“See what you’ve done?” Ernest said.
Gabe scuttled to pick it up.
“Step back,” Ernest snapped. He approached the bottle with makeshift mitts on his hands, napkins he’d grabbed off the table. Like a surgeon working with a still-beating heart, he carried the bottle at just the right angle so it wouldn’t spill more and brought it to the trash. He laid it gingerly on the pile of soggy buns and crushed soda cans, making a mental note to eventually take it to recycling.
“I’ve got to mop this up,” he told the family, looking at the still-damp spot of concrete.
“What?” Alison said, crashing her face into her hands. “Oh my god, we will never eat.”
“Dad, are you out of your mind? It’s on the concrete.”
“Doesn’t matter. You can’t just leave a chemical spill like that.”
“Come on, Dad,” Gabe protested. “You make it sound like Exxon.”
“Gabe,” Cynthia said in a zip-it tone before exhaling with her eyes shut. To Ernest: “Clean it up how?”
“I’ll run back home and get some soap and mop it up.”
“The field house doesn’t have any soap?”
“Nothing natural,” Ernest said.
She put her hand to her forehead. “This is totally impractical.”
“I don’t understand why you’re mad about this.”
“Because we’re all starving, Ernest. Let it go, just this once.”
“It’ll take ten minutes. You can start the fire while I’m gone.”
Cynthia shook her head and closed her eyes. She drew in what Ernest recognized as a cleansing breath, deep and slow. When she looked back at him she appeared radiantly determined. “Be here with your family, Ernest. What about this day? It’s your birthday. Be here with us.” She lifted her hand into the air and grasped at something and slowly pulled it down with her palm closed. The air outside of himself, the divine stream. “The day is right here,” she said.
He took them in: Alison, rooting around in the baby carrots she’d formerly rejected; Gabe, glaring at the ground, ravenous and ordered to silence by his mother, the only parent he sort of listened to; his wife, her figure directed toward him as a block and an anchor, her palm still closed around the air she wanted him to breathe. He found her attractive when she was like this—focused, determined—even if she had let a little extra weight gather around her hips and arms, but his mind was made up. It was his birthday, after all, and this was who he was—a committed environmentalist. The very idea filled him with energy. His life was a fight. He was a fighter, no apologies and no breaks for inconvenience. Of course he knew that mopping up the spill would probably do nothing, that it was an infinitesimal smidgen in the grand scheme of things, but his fight was no less important when it was symbolic. Symbols added up to something.
“Ten minutes,” Ernest said, and gave her other hand a squeeze. He crossed the lawn of Aurora Park, where the high school girls rubbed in more tanning oil and talked in bubble script over their radios playing Whitney Houston, her supple voice reduced to a tinny stream. “No other woman is going to love you more,” Ernest sang along as he passed by without breaking his stride, purely for the girls’ entertainment and delighting in their laughter. At the bleachers, a homeless man sat and repacked his bags, preparing to take the el train back into the city. Three middle-aged women, scrunchies around their stubby ponytails and wearing shapeless dresses in summer fabrics, walked by, subtly checking him out. Everyone seemed like they were posing for some sort of community yearbook yet to exist.
By the time he returned with a bucket of sudsy water and a raggedy mop, most of the spill had evaporated, but still, he sloshed water on the dark stain left behind. Cynthia had gotten the fire going—suspiciously fast, Ernest thought, but he wasn’t about to question her methods. She hadn’t greeted him upon his return; only a weak smile played on her lips, pitying or almost mocking, he couldn’t tell. Sometimes it was easier for Cynthia and Ernest to move in silent, hostile arcs around each other, marking their dissatisfaction with only the distant orbit of their bodies. The kids didn’t acknowledge him either. They had picked off everything edible on the table and were now sullen. The man and his girlfriend had long since decided that totally ignoring this scene was the most merciful gesture. Ernest mopped until he felt reassured that he’d done as much as he could.
Later, he’d think about what Cynthia had said: “Be here with your family.”
He should’ve listened to her. A year later, none of this would exist in the same form: the park or his family. What he had built haphazardly and carefully, with equal parts love and mistakes, would be destroyed, and nothing as he knew it would be left.
Back at home, after the picnic where his kids and wife had roused an acceptable amount of obligatory birthday cheer to get through the meal, Ernest sat in the living room with Gabe, who tinkered with his latest obsession, the shortwave radio, which he’d carried down in a box from its usual perch upstairs in his bedroom.
The muggy early evening wasn’t exactly scotch weather, but Ernest stationed himself in his armchair and sipped at his generous pour all the same, determined to enjoy this expensive gift from Tom, his close friend and neighbor and an avatar of good taste. Usually Ernest drank beer, preferred it to all else, but he’d decided that he’d tell Tom the scotch was wonderful, despite the fact that it tasted like that lighter fluid if it hadn’t evaporated but rather boiled in the sun. He could still see the liquid gushing out of the bottle, the simultaneous evaporation and sinking in. A part of him wanted to dash to the park right now, to see if he could still find the stain—an idea he’d already run by Cynthia, who’d given him a sympathetic pat on the hand and then promptly disappeared into her home office—but he stayed put, sipping at his fire water.
He wanted time with Gabe, who was setting up the shortwave on the carpet. Gabe had promised earlier, before the fight, to give his dad a tour of the different stations for his birthday, to play him something he called “natural radio,” but Ernest could tell that Gabe was now halfhearted about the plan. He’d have to warm him back up.
“Was that the best birthday gift ever or what?” Ernest said, nodding toward the black box.
Gabe, not looking at him, said, “Yep.”
“We got you one that came very highly recommended.”
“I know, Dad, you told me all this two weeks ago,” Gabe said. “What do you think of my birthday gift to you?”
Ernest wiggled his toes in his brand-new pair of navy-blue New Balance sneakers. “Perfect,” he said.
“Don’t you ever get tired of the same shoes?”
“Why would I? They’re comfortable,” he said. Ernest considered himself an unfussy, easygoing man in dress, even though his commitment to such a look was actually quite fussy in practice.
Every morning he strapped on his digital calculator watch within five minutes of waking up, along with his jeans, dutifully replaced from the Land’s End catalog whenever the knees got too threadbare, and his braided belt that made a satisfying creak when he pushed the prong into the woven leather,