“Big shot, eh?”
“Used to be.”
“Hug your son!” my mother commanded. “For heaven’s sake!”
An embarrassed grin crossed his face. He came to me as if to embrace me, but instead he grabbed me by the elbows of my dangling arms, squeezing tightly enough to make me tingle. It was a welcome home, a real welcome home.
“All right, come, let’s sit,” my mother said. “It’s on the table. Michael, you might want to wash your hands.”
I was home. Good God in heaven, I was home, and it really hit me hardest as I washed my hands in the downstairs bathroom, where a blue-green mineral drip stain on the porcelain sink had grown like an obscene tongue beneath the hot water spout.
I remembered when that sink was as white as snow. That’s how long I’d been away.
We ate at the kitchen table, the only place meals were ever eaten in this house. Nothing much had changed. There was a new coat of linoleum on the floor, and my mother had discovered refrigerator magnets, but the refrigerator they clung to was the same one I’d raided after school, and instead of my spelling tests there were coupons up on display. Back then the refrigerator was silent, but now it ran with an ominous hum, as if to warn that it could be just days, hours, minutes before it broke down once and for all….
“How was your flight?”
My mother was trying to jump-start a conversation. The three of us had been sitting there eating meat loaf and mashed potatoes, silent foods, mushy foods that made no noise when you chewed them. The silent food made the other silence all the more excruciating.
I swallowed the meat loaf, tangy with paprika. “It was all right.”
“Do you feel jet-lagged?”
“Mom. It’s three hours earlier in California.”
“Well, you know what I mean. Tired. Do you feel tired?”
If they knew I’d checked into a local motel for a night’s sleep they both would have had fits. Paying good money just to sleep! The waste!
“Nahh, I’m all right.”
I watched my father cut his meat loaf and bring his fork to his mouth. He has exquisite table manners, my old man. I never saw him gulp a drink or wolf a meal, and not until he’d chewed and swallowed did he speak.
“The pool thing didn’t work out, huh?”
In my sporadic communications with my parents about my working life I’d exaggerated what I’d been doing. I’d told them I’d been running a pool maintenance business that went bust. They had no idea I was just a hired bug-skimmer.
I shrugged. “I got run out of business by a big outfit. They undercut everybody’s prices.”
“Bastards!”
“Eddie!”
“Well, it’s rotten, that’s all. What’s the point? Why kill the little man?”
“It’s business, Eddie.”
“That’s not business, Donna. That’s murder, when you take away a man’s living.”
“Business is business.”
My old man let it go at that. He always let her get the last word, as long as his own words had been read into the record. I always admired him for that, even though I could never work that trick myself. I like getting the last word. I like getting the first word, too, and all the words in the middle. I’m like my mother that way.
She turned to me. “You want coffee, Michael?”
“No thanks, Mom.”
“It’s made.”
(Translation: I made it, don’t waste it, there are under-caffeinated children yawning away in Africa.)
“All right, I’ll have a cup.”
She cleared the plates away and set mugs of coffee, milked and sugared, in front of me and my father. That’s the way she did things. You got what you wanted all ready to eat or drink. Nobody ever asked anybody to pass the string beans or the mashed potatoes, because my mother loaded up the plates at the stove and carried them over.
It was like a diner. When I was sixteen I once left her a tip under my plate, and she didn’t think it was one bit funny.
While she did the dishes I sat back with the man who’d sired me and sipped coffee, coffee with absolutely no punch.
“Is this decaf, Mom?”
“Do you want regular? We don’t drink regular.”
“No, no, this is fine.”
“There’s a Starbucks now on Northern Boulevard,” my father said. “They line up for it. Latte. They need latte, these kids. Three bucks.”
My mother’s eyebrows rose. “How do you know how much it is?”
“I checked it out. Three bucks. More than that, if you want a grande.”
“You had a latte?”
“No, I didn’t have a latte. Calm down. I said I checked it out, that’s all.”
“A whole can of Maxwell House is two eighty-nine,” my mother said from the sink, where she had begun to wash the dishes.
My father nodded, turned to me. “Hear that?”
“I sure did.”
“A can costs less than a cup. Crazy.”
Having exhausted the coffee topic, we sat and looked at each other. Something was different about my father, really different, and at last it hit me. This was the longest I’d ever seen him without a cigarette in his mouth.
“You quit smoking, Dad?”
He laughed out loud, not in a happy way. Then he lifted a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, just long enough for me to get a peek at it before shoving it back.
“I quit smoking indoors. Your mother doesn’t allow it in the house anymore.”
“Why should I breathe your smoke?”
“No reason I can think of.”
She turned to me. “It’s good for him. He smokes a lot less this way.”
“Yeah. Nineteen a day instead of twenty. That oughta keep the tumors away.”
He stood, shook a butt into his mouth, and turned to go outside.
“Welcome home, Mick,” he said before leaving.
Home.
