by Anna Bruno
“Think of it as an investment,” he said. “A town house in Cobble Hill. You’ll need a place to land when this country quiet gets under your skin. And it’ll be worth a fortune should you ever sell it.”
I think he expected me to throw my arms around his neck and thank him but I was stunned.
As if he could read my mind, he said, “You should appoint it to your taste so you and Lucas have a place to stay when you come to the city.”
“We really don’t come down to the city that much, Dad,” I said. “Maybe you should rent the place out.”
“There’s a small yard for the dog in the back.”
“For Addie? You just said it was an investment property.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t live in it,” he said.
“We live here.”
“Lucas can hang drywall in the city.”
“So you do know what Lucas does for a living!”
“Of course I know. He’s my son-in-law.”
“I just assumed you didn’t care.”
Loving my father never felt like a choice. He was a good dad, insofar as that distinction only required his presence and not being verbally or physically abusive. In other words, if you’re a man, all you have to do is not do a few things and Congratulations! Dad of the year! Being a good mom requires perfection, in public and in private, without end.
“What are you going to do when you get bored with teaching?” Dad asked.
“Let’s not do this now,” I said. “Thank you for the town house.”
I had a sudden urge to unload the I NY key ring into Lucas’s pocket. My slinky silk gown was not designed to hold much of anything. He was across the dance floor talking to the DJ, his buddy from high school with a penchant for funk.
Then my dad said something that struck me, even on that happy occasion, as an omen of what was to come. “Think of it as a contingency. If things don’t work out as you expect, you’ll have a place to go, and down the road, if you need to, you can sell it.” Maybe the notion of it—a contingency on my wedding day—should have pissed me off. But he was so sincere—the look in his eyes so paternal—I understood, maybe for the first time, what fatherhood meant to him.
* * *
JIMMY GRABS HIS BEER and heads back to the pool table on the other side of the bar.
Another thing about The Final Final: it’s a sound tunnel. If you aren’t focusing on your own thing, you can hear every word of someone else’s thing. A couple of young girls who came in pretty frequently spoke on more than one occasion about Amelia’s body. They noticed when she gained five pounds and lost five pounds. They thought they could tell if she’d been working out. They always huddled together and whispered. Amelia never said anything. She continued to serve the girls their drinks. Only her eyes, piercing as she shot soda water into their vodkas, showed that these conversations affected her. Finally, one of the girls loud-whispered, “Saggy boobs: strapless is not for everyone.” I leaned over and said, “You realize everyone in the fucking bar can hear you, right?” They were mortified. Maybe they figured Amelia had been slowly poisoning their drinks. They never came back.
That’s a long way of explaining that even though Jimmy and Yag are in the back, Amelia and I can hear every word of their conversation.
“Dude, I had this dream last night,” Jimmy says. Yag misses his shot. “We were getting hammered at the bar.” They both laugh. Jimmy is unusually spirited tonight, a departure for a guy who almost always has bags under his eyes from early mornings at the diner.
“Remember when you clocked in for an entire week at Bageltown and didn’t serve a single customer?” Yag laughs. “How the fuck did you manage that?”
Lucas also worked at the bagel shop back in the day. Apparently, at one time or another, the manager hired every sixteen-year-old dumbass in town. For some period of time, these young guys all worked there together, until, one by one, they were all fired. One guy, for standing in the parking lot throwing bagels at anyone riding by on a bike, until a woman fell and broke her wrist; one guy, for making sandwiches so slowly that a customer complained she watched another worker make five before hers was complete, each lettuce leaf placed with craftsmanlike precision; Jimmy, for smoking weed in the supply closet.
“I hid out in the supply closet,” Jimmy says. “Krista knew where I was but she had the hots for me.” Krista was the manager. Jimmy sinks a shot and looks over at the bar. “Speaking of girls, what happened over there?”
“Who, Caroline? She’s young,” Yag says. “Doesn’t understand that evolved men can have female friends.”
“Girls are weird about their boyfriends sleeping with other girls—sometimes you just gotta listen to them.”
“Sometimes I think it’d be easier to just have sex with myself.” Yag gestures with his hand, making a loose fist, pulling up and down. He grabs the cue and squares up to take a shot. “Tonight is not my night.”
* * *
HANGING OUT AT THE bar one night, trying to mind our own business, Lucas and I overheard Yag break up with his girlfriend of one year. Most of Martin’s girls only stuck around for a matter of weeks, a few months tops, so this girl was the exception.
Tears streaming down her face, she asked why he wanted to break it off. He told her she wasn’t attractive to him because she had put on weight. She asked why he called her beautiful so many times. He told her he only said those things because that’s what good boyfriends did; he didn’t really mean them. The girl believed him.
I knew how Yag’s crazy mind worked, how it played tricks, and I was quite certain he did find her beautiful at one time, but, as a result of years of watching porn and jerking off, perception was fickle and he couldn’t hold on to one idea for very long, so his mind turned on him and somehow morphed this beautiful thing into an ugly thing, and the only way he could rationalize it was to insist the beauty never existed in the first place. The girl didn’t know any of this, though. She just thought she was unattractive. He added that she was perfect from the waist up but he was a “hips-and-ass guy.” He paused like he wanted to suggest something but knew he shouldn’t. Finally, he said maybe it was something she could work on. That’s when she told him she was pregnant.
He told her to get an abortion. Then he swiveled around on his stool, stood up, and walked out of the bar.
Lucas turned to the girl and said, “He’s crazy, you know—you are beautiful,” which was exactly what she needed to hear at the time.
From that point on, Martin Yagla was no longer welcome in our house. I couldn’t stand the sight of him. When Lucas hosted a poker night, Yag showed up with Jimmy and a couple of other guys. I stood on the front porch and pointed, my finger inches from his chest, and said, “Not him.” Lucas looked at me, surprised, and then at Yag and then back at me, and then said to him, “Sorry, man; she’s serious.” And Yag said, “It’s your house too.” Lucas put his arm around him and walked him down the front path to the sidewalk. I don’t know what he said to him. Yag didn’t come back for as long as I lived there.
Lucas was always softer than I was, kinder, and I know he found my stance overly harsh. On his own, he would have given him a pass, but living with me, I think he agreed that understanding Yag’s behavior and excusing it were two very different things.
As much as I dislike Yag, he probably hates me more. I took more away from him than he ever took from me. When he spoke of me to Lucas, he always referred to me as The Mrs., even before we were married.
I’m sure he thinks I ought to be embarrassed by the ways Lucas changed after he met me, the fact that he gave up cigarettes and stopped texting some girl who had been in love with him for years. Somehow, knowing Yag believes this makes me self-conscious. I never wanted to be that woman, the woman Yag sees me as, but I had to be that woman because Lucas was better off. Still, something about Yag makes me feel ashamed about myself, as if commitment is for losers—conventionality, a sucker’s burden. I am weirdly intimidated by him, though I can’t
say exactly why.
Lucas told me once, unprompted, that he was glad Martin Yagla was not prominently in his life anymore, which was his way of admitting that I had been right. That should have been the end of it. We should have all moved on with our lives. But it’s a small town, and that’s not what happened.
* * *
A GUY APPROACHES THE pool table and asks if they want to play Cut Throat when they finish their game. Jimmy says, “Sure, man, put down your quarters.”
“Man, we never do crazy shit anymore,” Yag says. “Like the pumpkin.”
I’ve heard the pumpkin story at least five times, but I’m about to hear Yagla retell it for the benefit of the new guy.
Jimmy racks the balls for their game of Cut Throat. Yag breaks because he won last.
“We stole this pumpkin from the ShopRite. That’s how it started. It was, like, a week before Halloween so we wanted a pumpkin. And then I remembered I had a bunch of illegal fireworks in my trunk. The kind that really explode.” At a young age, Yag had a propensity for pyrotechnics. “Whose idea was the bowling alley?”
In high school, the guys referred to nights like this one as “High Quality Nights,” a euphemism for nights when they didn’t drink. On these nights, they occupied themselves in other ways.
“The bowling alley had those automatic doors, so we figured we could wait until someone walked through, triggering them to open, then we’d roll in the pumpkin.” Their adolescent plan was to fill the pumpkin with lit fireworks before rolling it into the bowling alley. “After the pumpkin exploded we were gonna floor it outa there. I drove the getaway car,” Yag says.
Mind you, this happened in the nineties, pre-9/11. These were the halcyon days of pranks. Still, these kids had no idea what kind of firepower they were packing into this pumpkin, and I can see by Jimmy’s body language, the way he shakes his head and looks at the floor, that he now understands how reckless they were back then.
Yag continues. “I was behind the wheel. Jimmy was in the passenger seat cutting that pumpkin open with my hunting knife and packing it full. Our boy Lucas was in the back seat doing nothing, along for the ride. It’s so typical that Lucas would take the back seat. He’s a classic accomplice, sittin’ back there smoking American Spirits.”
“It’s not like he tried to stop us.”
“Hell, no. Lucas wanted us to do it. What the fuck else was he gonna do on a Friday night?”
The best part of the story is coming up. Depending on who’s telling it, you either get what happened up front, like one of those movies that starts where the sequence ends, usually with a bunch of dead bodies, and jumps back to the beginning, or you have to wait to find out what happens, sometimes for a long time, while the storyteller describes the rising action—the stealing of the pumpkin, the loading of explosives, the chugging engine of Yag’s Chevy Lumina, dubbed, affectionately, Luminus Maximus—as well as a hefty backstory, where Yag got the illegal fireworks (New Hampshire—Live Free or Die), the fact that the car was on empty because Yag’s mom canceled his gas card for reasons that escape me now.
There’s no right way to tell a story. I teach my students that the content and an understanding of the audience should dictate these choices. I have to admit Martin Yagla is good at telling stories. I want to know what is going to happen with the exploding pumpkin. In fact, I already know what happened because I’ve heard the story before, and I still want to hear it again.
He continues. “We idled in front. There was about twenty feet of sidewalk between the car and the door. And the door stayed open for about thirty seconds after a person cleared the motion sensor. I did a quick calculation in my head. We figured that was enough time to light it and roll it in.”
“You calculated how long it would take the pumpkin to roll in through the door,” Jimmy says. “Not how long it would take the pumpkin to explode.”
“We just assumed—”
“Bad assumption—”
Yagla laughs. “Boom! The car filled with smoke. Pumpkin seeds went everywhere. Who would’ve thought it would explode immediately? We rolled all the windows down. I hit the gas just as soon as I could see out the windshield.”
“That thick pumpkin skin saved my life,” Jimmy says.
“Well, it saved your eyebrows, at least—maybe a couple fingers. I was picking pumpkin guts off the ceiling of Luminus Maximus for months. Seeds were stuck everywhere—”
Yag has a million stories like this one. He continues to talk, loudly and condescendingly, even as the details become more and more embarrassing. Martin Yagla: King of the Bar! I shake my head, though no one is looking at me.
The game drags on, and I can tell the new guy has had enough. He might as well be from another planet—an outsider looking in. He doesn’t share their constitution.
They finally finish their game. By their body language, I can tell the outsider won. Yag asks him if he wants to play again. He says not tonight, puts his cue on the rack, and walks out the back door.
There are two types of people in the world: people who are glad high school is behind them, seen only through a tiny rearview mirror, and those who want to relive it as a state of constant present, glory days remembered as if they were only yesterday. Yag falls squarely in the latter camp.
Nostalgia makes me want to bury the hatchet with him. Nostalgia: memory’s rosy-cheeked sister. If memory is a state of fractional loss, a slipping away, nostalgia is a state of fictional gain, an imaginative expansion. I allow it to take hold, partly because all the whiskey has softened me but also because, without Lucas around, Yag’s impishness doesn’t matter anymore. He’s someone else’s problem.
I ask Amelia for three house shots. The Final Final house shot is something called the blood orange, at least when Amelia’s bartending. She invented it. It doesn’t taste like orange but it is reddish orange in color. I have no idea what’s in it, but it’s quite boozy and it goes down easy. The college girls love it.
I bring the shots over to the pool table. Yag appears delighted by the gesture. He says, “You’re not so bad, Em,” then, pulling the glass toward his lips, he looks at Jimmy and says, “Here’s to being free men.” He shoots it down.
At first I think he’s referring to the girl he said goodbye to earlier in the night, but he gives me a sly smile and pulls a cigarette out of the pack and puts it behind his ear. I realize he’s talking about Lucas.
“Woohoo,” I say. “Congratulations, Martin, no one cares about you. You cheat on your girlfriend. You owe ten grand to some over-the-hill wrestler, who may or may not collect the debt from your mother, scaring the life out of her for no other reason than her loser grown son still lives at home. Go ahead. Smoke your lungs out.”
“You know what I can’t figure out?” Yag says. Spit flies out of his mouth onto my face. “Why do you come here? Look around, Emma. You don’t belong. No one wants you here. You are a sad, uptight bitch. You think you’re better than us because you don’t smoke and your daddy has money. You think we’re a bunch of loser drunks. News flash, Emma—you’re a drunk too! Three years ago, you were hot. We let you hang around with us because Lucas is our friend, but then you walked out on him. No one said anything because we all felt bad for you. No one had the balls. Well, I’ll say it now. I’ll be the asshole. Find your own fucking bar. Find your own fucking town. Why the fuck do you stay here?”
Jimmy ushers Yag out back for another smoke, sparing me a retort. I return to my bar stool, the spell of nostalgia now broken. My hands are shaking, all the rage manifest in my extremities.
Cal touches my right shoulder. He mumbles, “Don’t listen to him. You belong here as much as any of us.” He rambles on about friendship. He says something kind. I’m not really listening, though. I can’t shake Yag’s question: Why the fuck do you stay? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? I stay to live in the past, the before.
* * *
“LUCAS,” I SAID. “I’M sorry but I have to confess something to you.”
Luca
s was behind the stove, making pasta sauce. Since he took out the wall between the kitchen and the living room, he could stand over the stove, watch TV, and talk to me, all at the same time. He had several balls in the air, but he managed everything gracefully: chopping, sautéing, cleaning. Somehow he found time to pour himself a whiskey.
“Something serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
Addie was up on the back of the couch. I leaned back and rested my head on her warm, furry body and crossed my legs on the coffee table.
“Only a sociopath could make a confession and appear so relaxed,” Lucas said.
“I was raised Catholic,” I said. “Confessing is a part-time job.”
“Lay it on me, baby,” he said.
“I think maybe I love Addie more than you.” She perked up at the sound of her name. When Lucas cooked, Addie was ultra-attuned to any clue that a food scrap had been accidentally dropped or a piece of gristle was there for the taking.
“Why do you think that?”
“Well, it’s just that she occupies most of my idle thought.”
He opened a can of tomatoes and added the contents to the sauce, while turning down the flame with his other hand.
“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s Addie. She’s too cute. I love her dog body. I love when she opens her mouth just a little and her tongue pokes out.”
“So, let’s say our house is burning down—”
“The ol’ house-is-on-fire scenario.”
“You wake up and realize you only have time to save one of us.”
I got up from the couch and joined him behind the stove. Addie followed. The sauce simmered and the water was just coming to a boil. I had dallied on the couch just long enough—there was very little left to do. The cutting board and knife needed washing. I turned on the faucet. “Well,” I said. “The three of us sleep in the same bed. So how would I only have time to save one of you?”