“Glad you came by, son,” Greg’s father said. He rose up and gripped Greg’s upper arms in what was supposed to be a hug. Greg returned the gesture. His father’s arms felt like dowels nestled in wet dough. This was the man who felt like a ghost in the house, a presence they could overlook until it’d been conjured or enraged. The man who sometimes made Greg jog by the open window of the car, around and around the block until the sun had dissolved, losing its fight with the blue and then the gray and then the navy dark, Greg wishing his father would just go back to ignoring him. Come on, son, his dad yelling. Still got a quarter tank left. His father was one reason freedom for Greg felt like a stack of moon pies and a rocking chair.
“Me, too,” Greg said.
Outside, a man in polyester shorts was up on his toes, peering in through the passenger-side window. When he caught sight of Greg he said, “You can’t do that. The residents come in here and it’s hard enough to pull their cars into the spots they’ve been assigned, and then here you are just parking wherever you please, and taking up not one, not two, but three spots.” The man had his hands on his hips, his thick hairy arms forming two triangles.
“Guess what,” Greg said, pulling himself into the driver’s seat. He was still thinking of his father’s weak, deflated arms, of how his own lungs felt scorched after those evening runs. “I can do whatever the fuck I want.”
Greg did get a Dr Pepper, handing the young man an entire five-dollar bill and not waiting for change. A plastic container of lemons rested in a bowl of ice. He took two, tonging them out of the container and into his extra-large cup, so yellow! He would drive home, he decided. Back to Deb and the house and his six hundred cable channels. But first he would stop in Orlando and file a police report. He wouldn’t leave until they let him do something official. It was enough, this constant presupposing and searching and protecting. If GJ was doing something illegal, then he deserved to get caught. If he was in trouble, then the cops could help him. It was a win-win.
“Sir,” the young man called. He was waving a couple bills in the air. “Please take your change. We aren’t allowed to keep tips.” The people in line stared at Greg as if he’d left a turd instead of a tip. He took the money and pushed it down into his pocket, the change slapping his leg every step he took out the door. Despite the minor embarrassment, Greg felt hopeful and determined. Like he was finally leveling with himself.
He blew a flat just before I-75 met up with I-4. At first he thought he’d hit something, some kind of animal caught tumbling in his axle, or a cardboard box stuck in his wheel well—that had happened to him once before. The RV sagged to the right side, bumbling down the road, and Greg saw black flaps flying out from behind him, a red Honda swerving and honking and flashing its lights in his side mirror.
“Motherfucker,” Greg said. He slowed and pulled to the shoulder. When he got out he could see a trail of tire behind him, so many scraps that he was surprised it was only one tire that blew. It was loud out there, the hot wind blasting grit and gnats and exhaust into his face. He stood with his hands on his hips, watching the cars go by, the semis gliding past in a roar. He and Deb had let the AAA membership lag; they hadn’t taken a road trip together in years. He had declined the extra roadside assistance package at the RV rental place. He was over a day’s drive from home; he was an hour and a half from his father and an hour and a half from Marie. He flipped his cell phone open. He had a three percent charge left. He could call Deb, but what could she do from there? It had to be Marie. He found her number and pressed SEND.
“Guess what,” he said when she answered.
“By the sound of it, I’m going to guess you’re caught in a tornado, or you ran into some car trouble,” she said. Her voice sounded small, nearly engulfed by the din of the highway.
“I’m on I-75 about two miles from I-4,” he said.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” she said, and hung up.
The tow truck showed up first, veering off the road and driving across the median toward Greg like it meant to run him over. Greg had been sitting in the cab of the RV, the AC on blast. He had thought of calling Deb, and then his phone had blinked off and died, making the decision for him.
The tow truck honked and Greg waved, but the driver didn’t wave back. He looked around the RV, wondering what he should bring with him, deciding on nothing. Marie was driving across the median now, slower than the tow truck. Greg wondered if he should get out and stop traffic for her, help her get across to where the RV was parked, some way of thanking her for taking care of things. Instead she gunned it, lurching out of the median and across the two lanes, cars honking in her wake. Greg opened the door and climbed down as gracefully as he could. The heat seemed to grow up from the asphalt, reaching up and wiping its hands from the top of Greg’s head down to his feet.
Marie rolled down her window and leaned out. “I’ll wait in the car,” she yelled, then mouthed it again for good measure. Greg gave her the thumbs-up.
The tow truck driver was standing by the RV’s rear bumper, writing on a clipboard. His body looked like a belted mattress; Greg wondered how he fit in his truck, how he fit in anything at all.
“This a rental?” the driver asked.
“Yeah,” Greg said. “I’ve been on the road, looking for my son…”
“Well,” the driver said, “I can tow you to the garage and they can fix your tire there. Two hundred for the tow and probably about the same for the tire. But I gotta warn you, all of these tires are real worn down, so if you put one new tire on and don’t replace the rest, that’s going to cause an imbalance down the road.”
“An imbalance,” Greg repeated.
“That’s right,” the driver said, going back to his clipboard.
“It’s a rental…,” Greg said. It came out like a question, Greg unable to control the upward tilt of his voice, the hope that this man wouldn’t see how tired he was, how vulnerable and ridiculous.
“Even rentals get run down. Up to you. Either way, it’ll be at least twenty-four hours.” The driver held his clipboard out to Greg, pointed at where to sign. “The phone number and address are on this.” He tore off the top sheet and walked back to his truck.
“Greg,” Marie shouted. She waved him over. “He doesn’t need you to stand there watching him,” she said when Greg was at her window. She wore sunglasses, the frames apple-shaped and enormous.
“I thought I was supposed to help him load it up,” Greg said.
“He doesn’t need you to do that, either.” He felt grateful to Marie; she had called the tow truck and driven an hour to fetch him, and now she was stopping him from making a fool of himself, but despite all of that Greg couldn’t help fantasizing bringing his knee up and dislodging her side mirror, watching it tumble to the ground. “Get in,” she said, already rolling up her window.
The quiet inside the Buick felt like a blessing. Greg’s face relaxed, everything settling back into its place now that he didn’t need to squint in the cool darkness. Marie had the radio on low, a man singing And if I had those golden dreams of my yesterdays …
“This was our wedding song,” Greg blurted. It surprised him, the memory so close, like his own hand in front of his face in the darkness, the light suddenly snapped on. Marie’s yellow dress, her vanilla perfume oil. Dancing at the bar afterward. Feel like makin’ love … He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, hadn’t meant to conjure the memory. It was just suddenly there, undeniable.
Marie turned the radio down lower. “So you always claimed,” she said. She pulled off the shoulder, lurched onto the highway in a cloud of dust.
“The man said it’ll be at least twenty-four hours,” Greg said. “You could drop me off at a motel…” Again there was the questioning lilt, again the hope.
“How come you were on I-75?” Marie asked. “You should have gotten on I-95 miles ago.”
“I was going to file a police report back in town,” he said. “Then I was going to head home.” He’d forgotten his
Dr Pepper; he’d been nursing it until it had melted into a lemony sweetness. He missed it.
“Were you going to tell me about it first?”
“Why would I?” Greg asked. He did his best to keep his voice level, keep it a lemony sweetness.
“Okay,” she said. “You know, I’m actually glad this happened. I didn’t feel like we had closure when I left your RV this morning.”
That was this morning? It seemed impossible. Time was stretching and retracting like the sunlight was just a pale whip of taffy on the pull. He’d been at his father’s for what felt like a week’s time, but it had truly been about forty-five minutes. He’d wasted the whole day driving, stopping only to argue with people he’d chosen and not chosen to be his family.
Closure. His father hadn’t even gotten up to walk him to the door. He wanted to tell Marie that the only closure was death, oblivion. The void. Maybe GJ had found closure. He wanted to argue with Marie. She walked around like she was right, knew everything, saw everything. Even when she was wrong, she found a way to see the light, to become right.
“I meant what I said, though.” She put on her blinker and aimed the Buick at the exit for I-4. “I meant everything I said. But it still felt like unfinished business. And then you blew your tire, and here you are.”
“Here I am,” Greg said. He was trying so hard to keep his voice level that his throat hurt. “There’s a La Quinta right off the exit, if you want to take me there,” he said. “Or a Homewood Suites across the street. Either way.” He’d seen them as he got on the highway that morning, heading to his father’s. Another dead end. He’d been on the trip for forty-eight hours and had gained nothing. All of it was a grand gesture, like the flailing of some poor sucker falling off a cliff.
“You should stay with me,” Marie said. “How are you going to get to the garage to pick up the RV otherwise?”
“No, thank you,” Greg said. “I can call a taxi.” The idea of sleeping in Marie’s condo felt akin to lying down in a hole someone had just dug. He was going in circles now, back in the Buick with Marie. Another twenty-four hours before he could have the RV back. What would he do? Lie in bed, watching the hotel television. Gather meals from fast-food restaurants. Make a late-night barefoot pilgrimage to the hotel vending machine. He would do nothing; he would spend yet another twenty-four hours of his life doing nothing.
“If that’s what you want,” Marie said. “Let it be known that I tried to convince you otherwise.” And then they were both quiet, Marie putting the Buick in cruise control, steadying the wheel with just one hand. Greg wanted to turn up the music, but he didn’t feel allowed to, so it tittered on, low and distant, songs he thought he recognized but couldn’t be sure. Soon he felt lulled by it all, the steady whir of the Buick, the blur of trees out the window, the inevitable nothingness that awaited him at the hotel. He closed his eyes. It felt like a miracle, the sleep that folded down over him, and he was grateful.
GJ came to visit them one summer in Birmingham. Marie needed a break was how she put it. He’s twenty-three years old, Greg. I don’t know what else to do. Greg suspected she was dating someone and that was really why she was shipping GJ off, but he couldn’t justify feeling superior over that knowledge; he’d grabbed hold of Deb and left GJ with Marie and almost never looked back.
Every time he spoke to GJ on the phone, or when he’d come and stay in the Ramada downtown for a quick visit, taking GJ out for burgers and beers at the Hard Rock, GJ talked about his life like he had plans. He was going to sign up to be a cross-country truck driver. I’ll get to see Vegas, or the Grand Canyon, or Red Rocks. But then he didn’t show up for his drug test. Then GJ talked about becoming a plumber; a friend of his made mad money doing it, and the training was long but not crazy hard, is what I heard. Greg bought GJ the books he needed and the coverall uniform the technical school required. On a visit down to Orlando in the fall that year, GJ picked him up from the airport, and when he opened the trunk to toss Greg’s suitcase in, Greg saw the books and the uniform still in their bags. I’m going to start in the spring, GJ said, squeezing Greg’s shoulder like he needed consoling, and slammed the trunk. Then it was a job at a bookstore by the college, but that ended after six months because GJ didn’t show up for work three separate times. Then it was back to the plumbing idea, maybe the air force, or maybe culinary school.
It excited GJ to talk about his plans. Saying them out loud made them real to him, Greg finally realized. And once they were real, there was no need to pursue them. It was good enough for GJ to simply have the idea. Then he could go back to his mother’s condo and hide in his room, drinking when she was home, smoking when she wasn’t. The first year of their marriage, he and Deb took a cruise, a knife-skills cooking class, spooned on the couch while watching evening television, and made love often. As the years went on Greg would say, We oughta take that trip down to the Keys, or There’s a new museum we should check out, or We should take photography lessons. But they rarely did any of those things. Work was stressful, exhausting, both of them in the prime of their careers and racing to stay that way. Home was a refuge of silence, where there were no expectations and no pressures. So Greg could understand why it felt so good for GJ to lie to himself, lie to Greg and Marie, about his plans for the future, and then never find the wherewithal to follow through. It was the Greg part of GJ, the part Marie had once called your depression issue.
Another part of Greg wondered if it was partly Marie’s fault, too; she was so controlling that she did everything for GJ when he was a child, even his homework, and he never learned to go it on his own. Or maybe GJ saw how adulthood was its own miasma of confusion and misery, Greg and Marie hating their jobs and each other, and their son decided it wasn’t for him.
At nineteen GJ’s car was found parked on a median in the middle of OBT. It was registered in Greg’s name, so after it was towed they called him to come get it. GJ had taken the bus back to Marie’s condo because he hadn’t been able to find his car. Greg had done things that seemed on par when he was that age and drank a six-pack a night, so he had decided not to worry all that much about it. Even if it had taken place on OBT. Then at twenty-one GJ was pulled over on OBT and arrested for possession. The judge gave him a warning and one hundred hours of community service, which he’d completed with a drive Greg hadn’t seen in years. It seemed to embarrass the boy, and it secretly thrilled Greg; he was hoping it truly was the bottom for GJ.
But only two years later there he was, fired at twenty-three from a car dealership, where he worked detailing new automobiles before their owners drove them off the lot. To Greg, it had seemed like the perfect job for the boy, a mindless kind of job that would exhaust his body and clear out his brain, help him go straight home and fall asleep instead of driving down OBT looking for his dealer.
“He showed up at work high,” Marie said. “He fell asleep in a chair in the waiting room. Where the customers sit.”
“How do you know all this?” Greg asked. He couldn’t imagine GJ confessing any of it to Marie.
“Because I went down there to beg them for a second chance. But it wasn’t the first time. It wasn’t even the second time. It’s your turn now, Greg. I need a break.” She was going to St. Augustine for a week, she said, and she didn’t feel comfortable leaving GJ in her condo all alone.
“It is our turn,” Deb said in bed that night. She was lotioning her hands and the smell filled the room. Plumeria, the bottle said, whatever that meant.
GJ flew up on a Saturday. He had offered to drive himself up but Greg liked the idea that he wouldn’t be able to bring drugs with him, what with bag inspections and security. They could drink together, at night on the small porch he and Deb had, could even sit in the new Jacuzzi with their ice-cold bottles if the evening was cool. It was a new thing he and Deb had been doing lately, sitting in the Jacuzzi with icy cocktails until they were almost asleep, then dragging themselves to bed and falling into darkness, a hard sleep that felt cleansing.
A woman at work had an addict daughter who was in rehab for heroin. She can’t drink when she gets out, the woman had told Greg one night at happy hour. She can’t even drink. They had cheersed solemnly.
Greg picked GJ up and they went for lunch at the Ale House. Then they went to the grocery store and Greg told him to toss whatever he liked to eat into the cart. He chose Fruity Pebbles, Pop Tarts, frozen pizzas, ice cream, lemonade. All the things Marie never allowed him to eat growing up. Greg added pasta sauce, whole-wheat noodles, a couple bagged salads that looked like they had shredded carrots in them. He and Deb weren’t cooks; they often ate out or ate the leftovers from eating out the night before. Greg added a frozen vegetable lasagna and bags of frozen peas. At the last minute he wheeled over to Produce and pulled two bags of Fuji apples into the cart; he wanted GJ to see that there were other ways to eat, other ways to indulge. He also wanted GJ to report back to Marie that he was kind of a health freak, even as the scale was tipping over 220 pounds.
“Dad,” GJ called. He was an aisle over; they couldn’t see each other, but it touched Greg, this moment of his son calling to him, the way he did as a child when they were in a crowd.
“Yeah?” Greg called back.
“Check this out.”
Greg wheeled the cart into the next aisle. GJ was pointing at a display featuring marshmallows, graham crackers, chocolate bars. “Remember when we went camping?”
“Hell, yeah,” Greg said. “S’mores? Let’s do it.” GJ seemed a bit tired, a bit dazed, staring a little too long, but who didn’t after an early-morning flight? He also seemed fundamentally himself, goofy and good-hearted. He had even gained weight; his arms looked tanned and muscular. He was only twenty-three, still basically a child. Still plenty of time.
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