Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  It’s the first time I’ve heard her talk about Dad since she started dating Leon. My tears follow hers. “Yeah,” I say. “I wish he were here, too.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Next?”

  “Gonna go for more?”

  “Mom.”

  “Two is just as easy as one.”

  “I think we’ll have our hands full with just the princess for now. Maybe a dog will be next.”

  “Still holding on to that dream, huh?”

  “Not everyone hates dogs like you do, Debbie.”

  “I don’t hate dogs.”

  “No, you loathe them.”

  Mom grabs the cigarette out of my hands, takes a small toke, coughs. She hands it back to me, her fist to her mouth, still coughing.

  “Friendly advice, Mom.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t inhale.”

  “But you do,” Mom says.

  “Took me about two years of smoking to work my way up to inhaling.”

  “It was your father, you know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “No dogs,” Mom says. “That was his rule.”

  “Dad loved dogs,” I say. “We’d go to the park and he’d play with them all day if we let him.”

  “I know.”

  “But you said—”

  “You remember Snooper?”

  “Dad’s beagle. The one he had as a kid.”

  Mom nods. “Grandpa George used to go foxhunting with Snooper. Turns out Snooper stunk at foxhunting, but he was a great family pet, and fiercely loyal to your dad. One day, John came home after school with two black eyes and a missing front tooth. He had got in a fight on the playground.”

  “Dad in a fight?” I say. “I can’t picture that.”

  “He was eleven years old, and at recess saw three teenage boys ripping a black girl’s dress off behind the school. He stopped them and probably saved the girl from being raped or worse. While they roughed him up pretty bad, he managed to get in a few good shots. John walked home from school. Two of the three teenage boys left school in an ambulance.”

  “Sounds like he got in more than a few good shots.”

  “So John gets home from school and tells his mother what happened.”

  “Where was Grandpa George?’

  “Out of town at an American Legion function.”

  “And what did Grandma Eleanor do?”

  “She took John out back underneath the willow tree.”

  “Not the switch.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Dad had permanent scars on his back.”

  “That was the day he got those scars,” Mom says. “Grandma Eleanor tied her son’s wrists to the willow tree and started whipping his bare back. He was screaming and bleeding, and at one point she hit John so hard she broke a switch in half and he nearly passed out from the pain. Just as Eleanor was about to lay into him again with a new switch, Snooper broke through the screen door on the back of the house. He had been locked in a kennel in the basement, and when he heard John’s screaming, he ripped the metal door off the hinges of his kennel. He had broken all four canine teeth in the effort.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Those busted teeth clamped down on Grandma Eleanor’s arm, the one holding the switch. With her free hand, she grabbed a baseball bat lying in the yard and hit Snooper in the head. She knocked the dog unconscious, but she didn’t kill him. Eleanor untied her son and went into the house. John ran to Snooper. He put his ear on his muzzle and was relieved to hear him breathing. That’s when Eleanor came outside with Grandpa George’s double-barreled shotgun. “

  “No, Mom. Please don’t tell me she shot Snooper and made Dad watch.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Thank God.”

  “She made John shoot him.”

  It’s nearly dawn now. Beth is sleeping. I stand at the window of the bedroom, looking down at the sidewalk that curls around the front of the hospital. An old man walks his dog along the sidewalk. Sure enough, the dog is a beagle. Sasha’s head rests on my shoulder. I hold her tight with both arms. I lean my nose into her soft, innocent-smelling skin—that spot just behind the ear on a baby’s neck. I hold this seven-pound-fourteen-ounce glimmer of hope against my chest.

  “Hey, don’t hog her,” Beth says. Her voice is like a lifeline to me. As she’s done so many times before, often without even knowing it, my wife saves me from myself.

  “You awake?”

  Beth reaches her arms out. “Yes, now give her here.”

  “Patience, Mommy,” I say.

  Beth sits up. She pulls down a flap on the left side of her shirt, revealing her bare chest. I position our newborn daughter in the crook of her right arm. Beth squeezes her nipple between her left index and middle fingers as I help guide Sasha’s head toward her mother. Beth is still weak from the C-section, so I help support Sasha with my left hand. With my right hand, I help Beth squeeze her nipple to get the colostrum going. The fact I’m massaging a woman’s swollen breast without being the least bit turned-on is a big step for me.

  1997–1999

  Chapter sixty-nine

  The dirty little secret about life is that it speeds up as you grow older. You put things in cruise control and watch the miles tick by without stopping to look at the scenery. It’s a secret no one bothers to tell you until you’ve actually succumbed to the time warp, feckless and coma-like, as people younger than you have “retro” eighties parties and DJs label your favorite songs as “classic” rock. Why is it an eternity between Christmases for a child? Because the time between Christmases is half of a two-year-old’s life, a third of a three-year-old’s life, a fourth of a four-year-old’s life, and downward it goes until you can’t distinguish one holiday from the next. Hell, I’m twenty-eight years old, so my next Christmas is a mere thirty-six hundredths of my life away. Think about thirty-six hundredths of a second. It’s an eye blink, a flash of light, an impulse. Time is all about context. Years become days. Miles become inches. Life becomes death. You start taking things for granted, at least the things that matter. You fail to notice your wife’s new haircut—again—but Catherine Zeta Jones’s major motion picture debut in The Mask of Zorro leaves you smitten. Seriously, can somebody prescribe me a fucking pill to slow this shit down? Like Rip Van Winkle, I feel like I’ve missed a significant part of my life, or at the very least 1997 and 1998. Sasha turned three today. I don’t believe it, but that’s what Beth keeps telling me. Jack played her “Happy Birthday” on his recorder. Is there a reason school systems still insist on imposing the recorder on our troubled youth? Throw in its archaic cousin, square dancing, and I’d rather take my chances with methamphetamines, bullying, and hate crimes.

  Mom called me today to say the divorce was final. It started when Leon tried to get Mom to sign all her financial assets over to him after we won the wrongful death lawsuit against the Indianapolis Auto Auction. He told Mom that he was “just better at moving money around” than she was. Then Leon’s mother died, and he sued his siblings for their inheritance—at the funeral. But I think the last straw was when she caught him not only hitting up Jeanine for some weed, but hitting on her with a four-hour erection powered by Canadian pharmaceuticals.

  Mom and Leon were married, and then they weren’t. Vagina Head just disappeared. Yesterday he hopped on a plane to Amsterdam with a cashier’s check for one-point-five million dollars, roughly half of my father’s estate. I’m trying not to be too hard on myself, but I keep thinking that my ambivalence and hostility toward Mom cost our family half of Dad’s blood money.

  Sorry, Dad. I let you down again.

  Chapter seventy

  Beth pushes open the door to the restroom. She looks at me over her shoulder. “I have to pee. Wait for me?”

  “Sure,�
�� I say.

  The door swings behind her. A whiff of her perfume wafts out in the hallway, that same subtle lavender scent she’s worn since I first met her. I close my eyes and inhale deeply, like I always do when a pretty woman who smells good walks by me. I leave my foot just inside the door, cracking it open. I can hear the faint trickle of my wife’s urine.

  I think I’ve got a thing for women urinating. Not in a sick way. I’m not talking I want a golden shower or anything like that. But the image of a woman’s pale cheeks on cold porcelain makes me yearn to be a toilet seat. I picture the goose bumps starting to rise on Beth’s bare ass. The toilet flushes. I listen close to hear the elastic snap as she pulls up her panties.

  Okay, maybe it’s a little sick.

  “All done,” Beth says.

  We’re attending our ten-year high school reunion. Beth had the idea to have a combined Ridge-Prep reunion. As Empire Ridge High School Class of ’89 president, I was tasked with doing much of the field work.

  “Pretty big turnout,” I say.

  “See,” Beth says. “I told you Prepsters weren’t snobs. We Ridgies are the ones with the chips on our shoulders and the inferiority complexes.”

  Beth and I approach the bar. I raise two fingers.

  “What are we having tonight?” the bartender asks.

  “What do you got?” I say.

  “Just Bud and Bud Light,” he answers,

  Beth shakes her head. “I can’t do straight-up Budweiser.”

  “Not in the mood for the Heavy, huh?” I say.“The Heavy” is a popular nickname for Budweiser. The judges will also accept “Diesel” and of course the standard “Bud.”

  Beth places her hand on her waist and strikes a pose. “I have to watch my girlish figure, you know.”

  “Is this the part where I’m supposed to say, ‘Beth, your butt’s not really that big’?”

  “No, Hank.” She smacks me on the arm. “This is the part where you make an innocuous statement that has nothing to do with my butt, because by specifically singling out my butt, you reinforce my insecurities and subconscious belief that my butt is in fact big.”

  “Uh, come again?”

  “We’ve been married for four years,” Beth says.

  “I realize that.”

  “So you should realize when to talk or not talk about my ass.”

  “There are times when I can’t talk about your ass?”

  “Sir,” the bartender interrupts. “You know what you want yet?”

  I place a ten-dollar bill on the bar top. “I guess make it two Butt Lights.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The joke escapes the bartender. At some point over the last decade Bud Light eclipsed Miller Lite in popularity, which is unfortunate because Bud Light tastes like plastic and gives me diarrhea to the point where I’ve taken to calling it Butt Light. I’d even settle for a Natty right about now.

  “Bud Light is fine, and keep the change.” I slide the ten-dollar bill across the bar. The bartender slides two amber bottles back at me.

  I hand Beth hers. She sips the beer, nursing the bottle and her ass-driven self-esteem. “Anybody interesting on the walk-in list yet?”

  “Chip Funke is here,” I say. “You just have to get past his groupies.”

  “Really?” Beth says, starstruck.

  I’m still amazed at Chip Funke’s meteoric rise from McDonald’s third shift manager to teenage weekend warrior to NASCAR phenom. For about eighty years Empire Ridge has been home to the limestone quarries that built the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the Biltmore Estate, the St. Anthony Society Chapter House at Yale, the entire University of Chicago campus, and the Washington National Cathedral—and yet the city was finally put on the map because one of its citizens possessed a high aptitude for making left turns.

  “Chip had to attend a friend’s wedding in North Carolina this afternoon, but a friend of a friend of a friend told me he was going to bust his ass to get here.”

  “Not bad for the bandie who always talked about his go-karts.”

  “The what?” I say.

  “Your words, not mine, when I said we should invite him to the reunion.”

  “I never called him that.”

  “You most certainly did call him that,” Beth says. “I asked if you knew Chip Funke in high school, and you said that he was quiet, pretty much kept to himself.”

  “That’s not the same as calling him a—”

  “And then you added, ‘I really just remember him as being a bandie who always talked about his go-karts.’”

  “Fucking bandies.”

  “Wasn’t your father a bandie?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But Dad didn’t cost me prom king.”

  “After ten years you’re still sore about that?”

  “I couldn’t get the hood or bandie vote to save my fucking life.”

  “You’re a pretty boy, Hank. Always have been, always will be.”

  “But I went to pig roasts, I got in fights with Prepsters for no reason. I had street cred.”

  “Street cred,” a disembodied voice says from across the room. “That’s fucking hilarious.”

  Like the parting of the Red Sea, the crowd separates, cleaved neatly in half by Elias Hatcher’s booming voice.

  “What’s a guy got to do to get a ginger ale around here?” Hatch grabs me and Beth in a full bear hug. We haven’t seen each other in four years. His cutlass bangs against my leg. I can feel his hardened, sinewy body underneath his Full Dress Navy Whites, and I’m more than a little envious.

  “Nice uniform,” I say.

  “And how,” Beth adds.

  Hatch stands at attention, salutes. “Petty Officer Third Class Elias Hatcher at your service.”

  I grab Hatch by the shoulder. “Color me fucking impressed.”

  “But wait, there’s more,” Hatch says. “Claire, you can come out now.”

  The Hottest Girl I Never Tried to Sleep With comes around the corner. Beth screams, runs to Claire, and about knocks her over. They hug, scream a little more, make a couple quick excuses for why they haven’t kept in touch.

  Claire comes up to me, winks, and gives me a big kiss on the lips. “I’ve missed you, Hank.”

  Maybe it’s because I’m standing in a room of former classmates whose bald heads and multiple chins don’t seem to give a shit about life, but I think Claire looks better than she did in high school. A silver sequined cocktail dress accentuates legs I don’t remember being that long and an ass that’s as exactly as tight as I remember. I wink back, and I mean it. “Feeling’s mutual, Claire.”

  “What the hell is that on your ring finger?” Beth says. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Claire looks down at her left hand, smiles. “Yes, it is.”

  “We got hitched in Vegas last night,” Hatch says.

  Beth, Claire, and I have spent the last hour doing tequila shots. Not our best decision. I tried to talk Chip Funke into being our designated driver, but he said he needed to fly back that night to Charlotte. Something about wrecking his car in practice and being on “Bill Junior’s shit list.” Apparently Bill Junior is someone I should know, so I nodded and said, “That’s the last guy you want to piss off.” I had Beth take at least five pictures of us together. I’m pretty sure I was a total ass.

  Depeche Mode’s “Somebody” starts playing on the dance floor.

  “Where the hell is my husband?” Claire says.

  “He’s walking around being Hatch,” I say. “You can take the guy out of Empire Ridge, but you can’t take the Empire Ridge out of the guy.”

  “Still the social fucking butterfly, isn’t he?”

  “Always,” I say.

  “I love this song.” Claire grabs my hand. “How about a twirl with the new bride?”

  I look to B
eth. She nods. “Go on. I’m in no shape to dance.”

  Claire and I are reasonably hip people. And given that we spent our formative years as drinking buddies in the late eighties and early nineties, it’s written in stone that we must worship Depeche Mode. “Somebody” is an awkwardly intimate song, a point of fact I fail to remember until I get on the dance floor.

  Claire runs her hands through my hair, because she’s Claire. “You surprised?”

  “That’s an understatement. You and Hatch? When did it start?”

  “About six months ago. I had a layover in Heathrow. Hatch was in London on leave. We kinda just hit it off.”

  “Kinda? What happened to Derek?”

  “You know and I know he was never going to settle down.”

  “True. But Hatch?”

  “What’s wrong with Hatch?”

  “Nothing. I just always thought of you two more as siblings than lovers.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Then what gives?”

  “Things change. Feelings change. Plus, neither of us wants kids, and with him being a naval officer and me a flight attendant, our hectic schedules just somehow fit together.”

  “That doesn’t sound like love to me.”

  “It’ll get there,” Claire says. “I’m sure you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Hank. I remember that night at Mineshaft.”

  “I wondered how long you were going to hold that over me.”

  “Hold it over you? You know that’s not my style.”

  “But Beth is your best friend.”

  “And so are you. I knew the day you two got engaged you weren’t fucking ready. I figured you’d mess up along the way, but with a little luck you’d get there. Nobody’s perfect, except for maybe your father.”

  The DJ grabs the microphone, stumbles through a contrived segue into Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting.” It’s another overly personal love song, but Claire and I keep dancing, unfazed.