turned, his eyes hard. “You’re always telling me how to behave and not to fuck up my life. Now it’s my turn.” He was trembling. “I don’t want a drunk for a father.”
Dan could see the fear in his son’s face. But he saw something else — something he recognized. He’d felt it himself enough times facing his own father in moments that had bordered on hatred. He saw determination hidden behind those disapproving eyes.
“Is that what you think I am?” Dan said slowly.
Ked nodded, taking quick breaths through his nose.
“I know I drink a lot,” Dan said. “But I’m not a drunk.”
“So you say.” Ked stood there staring at him. “So you say, Dad. But I’ve seen you passed out enough times to know you have a problem.”
“I like to drink. I don’t think I have a problem,” Dan said, trying to smile despite the pain. For a moment, he wondered if he really did have a problem.
“Then prove it.” Ked’s eyes challenged him. “I’m asking you not to have another drink for the next six months.”
Dan scratched behind one ear. “That’s pretty drastic.”
“Walk the talk, Dad. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? So walk the talk.”
Dan looked around at the mess on the floor then up at this son of his, half-grown, but maybe knowing better than he had at that age. He studied the features of the boy’s face. Somehow what was awkward in Dan had come out strong in Ked. He was becoming a handsome young man.
“Did something happen while you were away visiting Aunt Marge?”
Dan nodded slowly, calling to mind the conversation with his aunt as she lay in bed pulling on her oxygen. He moistened his lips. “Yeah. I guess it did.”
Ked wiped back a tear. “Is that what set you off drinking again?”
Dan hated the disapproval on his son’s face. “I don’t really feel up to discussing it, Ked. Maybe later.”
“Six months, Dad.”
Dan started to motion with his hands, but Ked cut him off. “If you don’t agree, I’m going to move out of here and go live with Mom.”
Dan paused to take stock of the situation. His son was a meltdown waiting to happen. “Is that what you want?” he said softly. “Do you want to live with your mother?”
“No! I want to live here with you!” he said. “But if you can’t … can’t just....” The tears started flowing, cutting off the sentence.
“All right,” Dan said quietly. “All right. I agree.”
Ked looked up and sniffled. “You agree not to drink for six months — starting today?”
“Yes. I agree not to drink for six months.”
Ked’s stance relaxed a little. “Okay.”
Dan wanted to say something to lighten the situation. “But your Uncle Donny’s going to kill me when I tell him I can’t even have a beer with him.…”
“No, he’s not.” Ked shook his head. “I already talked to him. He agrees with me. You’ve got to stop.”
Six months. Surely there would be any number of valid reasons not to keep the promise. Like right now, Dan thought. A drink would have gone a long way toward making his hangover just a little more bearable. How was he going to concentrate at work when it got really stressful? Sometimes things brooded on the horizon for hours waiting for a trigger, lying there inert then overtaking him all at once, unleashing their fury like a sudden storm. The searing, sizzling, electric dazzle of it. A desert rock, a splash of water, high noon. The pressure could build for hours, but all it took was one flashpoint to unleash his desire for a drink, and it all came crashing down. Leaving him exhausted, deflated, defeated. Disgusted with having lost control over himself once again.
Obviously he was going to have plenty to do to redeem himself in Ked’s eyes. How had the father-son equation got so turned around?
Dan went back out to the scramble of photographs and documents spread across his rug. He gathered up the pieces and left the file on the dining room table. He dialled Donny’s number. Better to confront the beast sooner than later. Donny picked up.
“Et tu, Brute?” Dan said.
“Then fall, Caesar.” Donny blew a well-considered breath across the line. “I’m sorry, but I agree with your son. Just be glad we spared you the video cameras and the weeping host and the public intervention on television. But if you’re thinking about not living up to your promise, I wouldn’t do it.”
“No?”
“You sure like to make ’em suffer, don’t you?”
Dan said nothing.
“Word of advice, Danny? Don’t disappoint your son. He’s very vulnerable right now. It’s bad enough you didn’t believe his stories about nicking junk at school, but this might do some permanent damage to your relationship if you’re not careful.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so. And that’s why I’m telling you myself.”
“I hear you. Thanks.”
Dan went upstairs to the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes and stood in the shower under the cold water until it hurt. Whatever good it might do to punish himself for what had happened to his mother and whatever had or had not happened in his life, unlike his own father, Dan didn’t intend to hurt anyone else with it. Ked least of all. It was time to stop feeling sorry for himself and get on with things. If what he’d learned in Sudbury could give him anything, then it could give him that.
Twenty-Two
Now Playing
The day for the planned porn sequel had arrived. Hardly the final instalment of Lord of the Rings or even The Godfather Part III, but still, Dan wasn’t about to miss the premiere of Richard Philips’s latest. He walked along the eastern perimeters of the Danforth, silently studying the words raised a head above the sidewalk: Zam-Zam Beauty School, Pro-Tax Accounting, Yummy Delicious Good Food. Hand-painted signs on plywood with lights affixed bore the perennial optimism of the eternally down-at-heel. He paused when he came to the Islamic-Christian Friendship Society. Was there any cause more hopeless at the moment? What well-meaning but futile urge lay behind the establishment of such a thing?
High over the rundown storefronts, a militant billboard proclaimed to the faithful that “You Deserve A Better Life.” A message of salvation from an organization claiming to be “Debt Counsellors Since 1966.” Dan imagined the first hopefuls lining up for the offer of a better life all those years ago. Had they achieved a better life or anything remotely like it? Was there someone even now passing by and looking up, thankful that a similar moment had saved him from a life of perpetual misery all those years ago? Or had those first clients just bumped through life from one misery to another and died eventually, the only end to debt they’d ever had?
