There’s an old pier right near the spa, and we walk along its curving and pitched wood. The constant sea air’s made the surface waxy. Our sneakers tilt and squeak. At the end of the pier is a fisherman, a young guy with a University of Florida T-shirt who I figure is plucking fish out of their water for kicks and not for food. He doesn’t catch anything in front of us, thank God, Darren would not be into that, but I can feel my kid getting withdrawn as he smells the blood and scales.
Darren dutifully plucks up any scraps of loose fishing filament we come across, balls them into his pockets. He doesn’t want them flying into the sea and garroting mermaids or whatever he’s worried about. He doesn’t want to see things that aren’t even human get hurt. He’s an absurdly sweet kid, my son.
Amelia called me a week ago, saying Darren had been moody until he’d finally explained to her that I’d said it didn’t matter if he was gay, or if he was green-skinned or ate babies or was a terrorist. Did that seem like the right way to talk to him about that? she wondered. I told her that I was sure I didn’t put it that way, and if I did it was a joke because I was nervous because I love the kid so much. Of course I don’t think being gay is the same thing as being a terrorist, but how am I supposed to find the words to tell Darren that? And now it’s like we’re never allowed to discuss the topic ever again.
I stop to talk to this nice woman in a tight top about where she’s from and whether she knows good places to eat near here, and when I look up Darren’s gotten away from me and he’s almost back at the spa. He’s a fast kid, his skinny legs made twitchy by all the swimming. I say goodbye to the lady, she was probably too young for me to be flirting with anyway, and catch up to my kid.
He’s at the entrance, where there’s this two-lane road clogged with glossy cars pumping out exhaust while they wait for the four-way stop to clear. Something’s caught Darren’s attention, but I can’t tell what. On the other side of the road is nothing special, just a six-story apartment complex that’s under construction. The earth around it is ripped and raw, and the apartments aren’t finished or anything. It seems like a nice enough place to live, though. I’d take it.
Darren looks upset, and I get worried that all the dried fish guts we saw on the pier are going to make this spa stay go blammo. I’m sure he’d be telling his mom just what was the matter, but I don’t know how to get him talking. I like everything he says to me, I just don’t have a lot to say back, that’s all. I scratch at the sweaty small of my back. “Something wrong?” I finally try.
“Nothing, Dad,” he says. But I know there’s something. It would be a bummer if your view got blocked by that new building, but I can’t see why he’d get upset about that.
He’s looking toward the spa, like he’s ready to go back and chill in the room, but I focus on where he was looking before, and see there’s an egret, a white spindly thing, pretty and harmless unless you’re a fish. It’s fluttering beside a stopped tractor, beating its wings uselessly against the side of the machine. It’s only going to hurt itself. That tractor’s not going anywhere until the crew returns on Monday.
What does a bird have against a tractor?
We have nothing to do with ourselves anyway—I’m at a getaway spa with my kid, and the awkwardness is hitting me more and more hard core—so we wander into the construction site. We poke around the boundary of the scalloped orange tape, check out the derelict backhoes and the homes without doors as we make our way to the bird. If you don’t count the line of stopped cars or the egret or the ladies in white jeans going to the Starbucks on the corner, we’re on our own. Eventually Darren and I make it to where we both know we’re heading: as close as we can get to the tractor and the egret.
The bird goes all still when we get near, like it’s trying to camouflage itself into the tractor. It seems to me that something spindly like an egret should fly away if a couple of humans approach. But it doesn’t, and the wrongness of that leaves me fluttery. Darren, too, he gets this posture like, Let’s leave, Dad, but he doesn’t say any words, he just folds his arms over his slight chest and stares at the bird.
Look, I’m not a knucklehead, I had enough smarts to get onto that trivia show in the first place. I put it all together quick enough: new construction, maybe getting ready to show a model apartment to prospective clients, first-time landscaping around the building, someone knocked down the bird’s tree or whatever, and its nest and its eggs or—God, little birds?—are gone now, but it’s still fighting the tractor, like it can get the babies back. Maybe the dead birds are still under?
“All right, Darren, let’s not bother the bird anymore.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know, but we’ve upset it, look.”
“I don’t think we upset it,” Darren says quietly. “It was already upset when we were back across the street.”
“Okay, but it’s not going to calm down with us around. Come on, let’s check out the pool.”
I walk away, but Darren doesn’t move. He’s like a kid in a horror movie sometimes, his attention gets so focused that all other things fall away.
“Can we help it?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Whatever it’s upset about is over now.”
“Poor egret,” he says in a whining way that makes me worry about how guys treat him at school. But he’s always tight with the girls in his violin section, chatting away, and I bet they’d all be making friendship bracelets for this egret right now. I decide my kid’s life is fine. In general, at least. For the next two days, I’m not as sure.
“You hungry?” I ask.
He shakes his head. I don’t need to look to know that his eyes are wet. “Okay, we can just stand here and look at the bird, if that’s what you want.”
That’s what we do. Cars are going by, sweat is dripping down my back, more ladies in white jeans are going into the Starbucks, and the egret is still freaked out, but not about us, and I wonder how long it’s been there, fighting this metal thing, and it’s making me sad too, even though my emotions are cinder blocks, so I go and try to investigate, like maybe if it can show me the broken eggshells the bird will feel better, but it flutters its wings at me, with its beak open, and that’s when Darren says, “We can go check out the pool, Dad,” so we head back to the spa.
While we walk I ruffle the hair at the back of his neck. It’s limp and wet. I know he’s gotten sad. He and his mother have always had plenty of melancholy in them, and I’ve never been able to do much about it for either one. They’re just not sturdy, but my own dad made me be sturdy above all else and I’ve come to realize that sturdy isn’t an especially healthy thing for a person to be.
“Maybe there’s chicken fingers at the spa restaurant,” I say.
No reaction to that one. He’s always loved chicken fingers. But thirteen is different from twelve.
The valet kid welcomes us back in that same go-tell-Aunt-Bertha-thank-you tone. By the time we’re at the indoor pool and steam room, my sweat has chilled.
The pool was probably something to behold back in 1980. It’s hidden away from any natural light, occasional tiles darkened like age spots. An old lady in a bathing cap is doing slow laps, and two more are sitting on chaise longues around one of the little tables with pebbled-glass tops. The ceiling is dentist-office low.
“Nice, huh?” I say.
The kid’s staring at a landscape with ceramic vases painted on it, which makes it look like we’re in a low-res Greece or maybe Rome or something. He taps the fakey-jake sky and looks back at me smiling, like he’s finally figured out the answer to some frustrating question.
We lie on our striped towels in the chill AC around the warm pool, and take turns diving in. He keeps his T-shirt on, like I’d have done at thirteen. I display my padded hairy belly to the world, then we go back to the room and put the TV on and drop into our phones. Someone can’t figure out the software licenses in accounting, but otherwise everything at work seems to be going along fine wit
hout me. Amelia asks how Darren’s getting along and I text her back a pic of him staring at his phone on his drooping hotel bed, and it all feels nice, like we’re still married. I compose and delete a few texts to her, then finally put the phone down to stop myself from sending any of them.
I say it’s time for dinner, and Darren doesn’t change out of his T-shirt, so I tell him it’s a special occasion. I’m grateful I don’t have to explain that I want the game-show prize to be something special. He puts on a button-down shirt, pleated khakis, and a clip-on tie—it’s a bit much but also pretty damn sweet.
We go tripping along the nautical hallway, my kid’s loafers—loafers!—squeaking on the plush plastic-y fibers. When we get to the restaurant there’s a printout taped to the window, seventy-two-point Calibri telling us it’s closed for a private event.
Kid and I peer in anyway. He’s on his tiptoes to see what’s going on, bringing his white athletic-socked heels right out of the backs of his loafers. At first I think it might be a wedding, but then I see that it’s probably a work event. There’s an easel with some poster board I can’t make out through the foggy glass.
I’m not the kind to go places I’m not wanted, so I bring Darren to the host desk and ask where the spa’s other restaurants are. The lady explains that there’s just the one, and sorry it’s closed for a party, someone should have told me. I ask what else is within walking distance and she explains that there’s nothing unless we want to get a sandwich from the Starbucks. That’s when I start getting really mad, but Darren’s there so I swallow it all down. He heard enough of my yelling back when I was married to his mom.
We stand in the hallway and I pull out my phone, but just looking at the car apps, imagining sitting in the back of a Camry in traffic, pits my stomach. I don’t want to get back on the highway, don’t want to wait at lights and pass three Applebee’s on the way to what other chain restaurant we’ve chosen. I put the phone away. “Come on, we’re going in,” I say to Darren, and before he can protest I’ve pushed through the doors and gone into the private event.
“Whoa, Dad,” he says under his breath as we step to one side, into the shadows. I crashed enough weddings back in my crazier days to know that you stay as still as possible until you’ve picked your strategy.
Looks like the event has been underway for a while already—maybe it’s technically a lunch?—and the conversation is drunken, the buffet mostly picked over. There’s plenty of waxy little cheese cubes, though, and some raw broccoli, and, no way, what looks like chicken fingers! The placard is in French, but I know a chicken finger when I see one. Darren can eat around the creamy blue cheese center.
I tell him to wait at the quiet end of the buffet while I grab some plates, since that’ll bring me close to the nearest clot of drunk office-party guys—this office does seem to be all guys, at least the ones who’ve stayed this late. I nod to four hair-wave polo-shirt bros with their napkin-wrapped beers, like to say, Hey, office stuff, that work we all do, crazy, amiright?
I get four nods back, then return to my kid with the two plates, their porcelain scuffed gray from innumerable meals. Feeling the office bros’ eyes on the back of my head, I hand Darren one and ask him if he doesn’t want to make up his own dinner and has he seen the chicken fingers yet? I’m hyper aware of these guys’ focus, am sure they’re passing around theories about us, because they’re in that late-party zone where no one has anything to talk about but they’re intimate and cheerful and a topic you’ve discovered together is proof of how amazingly everyone gets along, them against the world. Them against me and my kid. Potentially. I dunno where this is all going to go.
We get our food and then find an empty table where I can move enough smudgy wineglasses and napkins to one side so that we can eat together. Darren’s laying into his chicken fingers and I’m eyeing the bucket with the open wine bottles and we’re just being peaceful and companionable until I sense those guys nearby.
“Hey, are you two with—” Here they say the name of their company, which I honestly can’t remember, but it was one of those full-name-of-a-hometown-guy kind of small-fry investment joints.
“Nope,” I say, keeping my eyes on my plate.
Darren keeps his eyes furiously on his food too, but in a maybe overdramatic way, like we’re in a black-and-white movie avoiding Nazis.
“We were thinking this little guy could be a new junior analyst or something.” It’s the same bro speaking, and he’s probably the one drunk or naturally aggressive enough to make this confrontation happen. Not that I think they’re going to start an actual fight—they just want to make us feel shitty for a while so they can feel un-shitty together. I get it. I’ve done it before.
I look right into them. “Look, guys, we’re just trying to have dinner here. We’re not causing any trouble.”
They make side-eye at one another, and that’s how I know I’ve taken the wrong tack. Now I’ve turned from a foreign adventurer to a freeloader taking handouts. I could have explained that the spa rented out its restaurant without thinking about its guests, and that’s why I’m here eating food they don’t want anymore anyway, but I don’t feel like I owe these bros any explanations.
“Guess you didn’t see the sign,” lead bro says. “This is a private party.”
“We’re not doing any harm,” Darren mumbles.
I raise an eyebrow at him. He just said that? My kid?
“What did you say?” lead bro huffs.
“We’re minding our own business,” Darren says. “You should try it.” He takes a preposterously large bite of chicken finger and starts chewing.
Maybe it’s called cordon bleu, this chicken?
“We’re just thinding our own thisness,” lead bro says, with an extravagant lisp. “Well, this is a private party, and you’re not on the list, so you being here is our business, faggot.”
My world clanks and drops. Blood buzzes through my ears.
“They’re not causing any trouble, man, just let it go,” says one of the other bros. They suddenly come into focus, a trio of pastels—pink, green, and blue—behind lead bro’s orange. One of their hands is on lead bro’s shoulder.
“They’re not done ramming themselves down our throat on every TV show, now they’re coming to our parties and eating our fucking food.”
For the sake of Darren, I will myself motionless despite the rage pushing my limbs to move and fight. Do these douchebags think we’re together? Me and my thirteen-year-old kid? Whatever version of the truth lead bro is thinking, it’s not working for me. I push back hard from the table, enough to send my chair clattering to the floor. A couple of other guys in blazers look over, and go back to their conversation.
Pastel-blue bro picks up the chair. Maybe this is going to work out fine.
Lead bro puts down his beer and rubs his knuckles. Maybe this is not going to work out fine.
I’ve been in my share of fights before, and the whipsmack of this lifetime-achievement prize trip being so sucky has definitely given me the urge to connect my fist with something that’ll scream back, but as I start to do my chest-forward-bumping-the-air toward lead bro, I catch a glimpse of Darren and he’s got this look on his face—not scared, exactly, but more tired, like he’d give anything to be surprised by what’s about to happen.
If I’m a good dad, my priority should be getting us out of here.
For the sake of my kid, I put my hands up and turn away from the bros. They start chuckling and victory-snarking, and it makes my shoulders square off and the hair on my forearms rise, but I still walk away. Darren stands up, looking all meek and lanky, but he takes one last chicken finger from his plate and waves it like a Potter wand. “Faggot out!” he says, before sauntering after me and out of the restaurant.
The fight fury fades. It’s replaced by a queasy middle zone, where the pastel voices join together behind me and I’m waiting to feel a beer bottle or a hock of spit hit the back of my neck, things men have done to me and will do to my son
for decades to come, but also my mind is skimming along the new reality that my meek sensitive kid stands up for himself, has developed a whole gay arsenal of zingers. Who taught him how to do that?
We’re out of the room, and I’ve got my arm around him, rubbing his birdlike shoulder, and then I’m laughing. “Faggot out,” I say. “Amazing.”
“I dunno, that just came out of me,” Darren says.
“I should use it,” I chuckle. “Faggot out. Awesome line.”
“You don’t need to use it, Dad.”
That can mean ten different things, and I try to ask him to tell me more, but the words stop before they get to my mouth.
Darren looks back where we came, to the closed doors. “I’m glad those guys aren’t following us. They were total assholes.”
“Yep,” I say.
Without quite meaning to, we’ve wandered back into the pool area. I lean down and slap the warm, slightly cloudy water. “Want to take a swim again?”
Darren shakes his head. “I think I want to go back to the room.”
I knew that would be his answer. We don’t even have our trunks and towels with us or anything, and after nearly getting gay-bashed, neither of us is exactly inclined to any father-son skinny-dipping.
We walk past the steam room, and since it’s still barely sunset and we have a whole night of sitting on our hotel beds on our phones ahead of us, I drag my feet by looking inside. Narrow tiled box, dingy without officially being dirty anywhere. It’s like sitting under a giant hand dryer that blows wet. I’ve never gotten the appeal of those rooms.
Darren’s waiting for me, worrying his fingers and tapping his knees, so I close the steam room up and walk with him down the corridor of nautical carpet. We get to our room, and he’s immediately absorbed in his phone, unclipping it from the charger and hurling himself onto the bedspread. I take a piss, then waffle in the doorway. “Did you get enough to eat?”
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