The Sweet Dead Life

by Joy Preble

  “We need to check everything that your mother eats and drinks,” Amber said. “Especially anything that you two don’t. That’ll be a start.”

  “Should we have told Renfroe?” Casey asked. “I mean he’s looking into Jenna’s boot poison and all. Maybe he—”

  “No.” Amber’s tone was sharp.

  Casey’s brows scrunched. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m dealing with your mother’s situation, not him. Doctor-patient confidentially.”

  “You’re not even a doctor!” I practically shouted.

  My brother’s gaze met mine. Here’s what I understood right then: Casey wasn’t really sure about anything when it came to being an A-word. But he was going to find out what happened to Dad. He was going to uncover what had been destroying our family and why. He wasn’t going to stop until he did. Hell, maybe Lanie Phelps had glimpsed that same spark of motivation inside him, something she hadn’t seen since he was a football player. It went a long way to making a crap situation less crappy.

  “So what do you want to do now, Casey?” Amber asked, sounding defeated.

  “I want to go to Manny’s. Bryce says there’s someone I need to talk to.”

  “And you believe him,” Amber said. It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

  Casey pulled out his cell phone and dialed.

  I decided to use the painfully awkward silence to take inventory of our fridge, to see if there was anything Mom and I ate that could be destroying her brain and turning my pee green at the same time. (Amber had said the poisons came from the same source.) The list of items Mom consumed that weren’t leftovers brought home by Casey had extended to five: toast, water, juice, bananas, hard boiled eggs.

  Casey was deep in conversation with Bryce. “You sure?” he kept repeating. He nodded. Drummed his fingers on our grimy kitchen counter. “Okay. If you’re screwing with me, I quit.” He shoved his phone back in his pocket and glanced at Amber. “Bryce says we’re good to go. Dude’s name is Zeke. Bryce showed him an old sports column of Dad’s—you know, the ones where he had a byline and his picture. Zeke swears he remembers seeing Dad at Manny’s—probably more than once. Bryce is smart like that.”

  This was the first I’d heard of Bryce’s IQ. My personal experience had been that a guy who alphabetized his comic book collection by size and thickness was not exactly using his God-given brains to their fullest extent. On the other hand, my brother the angel was still failing Teen Leadership. The world was a funny place.

  “And?” Amber waved her hand in a rolling circle, the universal sign for get to the point.

  “And he’ll be there until Manny’s closes around ten. I’m going to go see him. Talk to him in person. It’s a start. You and Jenna need to stay here with Mom. I’ll call if I find out anything.”

  “No way,” Amber and I said in unison.

  “But—”

  “Casey!” A muscle tightened in Amber’s shapely jaw. “No buts. You’re new. You do what I tell you.”

  With that, she blew out a breath. Correction: she blew wind into our kitchen. Hurricane force. Just for an instant. The ceiling fan in the breakfast room shook. The light over the sink exploded. The overhead light flickered. The hands on our oven clock—the one that had no battery and had been stuck at 2:21 for the past three years—spun to 2:22, then promptly died again.

  “Holy crap,” I muttered.

  Amber’s posture straightened. She seemed to grow taller. A golden glow surrounded her, so bright, that it hurt my eyes. “I’m going with you.”

  Both Casey and I took a step back.

  “Did something fall?” Mom called from the bedroom.

  “Light burned out,” Casey yelled back. His voice trembled. “Made-in-China bulbs.”

  “I’m going, too.” I set my hands on my hips. If I had my boots, I’d have stomped them on the floor. Amber may have been able to flummox my brother with her angel chicanery, but she could not scare me. Besides, I actually agreed with her on this one. No way would I allow myself to be stuck with her and Mom. “Let’s face it. Mom can’t get much worse. And someone needs to keep the two of you from killing yourselves.”

  “Already dead,” Amber said. But she smiled.

  I didn’t smile back. “You’re also covered in dust,” I said. During her hissy fit, the gobs of dust on the ceiling fan had catapulted into the air and splattered her EMT shirt.

  “I’ll loan you something,” I told her helpfully.

  She gave me the stink eye. Whatever. I’d have done the same.

  We left the house about twenty minutes later. Amber was wearing her EMT pants and my old pink T-shirt that read, “This Ain’t My First Rodeo.” I was still in my jeans, tank and hoodie. While I was getting her the shirt, Amber had managed to combine our last banana with the frozen blueberries and the ice cubes into a thin looking smoothie. I made my mother drink it, and when she leaned back on her pillows and her eyes fluttered shut, Casey kissed her on the cheek.

  “You sleep.”

  It was almost dark outside, and the Gilroy’s had plugged in their decorations. The two yard angels glowed like spaceships in the middle of their lawn. On our driveway, my two angels narrowed their eyes at each other.

  “What’s the matter now?” Amber muttered. “Are you too stoned to drive?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said evenly. “You may be my boss, but you need to lose the damn attitude.”

  “Whatever. You can drive. But the car better not smell like marijuana.”

  “It’s Mamaw Nell’s,” I piped up. “She smokes Pall Malls.”

  We climbed into the Merc. None of us spoke, but Casey kept stealing angry glances at Amber as he drove. It was the same look he used to give me when we were little and I insisted that he watch Dora the Explorer instead of ESPN. I watched them nervously from the backseat. Finally, apropos of nothing, he snapped: “It’s my dad and my mom and my sister and my life. At least it was. I mean isn’t that the whole point of you being here? Making sure I do the right thing? So how can I do the right thing, if you keep doing it for me?”

  She sighed. “You’re right. I can’t. However your dad fits into this whole puzzle, I don’t know. You two are on your own.”

  I cowered in the backseat. For once, I wished Amber had shown a little more attitude. Even a lie would have been better than the scary truth.

  What Casey and I Remembered About the Day our Father Disappeared:

  • The weather was humid but not hot yet. I knew this because I remembered what I was wearing: the lightweight navy fleece that said Monterey Aquarium, a souvenir from our trip to California the previous summer.

  • Mom had been late from work. A patient had gone wandering from the Alzheimer’s unit and Oak View went on lockdown until they found him. Somehow, he made it back to his room on his own. She came home about nine o’clock. Back then this was my bed time and I’d just put on my PJs. The three of us asked each other where Dad was.

  • Technically I don’t remember this part, but Dad had been to Manny’s Real Tex Mex that day. The gift certificate was our proof of that, and the confirmation by Bryce’s buddy, Zeke.

  • Another related memory: I had been to Manny’s with Dad. He made a big deal about their chili gravy and how when they got their liquor license, they were going to have ten different Mexican beers on tap. He scribbled it all down in a new spiral notebook. And that disappeared with him. All the old notebooks—packed full of reviews and interviews and descriptions—were still tucked on a shelf in his closet just like always. Now I wondered. Why hadn’t Dad told me he was going back?

  • Back to the day he went AWOL: When he left the house that morning, he was wearing brown khaki Dockers slacks, topsiders, and a white roll-up-sleeve dress shirt. He climbed into his blue Ford Focus. Mom gave the police the exact same details, and more. He hadn’t washed his hair. He’d fiddled with his messenger bag. He’d kissed us and told us that he hadn’t slept well. Back then Mom’s memory was precis
e like that. It should have been. She spent all day working to spruce up other people’s brains. Like I said: irony. She once knew every memory trick in the book.

  • The police had been convinced that Dad had run off. “Was there another woman?” they asked Mom like a zillion times.

  ABOUT SIX MONTHS in, Mom decided to believe them. Secretly, I’d given up in a much shorter period of time. Now this made me feel small and guilty. Dad’s cell phone had gone right to voicemail every time we called it. Mom had continued to pay for the phone for three years. “She calls his phone to listen to his voice on the message,” Casey told me. Eventually he and I admitted to each other that we’d been doing the same thing. But the weirdest part: Someone had started putting money in Mom and Dad’s bank account not long after he disappeared. At first Mom didn’t even notice—things were crazy and Dad had always taken care of the finances.

  But then the deposits stopped. Just like that.

  WE DROVE SOUTH on I-45 into Houston. The air was balmy again. Christmas in Houston was always a crapshoot. Two years ago it had snowed—enough flakes to make an actual snowball. Last year, we walked around in shorts. Right now it was somewhere in between. But everything was twinkling and glowing like the holidays. Manny’s Real Tex Mex sat on Westheimer, a little ways off Montrose. The building had been a movie theater back in the day, and the specials were up on the old theater marquee in red block letters. The combo plate looked promising: two cheese enchiladas with chili gravy, two tamales, rice, beans, chips and a bonus taquito with queso.

  Tiny beer-bottle-shaped lights hung from strings on the ceiling. Half of the tables were packed with people scarfing down tortilla chips, chugging beer and margaritas. Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” blared from the loudspeakers.

  A smiling, inflatable snowman in a Santa hat and poncho sat in the corner. When we walked by him, his eyes darted back and forth and then he said “Feliz Navidad, y’all.”

  Dad would have loved it. The knot in my stomach returned.

  Casey, Amber, and I trooped upstairs. The game room had once been an upstairs lobby for the balcony level. The red-flowered carpet looked worn enough to be the original. It smelled like old carpet, anyway, and the room was stuffed with dozens of flickering screens and ancient pinball machines.

  There was only one guy up there, hunched over Terminator 2. He thumped the pinging and flapping pinball machine with his hip. “Yeah!” he shouted. He was thin and balding, his twig-like arms hanging out of a T-shirt that read “One taco short of a combo platter.” If you added some hair, he could have been Casey’s age.

  “That must be Zeke,” Casey said, confirming our collective worst fears.

  Right. So like Bryce, he was probably closer to thirty. On the other hand, it seemed Zeke was a man of intense concentration. At least when it came to pinball. I only hoped it also came to random nights five years and eight months ago. When he didn’t look up—even after Casey’s third “Hey dude!”—Amber stepped forward.

  Suddenly, the lights on the pinball machine blinked out. The little silver ball rolled down the hole and the whole thing went dark.

  I frowned at Amber. “I thought you had earthbound limitations,” I whispered.

  She flicked a finger toward the floor. “Cord’s loose,” she said.

  I followed her gaze to the black extension cord hanging almost out of the wall socket. Zeke jolted and turned around. He looked at the three of us like we’d fallen from the sky. Not far from the truth.

  “Bryce told us to see you,” Casey said. He sounded like he’d wandered into some old spy movie. Bryce told us to see you. Do you have the goods?

  Zeke looked disoriented. His beady eyes twitched like he was still watching silver pinballs. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s grab some grub. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Zeke, it seemed, was in the same spy movie with Casey.

  Amber sighed. “Geeks,” she muttered. “Like there weren’t enough of them when I was pre-med. I’m cursed. That has to be it.”

  ZEKE ORDERED THE combo special. Casey and I stuck to ice tea, spending the little money Casey had in his wallet. Amber sipped from her water glass and shot occasional longing glances at the margaritas being slugged down by the ladies at the next table.

  I’d have indulged in some taquitos if we had cash. I should have answered Amber honestly back at the house. I was hungry.

  The waiter—a meaty, muscular guy with very hairy arms and no name tag—eyeballed us as he delivered our table’s one and only meal order. The look in his eyes was hard to read, but I think it was saying, Why are you four cheap losers hogging a table and not ordering food? You definitely don’t look like big tippers.

  “Can I get you anything else?” he asked dully.

  We shook our heads.

  He stomped off, hairy arms swinging at his sides.

  I stuffed a couple chips in my mouth and tried not to drool while Zeke forked into the tamale. Mid-chew, he reached into his pocket and dug out a piece of paper. With the drama that matched his weird silence, he unfolded it.

  My father’s byline photo stared up at us.

  My mouthful of chips stuck in my throat. Casey was right. And screw it: Zeke deserved to be as geeky and dramatic and spy-movie-ish as he wanted. Sort of.

  “This is the guy,” Zeke said around his mouthful of tamale and gravy. He tapped my father’s face, leaving a greasy dot of red in the middle of his forehead. “Bryce told you, right? About me?”

  Amber smiled without any humor. “About you?”

  “Yeah, that I’ve got one of those memories? If it’s connected to a place I ate or a place that supports gamers, then I don’t forget.” He tapped the same gravy-grease finger to his own forehead. “You can trust me on that.”

  Casey glared at him. “And?”

  Zeke tucked back into his combo plate. He looked a little like that actor Michael Cera. Only if Zeke had been in the Scott Pilgrim movie, he wouldn’t have had seven girlfriends, evil or otherwise.

  Amber leaned across the Formica table. “Zeke,” she said. “I’m not a patient girl. If you have something to tell us, I would suggest you begin talking.”

  “She’s not joking, man,” my brother added. “You can trust me on that.”

  Zeke nodded. Chewed. Slurped some water through his straw. Our surly waiter appeared. He refilled our chip basket. I waited until he was gone to spot check for stray arm hairs. But before Zeke could dish, Manny himself walked by and waved hello.

  I recognized Manny—whom I’d never actually met when I was here with dad—from the picture on the front of the menu. He was in his late forties, really tall—about six foot five I estimated—thin and bald, the shave-your-head kind, not the follicle-challenged kind. Zeke got hyped at Manny’s brief appearance. Now that Manny had franchised into Austin and Dallas and San Antonio, Zeke told us, he didn’t come around as much. It was like a celebrity sighting or seeing the Pope. At least to Zeke, who chewed some more, then—when we were all on the verge of exploding—finally spat it out.

  He was positive that he had seen Dad talking to Manny. On that fateful April 22.

  The reason? Or reasons?

  Back then Zeke thought he might want a culinary career. He’d taken a couple of cooking classes at Houston Community College and he wasn’t half bad as a sous chef. (Note: I have no idea if the chef part is true. But it’s what Zeke said. He was irritating as hell, but I didn’t take him for a liar.) He’d come to the restaurant that day to chat up Manny about a job in the kitchen. Manny had been buying old pinball machines from Bryce, so Zeke figured he had an in.

  “I drank like a gallon of iced tea while I was waiting,” Zeke told us, finally taking a break from eating. “Your dad and Manny talked a long time. I didn’t want to be in the john when Manny got freed up, but the waitress kept bringing out plate after plate of food, and Manny—he was pointing and talking and your dad was tasting and chewing.”

  “Food writer,” I told Zeke. “
He was gonna write a book about Tex-Mex.”

  If this interested Zeke it was hard to tell. He didn’t seem to care so much about what had happened to Dad as he did about impressing us with his phenomenal powers of memory. I concentrated on the tortilla chips to keep myself from saying what I wanted to say: I just hope all these stories are real and not some fancy game-boy chicanery. If they are, I will procure new boots so I can kick your skinny rear end.

  “Anyway,” Zeke went on, “I had to piss like a racehorse. Finally, I said the hell with it. But I figured I’d give Manny a heads up before I headed to the john. And that’s when it happened.”

  My ears perked up. I scooted closer.

  “I got to their table just as Carla was bringing out combo number 10. That’s the one with three different plates, you know? There’s a starter plate with a ground beef taco and a chili con queso puff. Then the hot plate: enchiladas and gravy and two tacos al carbon. And then the flan and sopapilla duo for dessert—”

  “We don’t need the menu details,” Amber stated.

  Zeke smiled at her. Then he did a double-take, clearly noticing for the first time how attractive she was. “Sorry. I mean normally, they don’t bring all that stuff out at once, it’s a dining progression. But there was Carla, the whole shebang balanced on her arm. I just brushed against her, I swear. That’s when the enchilada plate tipped. Your dad got sauced.”

  Casey frowned. “He was drunk?”

  “No.” Zeke pointed to his own combo plate. “Sauced.” He tapped a finger to the red chili gravy. “She spilled enchilada gravy on his shirt. Serious spillage. He had a mess of red all down the front.”

  I glanced at Amber. She rolled her eyes. The rest of Zeke’s story went like this: Both Carla and Manny started apologizing. The man Zeke believed to be our father blotted at his shirt with a napkin and then headed to the bathroom. Zeke decided he could hold it until Dad returned. (Manny’s bathrooms are one-holers. You’re either in or you’re out.) Zeke grabbed Manny and chatted him up about the sous chef possibility. Manny gave him a job the next week, and Zeke lasted precisely one shift. Cut himself while chopping onions and bled all over the avocadoes during the dinner rush. When the head cook stopped screaming in Spanish, Zeke realized he’d been fired.