Читать книгу Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride - Brian Sweany - Страница 32

Chapter twenty-four

Möchten sie Gegottenbush?

Ja, ich möchte Gegottenbush.

German is not my strongest subject. My dialect is Germanglish with a slight southern Indiana drawl. I can’t conjugate verbs. The whole der/die/das noun-gender thing will forever mystify me. And I make up words when I don’t know—or don’t like—the German equivalent. Take for instance, the German word for sex, Geschlectsverkehr. Like the German language as a whole, it’s unwieldy, soulless, just plain old ugly. But Gegottenbush? Now that speaks to me. And it’s damn funny.

I am thinking about Gegottenbush with Beth Burke. As I sat in fourth-year German, I was tempted to ask the teacher if I could go to the restroom—to do some more intensive “thinking” about Gegottenbush with Beth Burke. That’s about the time the school nurse interrupted the class to tell me my mom had delivered the baby.

In the wake of two miscarriages, this pregnancy was, by contrast, uneventful, sedate even, lulling my parents into a sense of security. Against doctor’s orders, Dad and his eight-and-a-half-months pregnant wife made the cold February trip up to Notre Dame for their twenty-year reunion. Mom’s water broke on the floor of the basketball court five minutes after the Notre Dame-USC game ended. Dad had said to me over the phone, “God knew to wait.”

I pull into our driveway. Dad’s car is parked outside, the engine still rattling from the drive back from South Bend.

I walk into the family room. Mom is already asleep on the sectional along the back wall, buried beneath layers of old quilts. Grandpa George and Dad are watching television in separate chairs, my brother asleep on Dad’s chest.

My brother. After fourteen spirit-breaking years of sisterhood, I have a fucking brother!

“Hey there.” Dad’s voice is just above a whisper. He starts to sit up. I wave him off. “Dad, you’re fine. Stay down.”

Grandpa George stands up, beaming. “Isn’t he beautiful, Johnny-uh-Hank? Spittin’ image of his brother if I’ve ever seen one!”

My father raises his fingers to his lips and turns to Grandpa. “Dad, quiet.”

Grandpa sits down. “Sorry about that.”

“Well, son?”

I look at Dad. “Well, what?”

“You want to say hi to your new baby brother, Jack Henry?”

Just as she did with me, Mom vetoed John Henry Junior. She came close this time, but Jack is the name on his birth certificate, not his nickname. As for girl names, I refused to look at the list. It’s the late eighties, so I could guess “Caitlin” and have about a one in three chance of being right. I never even entertained the idea of a girl, convinced I could somehow will my brother into being.

Mission accomplished. “How’s he doing?” I ask.

Dad rubs the back of Jack’s head. “You’re looking at it.”

A baby sleeping on his father’s chest, one of those framed moments you want to keep in your pocket. I’ve never seen Dad like this, save in photos. Those old, perfectly square early-seventies pictures of me as a newborn, the more rectangular ones of Jeanine. The clothes change, Mom’s hairstyles are all over the place, but one thing is constant—Dad’s eyes. The surrender. The contentment. The eyes of a parent falling in love all over again.

“So the trip back was okay.”

“Yeah, other than when I tried to avoid the stoplights in Kokomo.”

“Dad, you didn’t.”

“I did.”

“You got lost on the back roads of Indiana with a postpartum mother and a newborn in the car?”

“Way lost. We’re talking Amish country lost.”