Читать книгу Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride - Brian Sweany - Страница 19

Chapter eleven

After the hospital discharged me, and after my fifth pure black shit in as many hours—which henceforth I shall refer to as The Great Black Butt Incident of 1988—I find myself walking down the hallway toward my bedroom. My body is covered in beads of sweat.

“How you feeling?” Mom asks, ascending the stairs with a cup of decaf in hand. She’s wearing Dad’s old blue robe, his initials “JHF” on the left lapel.

“I’m okay.” I shrug. “One more stupid-ass stunt for you to tell the world about, I guess.”

“Hank!” Mom says. She switches her cup of coffee to her opposite hand as her right hand grabs me by the elbow. “Is that what you call yesterday? A stunt?”

“Come on, Mom.”

“You could have killed yourself!”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I’m being very serious here.”

“Glad to see someone cares.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“You tell me.”

Dad hasn’t spoken a word to me since he left my hospital room. He volunteered his trumpet at a Tuesday evening mass at St. Benjamins and then snuck out of the house early this morning for the dealership. And I noticed.

“What’d you expect, Hank?”

“Anything,” I say. “Being pissed off as hell is better than no reaction at all.”

“Oh, he reacted,” Mom says. “You just didn’t see it.”

I roll my eyes. Mom squeezes my elbow harder. “Don’t you for a second question your father’s love,” she says.

“Take it easy, Mom.” I shake her hand loose.

She’s crying now, her tears more angry than sad. “Do you have any idea what he said to the doctor yesterday?”

“What do you mean?”

“They were going to pump your stomach!” Mom shouts. “I think they wanted to teach you a lesson.”

I’m quiet.

“And you know what your dad said?”

Still quiet.

“He looked that doctor straight in the eyes…”

My throat hurts a little.

“And he said, ‘You stick to being a doctor, and I’ll stick to being a father.’”

I look down at the floor’s dark oak hardwood planks. You can see hundreds of footprint watermarks if you catch the floor in the right light. A casualty of living on a pond. Mom keeps saying she’s going to carpet over everything. I wipe the sweat off my brow. The room is cooling down, the hangover passing.

“Dad really said that?” I say.

Mom sips her coffee, nodding. “Yep.”

I don’t know what to say next. My martyr complex is subtle, nuanced. It usually works for me. The eldest son, trying to live up to his father’s expectations, woe is me—I can do the damn thing in my sleep. But Mom’s bullshit meter is pretty sensitive today.

“Can I stay home one more day?”

Mom scowls, walks by me and into her room. She starts to shut the door behind her and then stops herself at the last second. She peeks through the crack. “Not a chance, mister.” She shuts the door.