by Craig Birk
Interlude Two
Roger (5)
Most of what Roger Kemp remembered from his childhood about his father, Jack Kemp, was him arguing with his mother in the kitchen or behind a closed door in the bedroom. The house they lived in, just outside of Sacramento, California, only had two bedrooms and a small living room, so there were not many alternatives.
If the discussion was in the kitchen, then Jack usually had at least four empty Budweisers in front of him, though never more than six. Roger didn’t think about this until much later. In his twenties, and now a bartender by profession, Roger had the opportunity to observe firsthand many people’s drinking habits. Most people either didn’t drink at all, only had one or two drinks, or kept drinking as long and as much as the situation allowed. It was very rare for someone to actually just have four to six drinks, but that was his dad’s routine.
Anyway, Jack did his arguing with his wife much like he did his drinking, frequently but never too out of control. So he and Sheryl, Roger’s mom, never seemed to reach the breaking point because both would raise their voices but never quite yell and there was never any physical violence. It was as if they preferred slow torture.
There were a fair amount of good times in the Kemp household as well. In fact, the week before the day that would spell the end of the marriage, the three of them enjoyed a lovely vacation to Tahoe where five-year-old Roger played in the lake and got sick eating too many tacos.
But in the end, things unraveled very quickly, for two reasons. Jack was a typical scumbag guy, and Roger never slept well as a kid or an adult. So, on a Saturday night in March of 1979, Roger woke up and went into the kitchen to get some apple juice. He remembered to bring his cup with him from the bedroom and felt he was well prepared. He was not well prepared for what he saw next. His baby sitter, Jessica, who was a student at the local community college, was bent over the kitchen table and his daddy was behind her. They were both naked. Roger had no idea why, but he knew this was a bad thing and was not something he was supposed to see. To this day, the most vivid part of the memory was the hideous orange and red wallpaper in the kitchen. He was eternally grateful to that wallpaper for muting out the rest of the vision in his mind.
No longer interested in apple juice, Roger ran back to his room and wished his mother was there, but she was visiting his grandparents in Arizona. Roger began to wonder if he should mention this to his mother at all. In the end, he didn’t have to because Jack told her what happened when she returned. Sheryl Kemp could put up with a lot of things, but for whatever reason, infidelity was not one of them. She filed for divorce the next week.
Roger’s dad ended up moving to New York by the end of the year. From then on, Roger lived with his mom, and it was just the two of them until he was in high school and his mom remarried with a man who owned a medium-sized contracting business. His stepdad, Howard, was also divorced, though Roger never heard the story about why. He didn’t really care why, and was just glad that his mom had found someone who made her happy and secure. Howard was a good husband and a good father. There were rarely any arguments and Roger was too old to have another babysitter to mess things up, so everything seemed to work out.
Roger didn’t often think about fate or the meaning of life, but one day when he was twenty, enjoying a Kodiak after a few whiskeys, he realized that while society deemed his parents’ marriage a failure, from his perspective it worked out perfectly. If his dad had not married his mom, he wouldn’t exist. If his parents had got along well enough to stay together, they would have been moderately unhappy all of these years and his mom would not have Howard, who truly did make her happy.