* * *
Baggage claim. Patrick’s eyes scanned right past Greg to a cluster of gossiping flight attendants before recognition set in. He was expecting his father to fetch him in Hartford and so was surprised to find his brother on the other side of the glass. Greg looked depleted, thin; even from fifty feet away Patrick could read his distress—the younger brother suddenly older, as if he’d passed through some weird vortex and aged a decade in the however many years it had been since he’d seen him last.
When Greg spotted him, Patrick’s carry-on slipped off his shoulder, the strap catching on his elbow, the bag stopping mere inches from the ground; he attempted a feeble wave. They stood there, two brothers, confused, a glass wall between them, like Patrick might bang on the glass and reenact the ending to The Graduate. But he didn’t. Patrick knew; he’d seen the movie dozens of times. It might feel good in the moment, but the harsh realities of life lay ahead.
Patrick made his way through the sliding doors, past the sign that said no reentry, straight for his younger brother, hugging him tight, holding the back of his head, his fingers buried deep in Greg’s hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Greg was trembling. He squeezed his brother until Greg fell limp, free of emotion, for a fleeting second at least. “I’m here.”
They waited for Patrick’s checked bag in silence; the parade of black luggage moved at a funereal pace along the conveyor belt, town cars full of mourners in procession. They would be in such a motorcade in a few days’ time. Neither brother said much on their way to the parking garage, not when Greg struggled to find the parking ticket at the prepay machine, except to usher those in line behind them to go ahead (he had absentmindedly tucked the ticket in his wallet), nor when he couldn’t remember on which level he had parked the car. Patrick stayed calm and even grabbed his brother’s hand when he started to turn like an animal, in rapid, panicked circles.
“Shhhh. We’ll find it,” he whispered.
“THAT’S HOW YOU DO IT!” The voice came from around a concrete pylon, some idiot, breaking their moment. Patrick reflexively waved as if that were the first time anyone was clever enough to shout that at him and not the eleventy millionth. That’s how you do it! was the catchphrase that made him a breakout character on his ABC sitcom in the back half of season two. He’d delivered it faithfully at least once an episode since, and the studio audience—usually shapeless Midwesterners in oversized clothing who couldn’t get into The Price Is Right—always went wild; the second banana, for a time at least, eclipsing in popularity the top. “You’re that guy, right? What happened to you?”
The question reverberated through the parking structure. The People Upstairs was the last sitcom that defined the era of network television; a special season three episode aired after the Super Bowl. The cast was on the cover of People magazine. Even a Golden Globe, for Patrick. Now people watched television in three-minute increments on their phones, if they watched anything at all. More often than not they preferred to watch themselves, making videos with filters that softened their ruddy complexions, or gave them whiskers and noses like cats.
“Yeah. I’m that guy,” Patrick agreed calmly.
“Hey, say it. Say your line.”
“Now is not the appropriate time.”
“C’mon! Do it,” the man urged.
“Okay, that’s ENOUGH!” Patrick let go of his rolling suitcase and charged three steps toward the stranger, angry enough to hit him. It was Greg who pulled him back, suddenly aware they were holding hands.
The man shook his head and fished his keys out of his pocket. “Dick.”
Patrick quickened their pace in the other direction, ushering Greg along before anyone overheard the altercation. It’s not like he knew where the car was parked, but the last thing he needed was to attract a crowd. He kicked open a stairwell door and, once they were safely through, put his hands on his knees while he collected his breath.
A guy in a UConn hoodie came bounding up the steps two at a time like it was an Olympic track-and-field event. Patrick moved to the left to let him pass. He listened as the man ascended two more flights and kept his ears perked until the footsteps faded entirely.
“She, she just . . .” Greg began.
“I know.” He wanted the safety of the car before they did this, but if it had to be in the stairwell, then so be it. “Mom told me.”
“Three weeks ago she told me she wanted Steely Dan’s ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ played at her memorial and I told her to shut up. I couldn’t believe the end was this close. But she knew.”
Patrick turned slightly so Greg wouldn’t see his own pain. “She knew everything.” He should have come earlier. He should have been there to say goodbye. But he reasoned she was no longer his and hadn’t been in years. Every moment he spent at her side stole a moment from Greg or the kids.
Greg shook his head. Patrick focused on the window in the stairwell; someone had etched their initials with their keys. Beyond, planes were taking off and coming in, lights in formation dotting the evening sky.
“The doctor said that after a—” A car screeched around the corner just outside the door. Greg looked at each raw concrete wall as if noticing this prison for the very first time. “I guess it doesn’t matter what the doctor said. I was there with her, but she was gone before the kids could arrive.” He retched three times before doubling over, bracing his hands on his knees. Patrick pushed his suitcase back, stepped forward, held his brother by the hood of his sweatshirt, and winced.
“Come here,” he said after it was clear there was nothing in Greg’s stomach to empty. He helped his brother up half a flight to the next landing, away from this scene and, maybe, hopefully, closer to the car. He dragged his suitcase behind him, disgusted by what he might be dragging it through, knowing already he would burn it and buy new luggage upon his return home.
Greg wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grabbing the railing to steady himself. “How did you survive this? With Joe?”
Patrick stopped cold, as if caught in a horrible lie. He pinched the bridge of his nose (where he could still feel the scar from the accident that took his boyfriend) and inhaled sharply. I didn’t, he thought. Survive. That was always his first response. But he was here, wasn’t he? He was the one still standing in the face of loss anew. He pointed up the rest of the stairs. “Let’s look for the car up there.”
They walked the aisles of this new level, Patrick having relieved Greg of the key fob and clicking it every few feet to listen for a telltale honk or to spot a set of flashing taillights. They ambled up one aisle and down the next for four or five rows before either of them said another word.
“What are you doing here?” Patrick asked.
“Huh?”
Patrick stopped to look at his brother. Why wasn’t he with the kids? “Greg.”
Greg stopped, turned back to face him, but didn’t answer.
“I thought Dad was picking me up.”
“I’m a drug addict.”
The cross talk was almost comical; Patrick tried hard not to laugh. It was one thing for Greg to employ humor as a coping mechanism for grief, but it was another for Patrick to come off in any way cavalier. So instead he just said, “Is this where you meet your dealer?” He looked up at the nearest post, which said 4e. “Should we pick up some catnip before we go home?”
“It’s not a joke.” Greg sat himself down on the bumper of a white passenger van, gently, so as not to set off an alarm.
“I’m not laughing,” Patrick said. A man in what he thought must be tap shoes walked quickly down the aisle behind them. “I’m confused.”
“What’s not to understand?”
“Like, heroin?”
“WHAT? No. Pills.”
“Pills. What kind of pills?”
“Vicodin, oxy, fentanyl, tramadol. I think I once took diet pills I found in my assistant’s desk dr
awer.”
Patrick was half horrified, half intrigued. “Did they work?”
“Did what work.”
“The diet pills.”
“You mean, did I get high?”
“No, did you get thin.” Greg didn’t answer and the silence dragged on, but Patrick thought, Good. He was angry now on top of everything else, and no longer wanted to be as quick to comfort. In fact, he was now questioning his brother’s dry heaves. “How could you let this happen?”
“Half the country is addicted, don’t you watch the news?”
No, Patrick did not watch the news. No good ever came from the news. “How long?”
Greg shot his brother a look. That look, the one he picked up in law school and fine-tuned as a junior associate. “Three years, Patrick. It’s been almost three years. Since the diagnosis. Since I started gunning for partner. I couldn’t do everything. I couldn’t . . .” He reached for the words to continue. “Be what everyone needed me to be.”
Patrick rested his forehead on the side of the van, absorbing the cool from the metal. Jumping forward three hours in time meant it was pitch-dark, even though he was wide-awake. “Are you high right now?”
Greg glared at him with disgust until Patrick pulled his head away from the van.
“Does Mom know?”
It took Greg a moment to answer. “No one knows. I’m telling you first. Look, can we go somewhere, please? Even . . . I don’t know. McDonald’s?”
“Why, do you have the munchies?” Patrick responded with snark, even though he couldn’t remember the last thing he’d had to eat. Perhaps some sort of snack bar on the plane.
Greg stood and shoved his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt jacket before looking down at his shoes. “So we can talk.” He looked up at Patrick. “I need you to take the kids.”
“Okay. Whatever I can do to help.” The family would need him to do any number of tasks this week, so he might as well step up to the plate. “Take them where?”
“Take them, take them.”
“I don’t underst—WHAT?” He scanned Greg’s eyes for any sign he was kidding. “Oh, hell no.”
“Patrick.”
“You are high. That’s absurd. You’re being absurd.”
“Patrick!”
“On its face it’s preposterous. I turned down a chance to present Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the Emmys two years ago. You want to know why? It was too much of a commitment. No. You’re asking the wrong person.”
“There’s a facility. In Rancho Mirage. Only ten miles or so from your house. There’s usually a waiting list, but I called this morning and they made a space for me. Extenuating circumstances, and one of the named partners at my firm knows someone on the board.”
“So, I’m not the first person you told.” Patrick didn’t know everything about addiction, but he knew enough to start tracking lies.
“I told work. I had to.” Greg sighed. “I have to do this now.”
Patrick thought back to when he smoked, in part to stay TV-thin, and how trying to quit right as his show was being canceled led to several relapses. And how a cigarette sounded so good right now in the face of this news, this new cancellation. “But is now the best time?”
Greg started shaking, determined to close the sale. “The kids are going to need their father, not half the father they’ve had for the past few years. Now is the only time.”
Patrick’s head buzzed with logistics; the walls of the garage felt like they were closing in, the floor and the ceiling about to pancake. The cars, and they along with them, would be crushed and discarded, junked. “I only brought two pairs of pants.”
“I want you to take them back with you to Palm Springs. The only way this is going to work, the only way I’m going to be able to do this, is if I know they’re nearby. They’re my strength. They’re all I—”
“Stop it. Stop it now.” Patrick didn’t know if he meant Greg’s shaking or the preposterousness of the request.
An older couple ambled toward the Cadillac parked across from them, the woman on the man’s arm. It took them an agonizingly long time to get in their car.
“For how long?” Patrick knew better than to even entertain the idea with such a question. But it just slipped out.
“Ninety days.”
“NINETY DAYS!” It echoed through the garage, sounding more like a jail sentence than a favor. He shouldn’t paint himself as the real victim here when a man had lost his wife and two children had lost their mother. But he’d lost someone, too. “You’re out of your goddamned mind.”
Greg burst into tears.
“Oh, god. Okay. Just . . .” He reached out to comfort his brother, but couldn’t decide where to place his hands. “You should know I’m an alcoholic.” Patrick wasn’t, but he was grasping at straws. Maybe he could check into this facility, too.
“Patrick. You’re a social drinker.”
“I live alone in the desert, how social could it be!” Ninety days sitting in a sharing circle talking about his feelings while sober seemed like hell on earth, but it had to be better than babysitting, and maybe the facility had a chef and masseur. Patrick lifted the key fob in the air and pressed the button furiously, searching for the car, his arm spinning around like a periscope that had just broken the surface. Goddammit, Joe, he thought, as he often did in times of great stress. Why wasn’t I the one driving? But he wasn’t. He was buckled in the passenger seat when Joe was T-boned by a fucking teenager out for a joyride. That was just his bad luck.
And then, out of the darkness, a chirp. They both spun around.
Finally, the car. They could argue about this later.
TWO
“It’s brunch. You don’t know brunch?”
“Is it breakfatht?” Grant asked while being strapped in his car seat. He was six and had a pronounced lisp.
“No.” Patrick gave the straps a good tug. Secure. Thirty-six hours had passed and the subject of his taking the kids had come up nine more times. He volunteered to treat them both to brunch without other adults just to avoid a tenth. “Fingers on noses,” he said before slamming the door. Did he really just utter that out loud? It was something his mother used to say.
“Is it lunch?” Maisie waited for an answer as Patrick crossed around to the passenger side.
“No.” He checked the straps on Maisie’s booster. Tight, too tight. “How do you kids breathe in these things? Christ.” She was nine now and no longer needed the chair, but she was on the smaller side and Greg warned him that she preferred it.
“We just do.”
Patrick stared at the kids. Grant had Sara’s features, including (impossibly) her third nose; Maisie had her hair and kept it pulled back off her face with some sort of elastic. He closed his niece’s door before climbing into the front passenger seat.
“Then what is it?” Grant threw his arms up, exasperated.
“It’s both. Breakfast, lunch. Brunch. Get it? Didn’t your parents teach you about brunch?” Patrick bit his lip. Their mother wasn’t even in the ground and now Greg was about to vanish, too—now was not the time to be critical. But how do you not teach your children about the most important of all meals? He would trade an arm to be able to give Sara a stern talking to right about now—brunch was an early pillar of their friendship. “Sunday brunch?” It was a last-ditch effort to see if it rang any bells.
“It’s Thurthday!” Grant screamed.
“Chill out, little man. No one can be that uptight about brunch.”
“You’re on the wrong side to drive,” Maisie pointed out.
Patrick took a deep breath. He didn’t drive, not since the accident. For years the studio sent a driver or he’d spend his own money to hire a car. He was paid a ridiculous sum, and it was easy to convince himself it was a necessary expense. Then, with the rise of Uber, he never had
to think about it again. “Not in England.”
“We’re not in England, GUP.”
“New England,” Patrick said, as if that explained anything. He shot Greg a text asking if he would drive them. “And why do you keep calling me GUP?”
“I forget. Ask Dad.”
Great. Patrick stared at his phone, willing it to buzz with a return text. Already, two minutes alone with these children was two minutes too many. “I just don’t drive, okay?”
“You don’t know how?” It was clear Grant had never heard of an adult not knowing how to drive and he wasn’t about to let it go.
“I know how. I don’t like to turn my head because it makes lines in my neck, so I can’t use reverse.”
“You don’t have to, GUP,” Maisie said. “The car has a camera.” She pointed at the screen on the dash.
GUP. There was that name again. GUP, GUP, GUP. They’d been calling him that all morning. “I know it has a camera, Maisie. But cameras lie.”
“No they don’t. Cameras can’t speak!”
“They find a way.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Wait until you turn forty, then all they do is lie.” Patrick thought of the recent headshots he’d been strong-armed into sitting for by his agent’s new something—assistant—and how they’d required an arduous effort from the retoucher.
Greg opened the driver’s door and hopped into the seat. “Someone call for a ride?”
“We need you to drop us at the restaurant.”
Greg started the engine as he fastened his seat belt, all one fluid motion.
“Why do your children keep calling me GUP?”
The Guncle Page 2