Regals at the Nederland Club.
Charlie McPhee stood with the door to the refrigerator open, feeling the cool air blow down his collar, and studied the contents before him. Six eggs and two bell peppers and the plastic container of patio beans turned over on its side. Had it done that on its own, he wondered. Some kind of chemical reaction at a certain temperature causing the contents to generate a gas and blow the lid open a crack? No, he told himself, you’d have to heat it up to get that kind of instability, not cool it down. Waylon just messed with it somehow, never able to leave things alone without poking at them, as usual.
Charlie took out the eggs and bell pepper out of the refrigerator and put them on the counter to wait until he found the iron skillet. With that in hand, he began looking for oil, pausing now and then in his search to rap the front burner of the electric range sharply with the skillet to make enough noise to wake Waylon, dead asleep in the back bedroom at nine o’clock in the morning.
It worked. By the time he had melted a half stick of margarine in the skillet and begun breaking the eggs into a bowl with the chopped-up bell peppers, he heard the toilet flush in the hall bathroom and thumping sounds along the wall as his son worked his way toward the kitchen.
“Having a hard time getting started this morning, Sonny?” Charlie said, not looking up.
“No more than usual,” Waylon answered. “What’s that? Not beans, is it?”
“Western omelet. Vegetarian. No meat,” Charlie said, whipping the mixture into a yellow froth with a fork. “A man doesn’t need all that animal fat after he turns fifty.”
“You did that a long time ago,” Waylon said, looking around for coffee. Seeing none, he settled for water and moved toward the sink. “More than twenty years back, as I calculate.”
“I’m talking about you, Waylon,” Charlie said, dumping the contents of the bowl into the skillet and stepping back from the pop of the hot margarine. “You’re the man advancing into deep middle-age. I done got over that myself.”
“You can tell me how you did it one of these days once I get my mind right about the subject,” Waylon said and sat to watch the cooking process. “Terry called last night.”
“Did you say I was out of the house?”
“She could tell that since I was the one talking to her. You fixing to burn that stuff.”
“Wrong, son. High heat and speed. That’s the way things get done these days.”
After he had divided the eggs and bell peppers between two plates, Charlie got himself a glass of water and sat down across from his son and began to eat with great flourishes of the same fork he had used to mix the omelet.
“Tell me that’s not good,” he said.
“That’s not good.”
“Did she say anything about Ronnie?”
“Terry? No. She didn’t mention him. Why? Is something wrong with him?”
“He’s fine, I imagine. I was just checking to see if your little sister had called her husband’s name. Far as I know, she ain’t said it in the last eight or ten years, that’s all.”
“Her record is intact, then,” Waylon said, picking out the pieces of bell pepper with his fork and carefully pushing them to one area of his plate. “How old is this green stuff here?”
“Anything fresh cooked is the same age,” Charlie said. “Done. You ought to eat that pepper. It’s the best part of your breakfast.”
“Is Ronnie still working at Koppers?”
“Yep,” Charlie McPhee said, finishing his last bite and leaning forward to spear at the bits of pepper on Waylon’s plate. “Just got his thirty-year pin in June. Terry didn’t tell me that, though. Amber did.”
“Proud of her daddy, huh?”
“A kid is supposed to be, when things are normal,” Charlie said. “What do you hear from Brian these days? What’s your boy up to?”
“Not much. He’s still living in Lake Charles, as far as I know. I haven’t heard from him lately.”
Waylon ate a small bite of the egg mixture on his plate and watched his father lean forward to chase the last two or three pieces of bell pepper around its flange. Charlie was having a hard time rounding up the remainder of the vegetable part of the dish, and Waylon hoped that distraction would keep him from pursuing the subject of Brian any further. He pushed his plate a little closer to Charlie and with that advantage his father speared the last piece of pepper and settled back in his chair.
“Let me tell you something,” Charlie said, gesturing toward the empty plate. “A man needs his breakfast and that there was a good one. Why haven’t you been over yonder?”
“Where? To Brian’s?” Waylon looked sharply up from the table to Charlie’s face, shaved so closely that it appeared almost skinned along the jawline. Charlie was chewing his last bite and clicking his teeth together as though the morsel was too fine to capture and he was having to chase it down before finishing the job.
“Been too busy,” Waylon said. “The front brakeshoes on my car are shot. I lost my map of Louisiana. Brian’s fallen in love again.”
“Now you’re getting down to it. That’s your reason, that last thing you said. The rest is just excuses. What ought to be called rationalizations.”
“Where’d you hear that word?” Waylon asked. “You been watching talk shows again?”
“That’s common knowledge, Way. You just got to focus your mind. Besides, that kind of talk is just special pleading, rationalization, creating your own reality.”
“You have been watching daytime TV,” Waylon said and pushed his chair away from the table. “You probably even read some kind of a paperback book on the sly.”
“Nope,” Charlie McPhee said, smiling broadly. “I just been talking to Hazel.”
“Hazel Boles told you all that?”
“She knows all kinds of things. She is a woman who thinks about stuff. Nothing that is human is foreign to her, she says.”
“I’d be scared to meet her, then,” Waylon said.
“You going to have to get over that, if you expect to be living here at home.”
“I’m not living here at home, Dad,” Waylon said. “I’m just staying here until I decide what’s next, that’s all.” He lifted his eyes to the line of cabinets over the sink and against the wall behind the electric range. “And I’m paying you rent, too, don’t forget. Don’t you have any coffee I can make?”
“I don’t need the stimulation,” Charlie McPhee said. “Neither does anybody else. Pregnant women these days are told not to drink it. What’re you thinking of doing about a job?”
“Setting
