The Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

  “You made out like a bandit, bandit,” Ben said when he arrived for dinner. The only present he’d brought was himself — Paul had heard his mother on the phone with him the day before, practically pleading with him to come, to set things right with Sonny. Now his father wasn’t even here. He’d gone out to walk the dogs, and Paul was in the process of attempting to put together his biggest present — a foosball table — by himself; the pieces of it were spread around him in disarray on the living room floor, the incomprehensible directions already wadded in a tight ball.

  “You know what I got for Christmas when I was a kid?” Ben asked, shaking his head in astonishment at the sheets of wrapping paper strewn around the room. “Jacks. And maybe a pack of baseball cards. That was it.”

  “That’s crap,” Paul said.

  “Okay, well, I never had a haul like this.”

  “You never had a father who never had toys,” Laura said, handing him a glass of wine. “You know that’s not staying in the living room, right Paul? It’s going in the basement.”

  “You should start charging admission to your basement,” Ben said. “What all you got down there now? Last year was that snazzy drum set, year before that the bumper pool table, year before that . . .”

  “Can we keep it up here?” Paul asked Laura. “Just for vacation? Then me and Dad can move it downstairs.”

  “Dad and I.”

  “Where is old Dad anyways?” Ben asked, crouching on the floor beside Paul and uncrumpling the sheet of assembly directions. “Out gettin’ his picture taken?”

  “Ben,” Laura said. “It’s Christmas.”

  “Right,” Ben said. “No pics on Christmas.” He peered at the directions, tugging on the end of his mustache as he read, then looked at the parts on the floor. “Where’s ‘A’?” he asked. “Which one’s that?”

  By the time Sonny returned from his walk Ben had fully assembled the foosball table and Paul was well into getting his butt kicked. He’d played before, at the same arcade in Philadelphia where he’d played Skee-Ball with his parents, but Ben was ten times the foosballer he was, moving from one lever to the next with great prowess while Paul spun his rows of men around frantically, usually long after the ball had skidded under their collective feet.

  “That was fast,” his father said, shaking snowflakes off his coat before throwing it over Ben’s on the back of the couch. He didn’t say hello to Ben and Ben didn’t say hello either. Paul took this as a good sign. You never have to say hello to your friends. You might as well say hello to yourself.

  “I’m smokin’ him,” Ben said, stepping out of the way. “I can’t help it. Step on in here so he’s got somebody to beat.”

  “Uh-uh,” Laura said, coming into the living room. “First we eat. Then the boys can play.”

  “So when you coming back to work?” Ben asked as they took their seats around the dinner table. Paul shrank a little in his chair. Couldn’t they talk about the food first? Couldn’t they talk about football or the weather?

  “Pretty soon,” Sonny said. He took a long swallow of his wine, smacked his lips. “We go to L.A. the middle of January, for four or five weeks. After that.”

  “After that you become a regular guy again, huh?”

  Paul glanced at his father. Would he get angry? He plopped a spoonful of mashed potatoes on his overloaded plate and smiled. “That’s right,” he said pleasantly. “Just a regular guy.”

  “We’ll all be back to normal,” his mother said cheerfully.

  They set to the business of eating. Wine glasses were emptied and promptly refilled. Laura and Sonny talked fondly about the holiday feast Paul had spent under his grandparents’ dining room table, pretending he was the family dog. Ben told a story about an old woman in Pittsburgh who choked on a turkey bone while eating Christmas dinner by herself, then called 911 and — unable to report what the emergency was — gobbled into the phone until she died.

  “You’re a shameless liar,” Laura said.

  “Every time you tell that story I believe it less,” Sonny agreed.

  Ben shrugged. “Believe it or not,” he said. “It’s all the same to me.”

  “Carson’s uncle choked to death,” Paul said. “On jujubes.”

  “I don’t think so,” Laura said.

  “He did,” Paul said. “Ask Mrs. Diehl. He was at a movie and —”

  “Jesus . . .” Ben said. “If I choke to death on jujubes, somebody promise me right now you’ll put a bullet through my head before the medical examiner arrives.”

  “You’re on,” Sonny said. He opened another bottle of wine. “As long as I get to finish the box.”

  “Then maybe they’ll make another movie about you,” Ben said. “Pitch ’em the story while you’re out there. See if they like it.”

  “I’m going too,” Paul chimed in. “I get to go to the studio and meet stars and stuff.”

  “Is that right?” Ben asked. He looked at Laura with surprise and — it seemed to Paul — maybe even a little disapproval. “Well how ’bout that?”

  “For a week,” Laura said.

  “Hmm,” Ben said. Then he winked at Paul. “Hey, listen, don’t get mixed up with any of those Hollywood girls. They’ll break your heart.”

  “He’d know,” Sonny said. “Never seen one man go through so many hearts. What number you on now?”

  Ben shrugged. “Stopped keeping track. Ran out of fingers.”

  Sonny turned to Paul. “Last time we went to Pittsburgh this guy had his heart broke in three days. It was like watching a movie on fast-forward. One day they meet, next day they’re in love, third day she finds out he’s a fireman and dumps him.”

  Ben smiled wryly. “Must be nice to be perfect,” he said. “Not every guy scores the first time he touches the ball, Sonny.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Laura said. “That makes me the ball, right?”

  “But a loved ball,” Ben said.

  “She dumped you ’cause you’re a fireman?” Paul asked. “What’s wrong with firemen?”

  “They die too much,” Ben said, forking a piece of turkey. “For some gals that’s a turnoff. Go figure.”

  “Maybe it has more to do with the way you live than the way you die,” Laura said. “Did you ever ask them?”

  “Ask ’em what?” Ben said.

  Laura shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know, Ben . . . anything?”

  He sighed. “You don’t understand. Most gals aren’t like you, okay? Most gals won’t —”

  “And what am I like?”

  Ben fingered his mustache. Sonny poured himself another glass of wine, swallowed half of it before he put it down. Paul said a silent prayer that a football would come crashing through the living room window.

  “Let’s forget it,” Ben said.

  “No, really,” Laura said. “I’d like to know how you see me. Dutiful?”

  Ben laughed. “That’s not the word I was thinking of.”

  “Then what?” Laura asked. “What do —”

  “Just make your little speech and get it over with,” Sonny said abruptly.

  Paul felt a tugging sensation at his feet, as if he and his parents and Ben and the tableful of turkey and potatoes and cranberry sauce were slowly being sucked into the floor. The sensation was so intense he braced himself against the undertow.

  “My speech?”

  “Yeah, you know, the one where me and him are idiots. Speech number four, I think. The selfish fireman speech. You know how it goes . . . pick it up from can’t you think of anything else to do with your lives? Go on, we got nothing better to do than sit here and listen to it. I’m not sure Paul’s heard it before.” He turned to Paul. His bottom lip was heavy, pouty. This was the three-quarters-drunk look; Paul had seen it before, not a lot, but enough to know. “What do you say? You heard this one?”

  “Bits and pieces,” Paul muttered. He felt like strangling both of them. Why start this now? This was what bedrooms were for, what whispers were for.

  “
How ’bout the dessert speech instead?” Ben said. “Just pick it up from how does a piece of pie sound?”

  “You’re so pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” Laura said to Sonny. “Sitting there like the cat who ate the canary, so puffed full of feathers you’ve had to let out your belt a few notches.”

  Good plan, Paul thought, his full stomach churning. The old stay-at-home plan, worked like a frigging charm. A nice family Christmas, just as he’d imagined.

  Sonny turned to Ben. “She used to be crazy about me,” he said. “You’d never know it, would you? Her eyes . . . oh yeah, they’d just light up. Now every year, every day, the light gets a little dimmer.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Laura said. “You’re embarrassing yourself. You’re drunk. You’ve had about fifteen glasses of —”

  “I’m drunk too,” Ben said adamantly, though he clearly wasn’t. “I’m drunk and I’m sorry. I got us all kinda carried away, didn’t I?” He slammed his fist on the table; the wine glasses shuddered. “Who’s up for foosball, dammit? I’ll spot any one of you losers five points.”

  “You’re on,” Paul said. He rose quickly from his chair, thinking that this gift from Ben was worth a thousand whacks on the head; he couldn’t remember ever being so grateful for anyone in his entire life.

  • • •

  The dream began familiarly — a test before him that he hadn’t studied for, an unsharpened pencil, all the other students scribbling furiously while he stares at the sheet before him, a single page filled with incomprehensible words, absolute gibberish, followed by the only symbol on the entire sheet that he recognizes — a question mark. Usually at this point in the dream a long shadow would drape over him and he’d look up into the eyes of a disapproving teacher, one who sometimes wore the face of his mother. But now, tonight, a new turn: the other students are rising from their desks and rushing to the window. He turns to see what they’re looking at and sees the Neidermeyer house, towering on a hill above the school, the middle caved in. The voices of the students are hushed but worried.

  “Maybe there’s somebody down there . . .” Carson Diehl says.

  “Under that?” Jennie Weitzel asks. “Be dead now even if there was.”

  Paul started awake. He wasn’t sure what had woken him, and he briefly treaded water on the surface of his dream, was slowly sinking back to the hushed voices of his classmates when he heard noises from the living room. It sounded like one of the dogs was scratching on the front door, had been left outside in the cold night. He looked at the clock. It was two-thirty. His heart, still pounding from the sight of the Neidermeyer house out the window of Casey Junior, would not still. He sat up, listened — definitely one of the dogs, he decided. Hugging himself against the chill, he left his room and trudged sleepily down the hallway.

  “All right, already,” he said. “Hold your —”

  He stopped. His father, dressed in his bathrobe and sneakers, was sitting at the dining room table in the dark. He had a silver toaster clenched between his knees and was scrubbing it furiously with an orange scouring sponge. A bowl of soapy water sat on the table, and every few seconds Sonny plunged the sponge into the bowl, then yanked it out, flinging water everywhere, and set to scrubbing again. The innards of the toaster — screws, nuts, washers, four charred grills — were scattered on the table before him. Paul stood for a moment, watching in silence, before he mustered the courage to speak.

  “Dad?”

  Nothing. Not even a flinch. The scrubbing continued unabated. Had he even spoken? Or had he just thought the word dad? He’d try again, once more, and then he’d give up, go back to bed, chalk it up to dreaming. Who was to say otherwise?

  “Dad?”

  Sonny glanced up briefly, then returned his attention to the toaster. “Jelly,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think it’s jelly. Hard as a rock.”

  Paul took a step closer. He wished it weren’t so dark; in the light, he thought, this wouldn’t seem so strange. In the light this would make sense.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It was buggin’ me,” Sonny said. He laid the sponge on the table and started picking at the spot with his thumbnail. “I couldn’t think what coulda happened to it. Then just now I was lying in bed and it came to me. The closet in the laundry room, a box full of old shit, stuff from college.”

  Paul sat down at the table. “That’s your toaster from college?”

  Sonny looked up, smiled, but didn’t stop picking. “I told you about it, remember? A while back? The magic toaster . . . it could cook anything. That got me thinking. I couldn’t remember where it was. I couldn’t remember throwing it out, giving it away, couldn’t remember anything about it. But here it is, good as new.”

  “Why’d you take it apart?”

  “It’s broken,” Sonny said. “I plugged it in in the kitchen and nothing happened. I thought maybe I could fix it, but now that I took everything out I don’t remember where any of it goes. So I thought maybe I’d clean it up, so I could see it good, and then maybe I’d be able to see where to put everything.”

  Paul hesitated. Point out the obvious? Or let it go? He decided on the former. “We already have a toaster,” he said.

  “So?”

  So who needs two toasters? So who gets up in the middle of the night to find a toaster that hasn’t toasted in fifteen years? So who thinks cleaning it could possibly help to fix it? He wondered if his father was still drunk, if he’d kept at the wine after Ben had left and he and his mother had gone to sleep.

  “Where’s Mom?” Paul asked.

  Sonny shrugged. “In bed, I guess.”

  Paul shifted in his chair. “Do you want me to go get her?”

  Sonny looked up at him, flustered. “What for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said. “I just —”

  “What’re you doing up anyway? What time is it? Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “I . . . I had a bad dream.”

  Now, finally, Sonny’s face softened, his shoulders untensed. He set the toaster on the table. “You wanna tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  Paul shrugged. “It was dumb, that’s all.”

  Sonny regarded the wreckage spread across the table. “Talk about dumb,” he said, his face relaxing into a smile. “Huh? Talk about dumb. This probably looks pretty dumb, the old man sittin’ here in the middle of the night.”

  “It’s okay,” Paul said. “It’s just —”

  “But it was buggin’ me,” Sonny said, his eyes darting to the toaster. “Buggin’ me, trying to remember . . .”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “Little stuff like that, it can bug you bad.”

  Sonny picked up the toaster again, set it between his thighs, grabbed the scouring sponge. “I’m gonna give it one more try,” he said. “It can’t be stuck there forever. Right?”

  “Right,” Paul said meekly. No, he would not go wake his mother. And he wouldn’t tell her either, not tomorrow and not ever. He wasn’t sure exactly why, but he knew this was the kind of thing you just didn’t tell. He would sit here, sleepy, while his father scrubbed. He would wait it out.

  Chapter Five The day Sonny was scheduled to leave for Los Angeles, Paul came into the kitchen for breakfast and spotted his father standing on the back steps, sipping a cup of coffee and watching the dogs bounding circles in the deep snow that blanketed the backyard. His mother was nowhere to be seen; he could hear the familiar steady hum of the shower coming from their bathroom. On impulse, Paul dropped his backpack, burst out the back door and down the wooden stairs past his father, then grabbed his football from the dry spot under the steps. They hadn’t played in months; the pigskin was pliable, gave under the press of his fingers along the stitching. He spun to the yard and cocked his arm behind his shoulder.

  “Go out!” he shouted.

  Sonny laughed, blew steam from his mug into the cold morning. “Your mom’ll kill me. You’re al
l dressed for school.”

  “Twelve-ten-sixty-two . . . HIKE!”

  Sonny set his mug at his feet and sprinted down the stairs and across the yard. The dogs abandoned their snow circles and stumbled after him. This was the way the game worked: he and his father on offense, the dogs on defense. Paul would call a play and his father would dash out into the yard with the dogs at his heels; he’d fake them left, right, then break long or short as Paul let the pass fly. If Sonny caught the ball (and he almost always did, even if the pass was wobbly or off target) he would dodge the dogs and make for the back steps, which served as the goal line. Paul’s job was then to block — or, in extreme circumstances, distract — the dogs as they lunged for the ball in Sonny’s arms. Sometimes they switched positions and Sonny played quarterback while Paul went out for passes, but it was always Paul’s task — part of his gridiron education — to call the plays. It was a great game, in some ways even more fun than real football, though the dogs would only hold up their end of things for ten or fifteen minutes before getting worn out and collapsing happily by the stairs, tongues lolling.

  The dogs were less hampered by the foot of snow than Sonny. June got a nose on the ball as Sonny staggered clumsily toward the steps, and this constituted a down.

  “You really got to go?” Paul asked as Sonny handed him the ball. He hadn’t meant to ask it but, out of breath and happy to have his father playing their game for the first time in months, he couldn’t keep the question from his lips.

  “Come on,” Sonny said. “I’ll see you in three weeks. Call your play.”

  “I’ll receive. I’ll fake left, go right, short. What time’s your plane?”

  “Eleven. I gotta pick up Ian at nine.”

  Ian. Stupid Ian. What did he have to go for anyway? What possible contribution could he have to make to the movie? It wasn’t like he was an expert on anything — all he’d done was lie there like a retard, waiting to be rescued. He was no hero. So what did they need him for? What did they —