“Look, I don’t know what you think I did, but that never happened.”
“It didn’t?”
“No, it didn’t. I mean, yeah, I know I’m overly affectionate, but that’s just me. I’d never do something so horrible, so…”
“Monstrous?”
“You know Ophelia can’t have kids. For all intents and purposes, you are my son.”
Uncle Mitch draws closer, his steps more committed. I raise the shovel in the air, preparing to swing. “Don’t take another step, asshole,” I say.
We stand there for a minute or two, not even inches apart. A physical and emotional standoff.
Uncle Mitch hazards the waters. “What is it you want me to do, Hank?”
I look at the shovel in my hands. I shake my head, taking a few steps back. I throw the shovel on the ground. “Well, since you’re taking requests.”
“Yes, anything.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“What?”
“I know what you’ve done. You know what you’ve done. If you don’t want me to let Dad in on ‘our little secret,’ get in your car, drive out of this town and out of our lives.”
Uncle Mitch starts crying. “You can’t do this, Hank. You have no right. I was John’s best friend twenty years before you were even born. What am I supposed to tell him?”
“Tell him whatever you want. Tell him nothing. I suspect whatever you come up with will be preferable to what I have to say.”
“So that’s what this has come down to, son? You’re willing to break your father’s heart just like that?”
“No,” I say. “You are.”
He stands there for five minutes while I finish shoveling the driveway. But finally, irrevocably, Uncle Mitch gets in his car. I knock on the passenger-side window. He rolls it down.
“There’s just one more thing,” I say.
Red-faced and beaten-down, Uncle Mitch doesn’t even look at me. “What?”
“The next time you call me ‘son’ to my face, I’ll kill you.”
That comment catches him right on the jaw. He staggers a little, but he shakes it off. Now Uncle Mitch is looking at me. “What did you say, Hank?”
“Do you really want me to repeat it?”
Another standoff. I can see the conflict in his eyes. Dad’s best friend is itching for a fight, but it is a fight the monster Uncle Mitch has become knows he would lose.
Chapter four
Love is fucking stupid.
Oh sure, there’s parental love, sibling semi-tolerance, grade school crushes, idol obsessions—innocent shit like that. But the whole idea of drowning in the idea of someone, and what’s worse, not knowing you’re drowning until you’re underwater and you open your mouth to take a breath and realize, Hey, something isn’t quite right here—well, until it happens to you, it sounds fucking stupid.
Laura Elliot is my fucking stupid.
I call her right when I wake up, still hungover more than thirty hours after my last sip of alcohol.
“Four weeks?” She makes that cooing, mopey sound with her voice that always gets me. “I can’t go that long without seeing you.”
“You see me every day at school.”
“But that’s not the same.”
“Look, I have study hall last period three times a week. Maybe I can snag a couple hall passes from my mom. We can hang out before I go to wrestling practice or something.”
“But I want to be with you…” She trails off. “Alone.”
A flash of her parents’ basement. The dueling dryer and dehumidifier each trying to upstage the other, the smells of fabric softener and musty throw rugs, a scratchy old couch relegated to rec room duty but enjoying a most active retirement. Laura’s head bent awkwardly against the couch’s armrest.
“Hank, you still there?”
I nod like she can see me. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m here.”
I realized I liked Laura about a month ago. She’s a senior and a year older than me. It just kind of happened. Two hours after the Christmas Dance ended, our dates kicked to the curb, we were making out on her front porch. Laura introduced me to her mom and dad. They went to bed. We made out on the couch in her family room. We made out in the kitchen. We made out in the dining room. She stopped me as I was pulling out of the driveway, jumped in my car, and we made out in my car. Two weeks ago, we fooled around all night in a hot tub at a New Year’s party and missed Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. And I never fucking miss Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
“Hank? Hello?”
“I said I’m still here.”
“Well, you’re not talking much.”
Sixty minutes into a phone conversation, and she wants to ratchet up the chit chat. I could tell her about the guilt I feel over the whole Mary thing, if I felt any. Thanks to Hatch’s sweaty bare ass, I’ve managed to rationalize away any culpability.
“I’m just bummed out, I guess.”
“Yeah, me too.”
She does it again, that cooing thing with her voice. I can’t take it any longer. “Hey, Laura.”
“Yeah?”
“You working tonight?”
“Sure am.”
“When’s the last show end?”
“Midnight-ish.”
“I’ll be there.”
Laura giggles. “See you then.”
Mom fixes us spaghetti for dinner. She makes the sauce from scratch, with ground-up Italian sausage instead of meatballs, because the sauce tastes better that way. Grandpa George is visiting some cousins in Kentucky for the week, so she only makes half as much as normal. After dinner, Dad asks Mom to join him for a walk around the block. Mom doesn’t want to. The thirty pounds she’s put on not even halfway through her pregnancy tells me she’s won this argument once or twice. But Dad insists. He issues instructions to his progeny.
“Clean the kitchen, son.”
I nod. “Sure thing, Dad.”
“And, Jeanine?”
“What?” my sister asks. She has a tendency to whine more than talk when she’s annoyed by the world. She whines a lot.
“Help your brother.”
“But, Dad, I cleaned after lunch.”
I look at Jeanine. She’s the one most opposed to the new baby, for fear of breaking her stranglehold on the getting-away-with-murder privileges afforded her as the youngest child. “We went out to eat for lunch today,” I say to her. “You were the one who begged us to go to Taco Bell.”
“Did not.”
“Did, too.”
“Do you or don’t you want to go to the New Kids on the Block concert?” I ask. “Because I can always back out as your chaperone.”
“Uh…” I can see the horror in Jeanine’s face. “I guess I just forgot.”
“Just do it!” Dad orders,