’m sorry, Grace. I’m so, so sorry. You deserve better than this. I know I’ve said sorry a thousand times, but I—I keep saying it and hoping that those words will make everything better, like if I say them enough I’ll change, but,” He twisted the serrated beer cap in his hand and pressed it into his palm, hoping for the edges to nick his nerves, give them a swift kick in the ass and show him that he still had that sense of touch, that birthright of pain. He didn’t feel anything, though, he never did.
“I know what you would say. You would probably say that all the booze I have in the house could have better uses, like building a bonfire to toast marshmallows, maybe even invite the neighbors over, have a BBQ. You always thought of stuff like that.”
“You can think of them too, Mr. Griffin,” a thin voice piped up from behind Rick.
He jumped up, turning to see the pale, blonde boy in a blue shirt and light jeans standing behind him.
“Have you had enough time?”
“What are you doing here? You’re that kid from the school, the—” Rick stopped himself short before he could call the kid crazy. He may have been a little far off the deep end, but he still wasn’t a complete asshole who would call an innocent child nuts.
“The insane one? It’s okay, you can say it. I don’t mind, not really anymore.”
“What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in school? Where’s your mom?”
The boy smiled mischievously, “I should be wherever I can help people the most, and right now, that’s here. My mother and I have a mutual agreement that my school schedule is flexible, bending around more important matters. She’s just over there.” He pointed down the pathway to the gardener who was now chatting away with the tall, blonde in her pink blouse.
Rick sighed, rubbing his eyes, “What do you want, kid? Why do you keep following me?”
“I’ve already told you. It’s because I have questions, or rather, Grace has questions.”