“I was on an important call,” he said, knowing it was too harsh but not entirely caring.
“I could come back some other time.”
August sighed. Leaned his forehead on the edge of the door. “Well, I’m off it now, so you might as well come in.”
“You have anything to drink around here?” she asked, wandering through the dining room as though she planned to find it on her own.
It had been her house, too, for almost twenty years. She’d volunteered to walk out with nothing but her personal belongings. She’d asked for almost nothing in the divorce. A function of guilt maybe.
August watched her look around and wondered how it felt to her to be here. Comfortingly familiar? Painfully familiar? He wondered if she now knew she’d given away far too much.
“I have two kinds of soda . . . coffee and tea . . .”
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”
“It should have been. You know I don’t drink now.”
“What, you don’t even keep a little in the house to serve to company?”
“Of course not. Why would I?”
“People like a drink when they come visit.”
“I never invite anybody to come visit. And if they show up unannounced, it’s not much of my concern what they like. Anybody who wants a drink and comes to my house is barking up the wrong tree. You can have a drink before you get here and after you leave.”
August wondered if she had. If she would.
She looked directly into his face for a long time. Then she wandered back into the living room and sat on the couch.
“I guess I was mistaken,” she said.
August sat on his big, stuffed easy chair beside the couch. She made a point of refusing to meet his eyes again.
“About what?”
“I didn’t think you would have called me that night unless you were trying to reestablish contact.”
“Oh,” he said.
He knew he should say more but not what the more should be. The true answer was no. He had not been trying to get back in touch with her on any kind of permanent basis. But she knew that now, and it felt unnecessarily cruel to say it out loud.
“All that weird stuff about Phillip didn’t seem to make much sense, so I thought it was a pretext.”
“I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression,” he said. “It was exactly what I said it was.” Then he realized he was restating what she already knew, which he had decided not to do. But he was doing it, and he couldn’t seem to stop. “I really wanted to know the answer to that question about Phillip, and then once we were talking I wanted to make that amends. I’d already told one of the boys I was traveling with that I owed it to you, and yet somehow until I had you on the phone it never consciously occurred to me to say so directly to you.”
He stopped talking. Ran out of words. He felt for the part of himself that had loved her for so long, even though he knew it would hurt to touch it. He couldn’t find anything. But he didn’t necessarily think that proved it wasn’t there.
There was a little three-dimensional wooden jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table that Phillip had made in high school woodshop, and August watched her finger it almost absentmindedly. Her face gave away nothing. She’d always had a perfect poker face. Quite the opposite of August, whose face gave away everything at all times.
“What’s the deal with the kids? Whose kids?”
“Oh. I met a couple of kids on my way up to Yellowstone whose father had to be in jail for the summer, so I took them with me.”
“For . . . ?”
“I don’t know. They were nice boys. They needed it.”
“I meant what did he go to jail for?”
“Oh. DUI.”
August felt unsettled, and almost unable to talk. Unable to grasp the thoughts he would need to make the conversation work. His mind was a jumble, as if he had the flu or had knocked his head. As if he just woke up. Meanwhile Maggie looked calm and sharp. But maybe that was a function of comparing the inside of his head with the outside of hers.
“Don’t tell me you’re doing missionary work.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Is it part of the program to find and save alcoholics?”
“No. I didn’t find these people. They found me. The motor home broke down, so I called the Auto Club, and that’s who came out and towed me into his shop.”
“Coincidence,” she said.
August had no idea how she meant it. In fact, he increasingly felt himself losing his grasp. Having less and less idea about anything.
“Is that a joke?”
“No, why would it be?”
“If I found someone else whose son died in a car accident two years ago, that would be a coincidence worth noting. You can barely throw a rock into a crowd without hitting an alcoholic.”
She looked up into his face, and he flushed and averted his eyes. Again, he found her face impossible to read.
“I guess it depends on how you define an alcoholic,” she said.
A buzzy silence followed, during which August weighed the trouble they’d already hit. There was a scratchiness to the conversational topic off which they had just glanced. It reminded him of why things had gone wrong between them. Why it seemed they always would. He wanted to express the feeling, but before he could even gather his thoughts, she spoke.
“We were good together,” she said. “What ever happened to that?”
It stunned August to hear her say it, just as he was absorbing how good they weren’t. He didn’t—couldn’t—speak.
“Oh, I didn’t really mean that,” she said. “I know what happened to it. That’s obvious. I guess what I mean is, are we sure that what happened to it is permanent?”
August opened his mouth to speak and promptly fell into even deeper waters. Because he suddenly tried on her idea. What if it was less of a dead end and more of the world’s biggest speed bump, what had happened to their marriage?
Part of August raced forward with the idea, while another more subtle, more hidden part of him tugged at his sleeve, warning him there was something he was forgetting. There was a reason. There was a dead end. And he knew it. But now he couldn’t think what it was.
“Oh,” he said out loud when he’d reclaimed it. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
“Oh what?”
“You drink and I don’t,” he said.
“And that’s a deal breaker?”
“I believe it is.”
“There’s no such thing as a couple where one drinks and the other doesn’t?”
“There may be,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s a workable plan at all. When you were on your way over here to tell me we should think about being together again . . . tell the truth now . . . did you think maybe you would stop drinking? Or did you think maybe I would start again? Or did you think the divide really didn’t matter?”
“I didn’t think about it at all,” she said. “So let me get this straight. You’d never be with anyone again who lets even a drop of alcohol pass her lips?”
August straightened himself physically and tried to clear his head. He felt a little too on the defensive and resolved to take himself off it again before proceeding. He mostly succeeded.
“If I met a woman who had a glass of champagne at a celebration or ordered a glass of wine during a dinner out . . . I wouldn’t see that as being a big problem.”
“Interesting,” she said. “Sounds like you’ve made yourself the judge, jury, and executioner on how much is enough and how much is too much.”
“Not at all,” August said, feeling he was pulling himself onto more solid ground at last.
“So where’s the dividing line? If it’s not arbitrary and not your own judgment, where do you draw the line?”
“It’s simple,” he said. “One takes place in a restaurant. The other in my home. People can do whatever they want in restaurants. It’s really none of my concern. I can’t make the world alco
hol-free, and I wouldn’t try. Those are things I can’t control. But I control my home. And when I walk into the dining room or the kitchen and find an open bottle of booze in my living space, that’s over the line. It has nothing to do with judging anybody else. I just know how I want to live in my own home.”
He waited, but she said nothing. She’d picked up the little wooden puzzle and was holding it in her palm, shaking it lightly back and forth. Watching the smoothly sanded pieces shift in place. If Phillip had been there, he’d have taken it off her palm and placed it back on the table. He hated any kind of nervous habits, unnecessary repetitive movements. He said they made it too hard to think, and that thinking was already hard enough. It struck August that he might have found his footing, and she might have lost hers.
She never answered.
“So, tell me,” August said, “could you live in a house with no booze?”
To his surprise, he felt something rise in his chest, a desperately flapping small bird of anticipation and hope. He hadn’t known any hope was even still alive in there. He’d been so preoccupied by the loss of his son that all other losses had been forced into seating deep in the shadows. So deep he’d lost track of them entirely.
“Of course I could,” she said. “I just don’t see why I should have to.”
The bird closed its wings and retreated back into the shadows.
“I have class notes still to do,” August said. “I’m not sure what possessed you to come by here without calling first.”
“Still always feel the need to control everything, don’t you?”
But August didn’t. In fact, he noted with some pleasant sense of surprise, he didn’t even need to convince her that he didn’t.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” he said.
August sat at the dining-room table for another half an hour, willing his computer to ring. He desperately wanted his conversation with the boys back. Too desperately, in fact, and he knew it. As if he needed their call to save himself. Which he knew wasn’t right. Yet he couldn’t quite grasp how to repair it. He couldn’t work on his notes, because he couldn’t make his brain hold still.
He glanced at his watch to see that he was already twenty minutes late for his regular meeting. He would be thirty minutes late by the time he arrived. But it was the only option that made any sense, so he threw on a jacket, grabbed his car keys, and ran.
“I wanted to talk to the boys,” August told Harvey over coffee, “because I wanted them to know I know exactly how they feel.”
Harvey narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Because their ex-wives are also trying to win them back?”
“Because I wasn’t the most important thing to her. I asked her if she’d put me before drinking. And the answer was no.”
“She’s your ex, August. There’s no such thing as an ex-parent. They needed their parents to put them first. And it’s a parent’s job to put their kids first. How many people do you know whose exes put their welfare above all else?”
“I think you’re missing the point,” August said. “I was married to her for almost twenty years. We raised a son together. She came over to my house to try to tell me we could work through the things that had split us. Do you honestly not think part of me jumped at that idea? Do you think there wasn’t any part of me that still wants that?”
The waitress inconveniently arrived to refill Harvey’s coffee cup. The two men fell silent until she was gone.
“Okay, I see your point,” Harvey said. “I didn’t mean to be dismissive. But let me throw another idea out there for you to consider. You wanted to talk to the boys to tell them you knew how they felt. Fine. Maybe. We’re all human beings, and there are things we all feel. You know how they feel when they’re lonely, too, but you don’t necessarily feel compelled to call them up and tell them so. I think you needed to talk to them because you need an emotional lifeline right now. And because you’ve made them your emotional lifeline. And that’s not fair to them. They’re kids. Somebody else’s. You were supposed to be bailing them out, not vice versa.”
August frowned and stabbed his fork into the leftover pancakes he no longer wanted. He knew Harvey was right, but he resisted letting that truth in, because it meant he had to cut the cord.
“Why do I even bother to come talk to you, Harv?”
“If you don’t want to hear the truth, you’re always welcome to stay away until you do.”
August sighed. “So what do I do?”
“Same thing you did before you met them. Go to work, go to meetings. Call your sponsor. Work the steps. Get on with your life and let those boys get on with theirs. It’s really the only thing you can do.”
In his sleep that night, August had a dream about Phillip. The first he’d ever had. Well, that was not entirely true. The first one in which Phillip had actually appeared. In the weeks after the accident, August had nearly nightly entertained a dream in which he learned by phone call that Phillip was in the hospital. As in, injured but alive. And almost nightly he raced to the hospital to tell his son that he’d been told he was dead. That he’d truly believed he was dead. But he always woke up before he could get there.
This dream felt entirely different.
August dreamed he sat at the dining-room table, rolling that long-lost plastic bottle of iced tea around in his fingers. But it wasn’t half full of iced tea. It was half full of ashes, the way it had been on the motor home trip. When he finally looked up, Phillip had come to sit at the table with him. And August did not feel surprised. He felt gratified. In fact, he felt as though his heart was stretching, growing a size or two at a time. But he did not feel the least bit surprised. He tried to speak but couldn’t. Literally couldn’t.
“I would so go over Niagara Falls in a barrel,” Phillip said.
“Would you?” August said, suddenly finding his voice. “I thought maybe you were the sort who wouldn’t.”
“I was alive. And that might have killed me. So back then, no. But now I would. In a heartbeat.”
August looked down at the ashes in the bottle again, thinking of what difference Phillip’s words might make to any plans for scattering them. When he looked up, Phillip was gone.
August woke up sitting upright in bed. The clock said it was ten after four in the morning, and all he could think was how much he wished he could call Henry and Seth and tell them about his dream. It wasn’t until later that he realized he couldn’t, even if they called the very next day, because he’d told Seth that Phillip was a thrill seeker in life. This would have to be his little secret.
But the urge to connect with them remained. Which is how he knew Harvey was right. He had made those boys his lifeline. And that wasn’t fair to them. It had been his job to bail them out. Definitely not the other way around.
It took ten or eleven days to move it all the way down into his gut, but August accepted those words. It was good that he did, too. Because Seth didn’t call again until Christmas.
When he did, he reported that his father was indeed staying true to his word and having only two or three drinks a night. With a catch. The drinks kept getting bigger.
By the time Seth called, a drink—by their dad’s standards—was a twelve-ounce water glass full of straight scotch or vodka. No water, no ice, no nothing. But the boys were okay, Seth said, because he stayed home.
At the end of the conversation, Seth thanked August for the open offer that the boys could stay with him in a pinch. And he did so in a way that made it clear to August that he was an important factor in that okay-ness. Nothing was guaranteed in that world, but Seth and Henry lived in a reasonable state of relaxation because they always had August as a plan B.
August remembered Harvey’s words, and when he said good-bye he silently let them go. Released them into their own lives. He wished for their father to stay out of trouble, even if it meant he’d never see the boys again. Because that’s just what you do.
You let go.
Part Three:
LATE MA
Y, EIGHT YEARS ON
Chapter One:
WEAKNESS
August made his way through the living room slowly, careful not to trip over Woody, and sat down at his computer. He closed his eyes and made a simple, silent wish.
Please let Seth be there.
He’d geared himself up to do this, and it hadn’t been easy. If Seth was away from his dorm room, August would lose his nerve. He could feel it. And he had no idea how long it would take him to gear up again.
He booted up his laptop and opened Skype. After eight years, he still had only one Skype contact. Seth. He clicked on the icon to call him, relieved that Seth’s status showed as online.
August could call Seth without worry, now that Seth was away at the university. The previous year, his freshman year, they’d talked often. Eight or ten times, which was more talking than in all the years before that put together. This year Harvey’s prediction about life going on seemed to have borne out again. Either that or August had been trying to avoid the conversation he was about to have now.
“August,” Seth said, appearing in a window on his screen.
He was tall like his father. Awkwardly tall, as if life had stretched him. He wore small, round, wire-rimmed glasses, and his hair hung down long in the back, curling into—and over—his collar. Like his father.
He’d grown a beard, a small, neatly trimmed goatee that August had never seen. Last time August called, Seth had been clean shaven.
“Hey, Seth. This is new, huh?”
August pulled at his own chin so Seth would know what he meant.
“Oh. Yeah,” Seth said, seeming embarrassed. “Grand experiment. I might keep it or I might not. Listen, August. I’m sorry it’s been so many months. I’ve just been so busy with school. My class load is insane this semester. I have no idea what I was thinking signing up for all this.”
“It’s not you,” August said. “I could have called. But I’ve been having some stuff going on. Some health issues . . .”
“Yeah, you mentioned that last time we talked, but you didn’t really go into detail about it. And you looked great. Still do, by the way. So . . . okay now?”
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