hollow tubes of her legs and torso and leveling off in her eyes, where I could see them, the emotions, sloshing around in her pupils. My mother raised her right arm slightly, as if to touch my cheek, and I needed her then more than ever, but this need was closer to love than to hate. I wanted to say, Oh, touch my cheek, Mother. You told me those stories and ruined my life, and I ruined yours, too, but if you touch my cheek …
I didn’t get to finish the thought, and my mother didn’t touch my cheek, either. Instead she grabbed the (empty) can of beer out of my father’s hand and went into the kitchen. Then it was just me and my father again, just two men in a room struggling to understand the woman who had just left them alone with each other. This would clearly be a never-ending battle. I could see the two of us sitting in that room until kingdom come, trying — and failing — to understand the women we loved. The past washed over me right then, as you can’t ever stop it from doing, and there was Anne Marie, in my heart, my eyes and ears and brain, wondering what I was doing there with my parents when I should be at home, begging Anne Marie to let me come back to it, and her, and them, and us.
“Should I just go home, Dad?”
“Home?” he asked, confused, as if to say, I think, Home? Why, you’re already in it .
“My other home, I mean. Shouldn’t I just go back to Anne Marie and the kids?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be better that way? Wouldn’t things have been better for all of us if you hadn’t taken three years to come home?”
“Wait … wait,” my father said.
“For what?”
“Time,” he said.
“How much time?” I asked. “I don’t think I can wait three years. Do I have to wait three years like you did with me and Mom?”
Speaking of my mother, there she was again, in the living room, holding a triangle of big beers in both hands. She placed one can in my father’s ready claw and he immediately began drinking from it, violently, as if trying to suck up some of the aluminum from the can along with the beer. Then my mother tried to give me a beer, and I held up my hands in protest and said, “Oh no, not me.”
About me as a drinker: I wasn’t much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I’d tried drinking — in high school, at subdivision barbecues — I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss’s Christmas party (it was vodka I was drinking, more than two glasses, and so too much of it), I passed out for a minute — passed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional — and when I came to, I found myself in my boss’s kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pass before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen’s population — there was a big crowd in there, including my boss, Mr. Janzen, a tall, stern man who had a big nose that he couldn’t help, physically speaking, looking down at you with — staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, “Sandwich.” Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is.
“I don’t really drink,” I told my mother.
“You do now,” she said, with such certainty that I believed her. I took the can and we all drank our big beers, one after the other, and I discovered that my mother was right: I did drink, and I learned that when you drank, things happened, nearly by themselves. It got dark, and someone turned on the light; it got too quiet and someone turned on the television; the
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