Ultimate Frisbee in Nashville. That’s the only time I’ve felt unshackled since you’ve been gone. Maybe I need to stop thinking about you, Aleah.
Jesus God, there’s a little kid in the seat behind me. He’s kicking the crap out of my seat. My head…my head…my head…
August 17th, 1:23 p.m.
Even a Little Farther from Bradenton
The poor kid who was kicking my seat got screamed at and probably spanked (hitting of some kind). If you want to feel like your life isn’t too bad, take a Greyhound bus, Aleah. We should all take Greyhound buses.
• • •
Need a good friend? Call Gus.
Andrew left the room while Tovi showered that morning.
As soon as Andrew left, I turned to Gus and said, “He threw out my shoes.”
Gus said, “This is trouble.”
“Can you believe it?” I asked.
“I’ve decided to stay.”
“Dude, no. You have to go. This isn’t your problem.”
“This is our problem. We’re brothers,” Gus said.
“Your parents are going to call the cops, man. You have to drive home now.” I didn’t want to take Gus down with me.
“I have to believe Teresa will understand. She’s a good mom. She worries about you too. I’ll call them today, okay? I’m not going to abandon you again, Felton.”
Just then, Tovi opened the bathroom door. She wore a tennis skirt, which clearly made Gus shiver.
“Jesus. Child abuse,” Gus whispered.
“Jesus. Thank you, Gus,” I whispered.
“What?” he asked, staring at Tovi.
“Where the hell’s Andrew?” Tovi barked.
We found Andrew in the lobby playing the piano. He had a big white straw hat and a giant pair of sunglasses on the bench next to him, which Tovi had directed him to buy at the gift shop.
“Good. Here’s your disguise,” Tovi said.
I put the junk on, but looked totally ridiculous. (There’s a big mirror in the lobby.)
“This is crazy,” I said.
“He still looks like our dad,” Andrew said.
“It’s better,” Tovi said. “It’s better.”
A few minutes later, we were in the Beemer (the car Grandma Rose once drove) and were rolling over bridge, past water, into sprawl, into crap ranch homes and more sprawl and the CVS pharmacies across from the Walgreens pharmacies, and past Winn-Dixie grocery stores in giant strip malls.
And, Aleah, I was completely petrified. I couldn’t not go but I totally didn’t want to go, plus I had on flip-flops, which I hated because they harmed my escapability. I was dizzy. I wore sunglasses (over a black eye). I wore a big hat. (I’d never worn a big hat before.) Nobody talked. Nobody really breathed. The energy in the car was totally, wickedly foreboding, like when the teens in a horror movie know who the psycho mass murderer is and have made a plan and are on their determined way to kill him (even though they could turn the car around and just go to the beach and forget about it). Crap. Scary.
Eventually, like forty minutes later, we drove through what looks like a Florida Dangling Sack version of a California TV ghetto—lots of seriously run-down ranch homes with cars parked on the lawns, and then, out of no place, came the giant black-and-gold-painted gates of the Fiddlesticks Golf Community.
“Why is this place stuck in the middle of hell?” Gus asked.
“It’s how Florida works,” Tovi said.
Tovi pulled up to security. A giant dude in a uniform leaned out the window of the gatehouse. “Morning, Miss Tovi. You know all these boys?”
“Not intimately,” Tovi smiled.
“Thank God for that,” the gate man laughed. “You kill me, girl.” Then the gate went up and we were in.
Inside, we followed a winding road past Spanish-looking mansions with those clay-pot-planter roofs (as seen on COPS). We rolled past fountains and swimming pools and past the tennis courts and the country club. I felt ill, like I’d throw up hard on my flip-flops, and my straw hat made my head itch and the glasses made the world dark. Gus said, “Reinsteins have some cash, I guess.”
“Hey, yeah,” Tovi said. Then she pulled up to a two-story behemoth with a Honda parked out front. “Why doesn’t he park that shit in the garage?” Tovi asked. “The sun’s going to melt all his gum.”
“This is it?” I asked with no voice to speak of.
“Yes,” Andrew said.
“One little old man lives in that thing?” Gus asked.
“Except when I’m here,” Tovi said.
“It’s like Southern Gothic with you guys,” Gus said.
I sweated great bulbous drips of viscous liquid that got hung up in the mounds of man hair on my legs.
My dad’s dad. Dad.
I don’t know Dad. My dad’s dad hates my dad. My dad’s dad hates me. I’m in a costume. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. Om shanti. It’s okay. Jerri, Jesus. Okay…
My very capable squirrel-nut brain began to take off on the angry hamster wheel, and I couldn’t even move my body as the others climbed from the car.
Tovi leaned back in. “Come on, Felton. It’ll be okay.”
“Can’t we just tell him the truth and get it over with?” I asked.
“We’re in process here,” Andrew shouted at me from outside the car. “Don’t destroy our work, Felton. Please.”
I almost had to lift my legs with my arms. You’re a football player. You’re a damn star. Every school in the country wants you. This is nothing… I swung my big legs out and stretched up to standing, so that I towered over Gus.
“You are a big man, Felton,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You look like the white Ray Charles.”
We walked up the sidewalk. (I stumbled along in the Dangling Sack heat.) Tovi opened the front door. (I stumbled behind her.) Mass murderer. Why don’t we turn and run? Gus and Andrew entered before me. Cold, cold air-conditioning blasted us. We walked into a museum filled with that blobby painted art that is just colors, not actual pictures of anything. (I shuffled, my legs almost giving out.) Phantom of the Reinsteins…
Music came from a room deeper inside. It was Bach. Andrew’s favorite.
“Good. Pretty music. He must be in an okay mood,” Tovi said. Then she shouted, “Hey Papa, I’m home!”
“You’re here?” A voice came from within. The horror…
“Yeah. I have some friends with me.”
And then he came. A little old man in a pink polo shirt, a man with owl glasses slid down his nose, a man wearing shiny track pants and a very big watch, a man with wisps of white, thin, curly hair. He shuffled into the room, talking to the floor.
“Always with the friends, Tovi.” He looked up and saw us. “And they’re multiplying! All boys too. Your grandmother would be very proud.”
“This is Gus,” Tovi said.
“Nice hair, you sheepdog,” the man smiled.
“You know Andy,” Tovi pointed to Andrew.
“Johnny McEnroe!” the man said.
“And this is…this is Ricky Martin.”
“Big guy. Is he Australian? What’s with the hat?”
“Sun sensitive,” Tovi said. “Ricky, this is my Papa Stan.”
“Oh shit,” I whispered. I tried so hard not to tremble.
“I’m Venezuelan,” Gus blurted.
“Must be tribal hair, sheepdog. Come in, come in. Go ahead and use the pool. I’m paying my bills!” Papa Stan said, sticking his pointer finger into the air.
“We’ll knock around for awhile, Papa. You want to hit some balls later?”
“Maybe, little girl. My back doesn’t feel straight today. Slept funny. All right. Bills! Good to meet you all.” He shuffled back into
the house.
“That was totally anticlimactic,” Gus said. “Tribal hair? That’s funny, don’t you think, Ricky Martin?” Gus grinned at me. “Nice one, Tovi.”
“He’s in a good mood, man. Don’t let your guard down. Let’s look at some pictures upstairs,” said Tovi.
We followed Tovi up some brick stairs and into a large room at the front of the house. We sat down on a couple of couches. Andrew seemed relaxed. Gus was relaxed. I thought I’d vomit. Tovi pulled two photo albums off a shelf and handed them to me.
“These are pretty neat, Felton,” Andrew said. It was the first kind-sounding statement he’d made to me in months.
The first one had pictures of my dad and Evith, Tovi’s mom, when they were in high school. Lots of prom and beach (Fort Myers—they always vacationed here) and messing around with friends and tennis tournaments. Dad didn’t look exactly like me.
“He had a bigger forehead, huh?” I said.
“Bigger than what?” Tovi said.
“I seriously wouldn’t know that wasn’t you,” Gus said, looking over my shoulder. “He looks a little off, but seriously, man. That’s like 1980s you.”
There was a great shot of high-school Dad holding a trophy and smiling his head off. I could see me. I could see a picture from the fall Jerri took of me, Cody, and Karpinski standing in front of the scoreboard after the Richland Center game. I could be Dad in that shot.
“He looks so happy, you know?” I said.
“He really does,” Andrew said.
“Maybe he was then,” Tovi whispered. “But not a couple of years later. Mom told me that Papa just rode him constantly. He’d pull Steve out of bed at like 4:30 and make him run. If Steve didn’t get all As, Papa would ground him. If he played bad in a tournament, Papa would make him hit balls half the night. Mom said it was pretty terrible. After he left for college, Steve wouldn’t come home for anything.”
“Shit,” I whispered. “Then why are we here?” I glared at Tovi.
“You saw him, Felton. You saw Papa. He’s nice, okay? He lost Steve. He lost Gram.”
Andrew nodded next to her.
“You think this is good for us?” I asked Andrew.
“Don’t you want to know what happened?” Andrew said.
“No.” I shook my head.
“Look at this,” Tovi said. She handed me the other album.
These were pictures of me—three-, maybe four-years-old, with Dad, Jerri, and Grandma Rose at Fort Myers Beach. There were a couple on the same pier where Andrew first photographed a pelican, me in Dad’s arms, staring up at birds, me pointing at a boat on the gulf behind us. There was one close-up of Jerri and Dad cheek to cheek.
“Weird to think he was romantically with other women,” Andrew whispered.
“Shut up,” I whispered back.
There was a picture of me nuzzling my head into Grandma Rose’s cheek, her laughing. “I sort of remember,” I said.
Felton in diaper. Felton stares at shells. Felton chases seagulls. Felton in surf with dead father. Felton and Tovi running into the water. Felton hugging dead grandma’s leg. Felton lifted into the air by Jerri, who is right now probably holding hands with your dad, Aleah. And then, just one shot from ten steps behind: Felton holding hands with an older guy named Stan. Felton looks up laughing. Stan looks down making some kind of goofy face. That guy, the old one, is alive but will not talk to, look at, acknowledge Felton’s existence any more. That guy thinks Jerri is trash and Andrew is unworthy of attention. That guy is downstairs in this house.
“Hey,” Tovi said. “Compare this picture to that one of your dad when he was smiling after his match in high school.”
Tovi pulled an 8x10 out of the album. “Look. You can see that he stopped enjoying playing. It’s from when Steve won the National Championship. He beat Guillermo Pender, see?”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Pender made it into semifinals of the Australian Open the next year,” Tovi said.
“Yeah? Okay?”
“So, Steve was like beating dudes who were amazing, like tops in the world. But look at Steve’s face.”
Guillermo Pender smiled in the picture, even though he took second. My dad, though, wasn’t smiling at all and was staring off into space. If anything, he looked a little mad, or maybe sad.
“He was awesome,” Tovi said, “but he totally didn’t care by the time he was champ. You have to pretty much kill yourself to play at that level, but your dad didn’t care.”
“Pretty much kill yourself,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Tovi said.
“I have to leave. Right now,” I said.
“Now?” Tovi asked. “Don’t be dumb.”
“Now,” I said louder.
“No,” Andrew said.
“I want to go.” I stood and handed the picture to Tovi.
Gus said, “It’s okay, Felton. It’s okay, man.” He nodded at the others. “Felton found Steve hanging. Don’t take this stuff too lightly. This is rough shit.”
I stood there. Gus. Man. He’s as good as it gets, Aleah.
Tovi said, “You’re going to be all right, Felton.”
Even Andrew nodded at me.
“Okay,” I said. “Can we do something else at least?”
“Let’s see if Papa wants to hit,” Tovi said.
We all followed Tovi downstairs. Charming Grandpa Stan was eating green melon balls in the kitchen when we entered. “All these boys,” he said.
“We feel like hitting Papa. You interested?”
“Oh, my poor back.” He shook his head.
“Come on. At least you can coach Andy,” Tovi said.
“All right. For the youth!” he said. He held a fork up in the air with a melon ball spiked on it. Then he glanced over at me and paused. “Why don’t you take off your glasses, Ricky Martin? I can’t see your eyes. Do you have eyes?”
“Light,” is all I could get out.
“He has dilation issues,” Tovi said.
“Hmm.” Grandpa Stan shrugged. “Maybe if he stayed off the cocaine?”
“Bahahahahahaha!” Gus laughed.
“The Venezuelan has a sense of humor,” Grandpa Stan said.
Then Stan looked at my feet. I got worried he’d recognize them, so I curled my toes. “Ricky Martin is going to play barefoot?”
“I can’t play,” I said. “I have leg problems.”
“What leg problems?”
“Hamstring,” I said.
“We know a little bit about that in this house,” Stan nodded. He wasn’t smiling this time. “We sure do. Right, Tovi?”
“Yeah,” she said. “The Reinsteins have short hamstrings.”
“That’s what I hear,” I pretty much shouted.
Everyone stared at me.
“Tovi has short hamstrings,” Grandpa Stan said. “So did my son.”
“Yes,” I nodded.
And then we were following Grandpa Stan and Tovi on a path outside the house. And then we were next to the golf course, so green compared to the country club in Bluffton. And then we were pulling racquets out of lockers, and my grandfather grabbed my hand and stared at it, paused over it, which made me shake.
“Do you play when you’re healthy?”
“No,” I said.
“You have athlete’s hands. Not like this one,” he pointed at Andrew. “He has ballerina’s hands. Ha!” he laughed.
Andrew nodded.
“Too bad, Ricky Martin. Wish you had some shoes. I could teach you the game. I’m a good coach. Just ask my daughter over there.”
“Granddaughter, Papa.”
“Right…right,” Stan mumbled.
He passed out racquets to Andrew (Here you go,
McEnroe!) and Gus. Tovi had her own racquet in the locker. Then he handed me a metal basket full of balls (“Relegated to ball boy, big fella”), and then we headed to the courts.
Tovi and I fell behind as we walked along. “This is terrible,” I said, my voice weak.
“No,” Tovi said. “This is the plan, okay? He’s teaching Andrew to play, and when Andrew gets good enough, we’re going to tell Papa who he is.”
“That’s it?”
“Andrew also listens to music with him.”
“Jesus. Andrew can’t play. He’s the worst athlete in the world.”
“He’s smart. The game is half smarts, Felton.”
“That’s your plan,” I mumbled.
Ten minutes later, Tovi was smacking balls at Gus and he was tripping all over himself. She moved so quickly and beautifully that I wanted to play. (“If there are balls around, Felton will chase them…” Remember that Andrew said that?) And Stan was hitting balls at Andrew, who stood a few feet from the net. Andrew actually managed to take the ball out of the air and drop it softly back over the net half the time.
Stan yelled at him, “That’s right, kid! Use what you’ve got. Soft hands! Kill the point. Kill the point…”
My leg muscles twitched. I did want to play. I love to play stuff. The seriously hot sun beat down on these beautiful, rich-person courts. I sweated. I felt like I should be moving. I couldn’t move.
Then Andrew went on a streak of missing the ball or hitting it way off the court. Stan got more and more wound up, the more Andrew blew it. He barked at Andrew to focus. I could see Andrew get frustrated. I could see him tighten up and miss because of Stan’s yelling. Maybe it was because I’ve hated being the focus? Maybe it was because I’ve felt all this pressure to do well? Maybe it was because I’d just seen that picture of my dad looking sad after winning the NCAA Championship? I don’t know. But…
After watching Stan yell for ten minutes, “Focus, kid. Come on. Look at the ball!” After Stan screamed, “Your concentration is for shit…”
I stood up and shouted, “Lay the hell off him!”
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