Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

“Okay,” said Brian. “Can I ask one more question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where would we be going? Iceland?”

  “Close,” Sandoval said. Man, the booze sweat was strong now. “Hvíldarland.”

  “Hvíldarland,” Brian said, drawing out the word. “Heard of it. Never been.”

  “Me neither. It’s like Iceland’s dirty-faced little cousin, from what I hear. Used as an ammo dump during World War II, seems like it’s been slowly atrophying ever since. I’ll be in touch, Brian. It was great talking to you.”

  •

  That evening, Brooke picked him up in her little black two-seater, and they took the freeway through a no man’s land of rough-edged suburbia, where office parks and mini-malls stood scattershot amid dollar stores and auto repair shops. Some punk band on the stereo railed about annihilation and Brooke mouthed along with the words, charms and skulls and a tiny magic 8-ball wobbling from the rearview mirror. He took it down and shook it, read through its catalog of doubts. Don’t count on it. Reply hazy, try again. Once they got off the freeway, she drove fast, wending through blocks of residential homes that looked eerily alike, zooming past the sodium-lit windows of Plaid Pantry, 7-Eleven, Circle K, around SUVs with bass throbbing from open windows and rust-rimed sedans sagging from their deadened shocks. Past abandoned lots, weeds snarled in fence links like reaching fingers. Brooke finally turned the music down as they were about to pull into the entrance to Sunny Meadows—the apartment complex where their mother now lived—when she glanced over at him, rolled her eyes, and kept driving.

  “You forgot, didn’t you?”

  “Oh shit,” Brian said. “The wine.”

  “Yep.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Dude, you had one thing to do.”

  “Hey,” Brian said, “I’m a busy guy.”

  Brooke laughed. “Oh, so you’re eating Hot Pockets and masturbating full-time now, huh?”

  “Oh, Brooke. Wow. Incredible. The comedy stylings of Brooke Schutt, everyone. Besides, it’s not like Mom is short on wine these days anyway, you know what I mean?”

  Brooke glared out the windshield. “Do you know what kind of an asshole you sound like?”

  “One that forgot a bottle of wine? Jesus, it was an accident, Brooke. Sorry.”

  The parking lot of the Fred Meyer was half-full, forlorn shopping carts cast off here and there. Brooke got out and hoisted her purse over her shoulder, and for just a moment he saw the pockmarks at her temples, the old acne scars there like some ghost of Christmas past, rattling the chains of the history he shared with her. He softened, remembering her as a teenager with toothpaste on her zits, IMing her friends about how hideous she was, a kid prone to crying jags and a nameless fury long before their parents’ relationship went south. They walked toward the pneumatic doors, Brooke in the lead (Brooke always in the lead), and Brian felt guilt clang inside him, remembering how close they’d been when they were younger. Closer, anyway. She’d always been tougher than him, had always held this staunch reserve inside her, but this thing with their parents had cemented the differences between them even more—she’d grown harder still, more resolute, and he’d been the one to become softer, gun-shy, rooted to one spot.

  To her back, he said, “Brooke, seriously. I’m really sorry I forgot.” She ignored him, her footsteps on the asphalt brittle and pronounced, like she was trying to stab the ground to death. Even when she wasn’t working, she got plenty of comments from guys—such was the state of the world—and a rundown Fred Meyer parking lot on a weeknight evening was apparently no exception: a potbellied dude in cargo shorts exited the store, a 24-pack of Michelob Light in his arms. He lifted his lip at her and said, “Looking fine tonight, goddamn.”

  Still walking, Brooke lifted an arm and flipped him off. “Go die.”

  The guy stopped and turned, his face darkening. To her back, he said, “The fuck did you say to me?”

  Brooke kept walking and the guy caught Brian’s eye, his box of beers hanging by the knuckles of one hand. “You need to check your bitch.”

  “That’s my sister,” he said, and surprisingly, a stutter of shame walked across the man’s face.

  “Damn,” he said. “I’m sorry, man.”

  Brian shrugged, turned and walked backward. “What if she wasn’t, though?” Even this exchange was something he could only do because he was with Brooke—he at least knew that about himself.

  The guy walked off, flapping a hand over his shoulder, cube of Michelob slapping against his thigh, flip-flops pap papping their way through the rows of parked cars.

  In the wine section, Brooke grabbed two bottles of white—brands more expensive than he’d have chosen—and started to stalk off again. A little more plaintively than he wanted to sound, he said, “Hey!” and she finally turned around to face him.

  “What is with you?” he said.

  Brooke flicked her bangs out of her eyes, a habit she’d had since they were little kids. Cords leapt in her neck. “With me? Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, with you.”

  She started to speak and stopped, turned to look at the shelves beside them, the long aisles of tiered bottles. When she faced him again, he couldn’t tell if it was fury or tears that were about to brim over, but he’d clearly placed a dubious value on forgetting a bottle of eight-dollar white for his mom.

  “Do you have a fucking clue what’s going on?” she said. “Like, at all? In your life?”

  He reared back, frowning. “Hey, easy.”

  “No, I’m serious. I love you, Bri, but you are just screwing up, hardcore. You’re just treading water; you can’t even remember to get a bottle of wine for Mom, who’s, like, hanging on by her fingernails. To just let her know you’re thinking of her. The most basic things.”

  A stitch of anger ran through him, heated and quick. “Right,” he said. “Cool, Brooke. The air must be thin up there, on that high horse of yours.”

  She rolled her eyes as a small woman with a shellacked helmet of hair scooted past them, one wheel of her cart squeaking loudly. Of course he was treading water! They all knew it! She didn’t have to say it!

  “This is a conversation we’ve had before,” she said.

  “What, you lecturing me about how to live my life? You’re right, we have.”

  “Oh, so this is living?” She gestured at him like a host on a game show. “In school for the rest of your life? Afraid to graduate?”

  “I’m not afraid to graduate, Jesus. Besides, at least I’m not a thirty-one-year-old bartender.”

  “What is wrong with— You know what, never mind.” Brooke rolled her eyes again and started to walk off toward the registers.

  This was, of course, a pointless barb to fling her way, but it was the best he could do. Unfortunately, it was also one that he used on her with unsurprising frequency. He could be Don Whitmer’s age, decorated, with a PhD in anthro and the head of his department, and he’d still lose every argument to Brooke, who tended bar at the Oak and Fiddle five nights a week and was taking business classes at the community college. She was just quicker than him, and always had been.

  Brian sighed. “Hold on,” he said, and walked up and gently took the bottles from her. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “I love you, too. I know Mom’s having a tough time.” Brooke nodded, flicked her bangs away with a finger.

  This, for the most part, was what passed for conciliation among the Schutts.

  •

  Sunny Meadows: dozens of buildings winding a drunken, circuitous path around a field of dead and beaten grass, a jungle gym, a single basketball hoop on a swatch of buckled blacktop. Nearby was a pool, its bottom painted an impossible blue, though this time of year it lay covered with a tarp. Brooke never got lost, always found their mother’s apartment amid the hundreds of apartments just like it. Even now, at night, when every building too
k on an eerie similarity, she drove with a confidence and surety that Brian lacked in, well, everything. Like some homing radar activated, he assumed, by her unfettered confidence and moral superiority.

  She pulled into a visitor parking spot and turned the stereo down; some rockabilly guy crooning about the hot sweats faded to background noise. “So,” she said, “when Mom talks about Dad tonight, try not to be a jerk.”

  He frowned. “Okay. Cool. When Mom looks at your outfit, try not to buckle under her obvious disappointment in you.”

  “You have got to expand your repertoire. You have, like, two jokes and they both suck.”

  “I’m just saying, I think your suspicion is unwarranted. I’m always nice to Mom.”

  “Ha,” she said.

  “I am. I don’t need a lesson in how to talk to Mom.”

  “Just don’t be a dumbass.”

  “You’re the dumbass.” He was thirty years old and they still fell into this easy cadence. “By the way, how do you do that?”

  They stepped out into a night that smelled of cut grass, motor oil, honeysuckle. Brooke eyed him over the roof of the car. She’d put on a hoodie, and beneath it, her bright pink bangs hung over one eye. “Do what?”

  “You always find Mom’s place with no problem. This place is like a maze. I’m expecting, like, a minotaur to jump out and bite me in the ass.”

  “Brian, she lives in apartment 341-B. It’s not like she moves around from building to building. It’s the same apartment every time.”

  Cassie was surprised to see them. She opened the door and spent a moment staring at her children as if she was trying to place where she’d seen them before. She held a hand at her throat (Brian noted the light liver spots there with a mixture of quiet sorrow and a fierce bloom of almost animalistic loyalty) and then her mouth opened and a sound came out—“Ohhhhh!”—that was half frustration, half recrimination. Brian could see moving boxes stacked against the wall behind their father’s recliner.

  Brooke smiled and leaned against the doorframe. “You forgot, right?”

  She ushered them in. “Oh, hush. I thought it was tomorrow, is all.”

  Kisses, hugs, and the three of them stood in the kitchen and gathered stock of the available ingredients for a makeshift dinner. “Man,” Brian said, presenting the bottles of wine to his mother, “we should have brought stuff. We were just at the store.”

  It was a grim affair. There was the wine and an unopened bag of Avocado Oil Sea Salt potato chips. Rooting through her purse, Brooke laid out three protein bars and half a roll of Fruit Punch Life Savers. Cassie laughed and ripped open the chips while her children peered in her refrigerator. It was desolate: a line of condiments rescued from the old house, a half-empty container of white rice dried brittle as gravel. A bag of salad mix in the crisper that had turned to black slurry. Brian shut the fridge door and saw his mother sitting at the kitchen island, drinking wine from a pickle jar. Nine months since she’d moved into the new place and she still had yet to really unpack. She wiggled her eyebrows at him over the rim. His mother was in stasis, and how could he, of all people, get mad at her for that?

  Brooke stood on her tiptoes and peered into a cupboard. “Don’t you believe in food, Mom? Where’s your food?”

  “I work sixty hours a week, friendo. Who the heck has time to go shopping?”

  “But you make food for a living.”

  “Exactly,” Cassie said, and as if that answered something, lifted her pickle jar again.

  On top of the fridge, Brian found two spotted bananas in a cardboard box of cookware, their stems poking from between the black handles of pots and pans bristling from the top. “How did these land here, Mom? Did you throw them from over there? Was it like a boomerang-type situation?”

  “I just put them there. I set them there. What’s with the interrogation?”

  “They’re, like, super mushy.”

  “I brought them from work a while back.”

  “Ah, bananas,” Brian said. “Bananas and half a thing of rice and some chips. Taking good care of yourself, Mom.”

  When Cassie wasn’t looking, Brooke fired him a look. He shrugged, opened his palms.

  Consensus was quickly reached: they would go out to eat. They passed through the jumble of their mother’s apartment. Outside, Cassie fished through her purse and locked the door and there was something about it, about seeing his mom grown a little smaller, a little more hunched and shriveled and way more sad since the divorce, locking the door to this apartment. Locking a door that was one among hundreds—her door right next to that door right next to that door—that hurt him in a way he couldn’t really describe. The seamed flesh at her neck as she dropped her keys inside that horrible macramé purse the size of a duffel bag, the blue veins worming over the rigid bones of her hand—it tightened his throat a little. Watching your parent navigate the topography of heartbreak, especially as they aged . . . It sucked. Brooke was right.

  They walked to a pizza place across the street from the complex. With the grammatically unfortunate name of Piece A’ Pizza, it was bracketed by a mail supply store and a nail salon, and the whole thing could’ve been the site of a toxic spill for the lack of cars out front.

  There were no other customers inside. They had to walk through a trellis wrapped in fake ivy to place their order, and their cashier was a sullen teenage girl wearing a hat shaped like a slice of pizza. She took their order, managing impressively to seethe with a blazing hatred and contempt—for them all, for the job, for the classic rock playing overhead at a nearly subliminal level—all without saying a word. She even managed to seethe against the hat. It was all there. Brian, watching her stab the register with her fingers, felt a curious lift. He almost wanted to high five her.

  Brooke paid for dinner. She almost always paid, really; Brian buying the wine had been an anomaly clearly born of guilt. Tending bar, and with the capitalist urges of a Trappist monk and a frugality and work ethic that bordered on relentless, Brooke made a hell of a lot more money than he did. People meeting them together for the first time were always confused: with her full-color tattoo sleeves that bled up onto her neck, her knuckle tattoos and piercings, hair always dyed or bleached and in some varying state of intended dishevelment, Brooke had always been the one that vibed as the screwup between them. The disaster. But she was sober, resolutely single, taking her business admin classes, and focused (if not entirely myopic) on getting a nest egg together to invest in Portland’s housing market before the city became untenable. She had her shit together. Brian, meanwhile, had that pasty academic look down pat; the patchy beard over a constellation of chin zits, unwashed hair, the gut mounded around his long sleeve button-up or his ironic T-shirt, his sagging backpack. He was a thirty-year-old man wearing a backpack! He looked the straighter of the two, but also usually looked like he’d just come from feverishly masturbating behind some book carrel somewhere. So, yeah. Looks be damned, whose life was in shambles, and whose wasn’t?

  “Thanks for the pizza,” he said, and for once she didn’t say anything snide back.

  The booth squeaked along his haunches as he sat down and scooted over. Brooke sat down next to him. Cassie got in the other side of the booth, swirling her wineglass around.

  “How’s that pizza-wine treating you, Mom?” Brooke asked.

  Cassie smiled. “Oh, stop.”

  Traffic chugged along outside the window. He thought half-heartedly about bringing up the interview with Sandoval—if only to tell his mom about how weird it was to see Don Whitmer removed from his own desk, kind of emasculated like that, since she pretty much thought the man walked on water and was the only thing that stood between Brian and destitution—but there’d be so much additional stuff to unpack alongside it. Specifically, why he was interviewing for such a thing to begin with, in the middle of the school year. He’d spoken to Brooke about his ABD plans but had swo
rn her to secrecy. So far she’d relented, even as she’d gone slack-jawed at his idiocy. Besides, by that evening, the whole interview thing had taken on the quality of an uneasy dream. Not necessarily bad, but a little off. Strange. He wasn’t even quite sure how to frame it to himself, much less talk about it.

  Cassie, as if testing her motherly mind-reading skills, set her wineglass down and said, “So, Bri. How’s school?”

  “Good,” he lied. “Hung out with Don Whitmer today, went over some stuff. Things are good.” Under the table, Brooke clacked his ankle with her boot. He smiled at her and kicked her back.

  “That man,” Cassie said. “Give him my best.”

  “Will do.”

  “How’s the dissertation coming, hon?”

  “Yeah, Brian,” said Brooke, “how’s the dissertation?”

  “It’s fine,” he managed. “Slow. But I’m pushing through. It’ll happen.”

  “Any idea when you’ll submit it?” His mother took another sip of wine. When he was in grad school, she had been very into this idea of him defending his thesis, as if there had been chain mail involved, or a gunfight, rather than Brian sitting in front of a bunch of his teachers answering the inevitable softballs they’d tossed his way.

  “Well, I still have to finish it first. Then there’s the review. It’s all still a ways away.” He buried his face in his cup of soda. His mother cast a glance at Brooke, then back at him, and before he could wonder if she knew more than he thought she knew, or suspected more than he thought she suspected, they moved on. Brooke told them about a housing seminar she went to, how quickly prices were rising even further out of town, deep south and north. Cassie regaled her children with an admittedly pretty funny story (in a Cassie kind of way) about one of the women she contracted catering stuff out to who came down with a sneezing fit while on the phone with a client. When his sister and mother started talking about his father, he drifted. They were a family navigating their collective waters as best they could. His sister and mother, his fractured thirds—they loved each other. He knew it. And yet there was a sense—wasn’t there?—that they were all kind of strangers to each other in vastly important but unspecified ways. And that was really kind of terrible, wasn’t it? That chasm? Theirs was a fierce, stodgy, complicated love, awkward and entwined with so many other things. A love crafted, perhaps, from obligation, from their shared history. And worse, he felt obligated to defend his father in some small indefinable way. The intractable weight of blood, of family. And that in and of itself pissed him off more than anything.