Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Brian Sweany

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      Dad made sure to wake me up early this morning, before my sister had to see anything. I’ve been back from the party for about five hours. I’m armed with a sleeve of Saltines, a glass of ginger ale, and one hell of a hangover. The smell of smoke and liquor is still on my breath, in my hair, in my clothes—the clothes I wore and slept in last night.

      “Ease up, Dad.” I lift the ginger ale to my lips, drinking half the glass in one gulp. “Believe it or not, I’m perfectly capable of getting in trouble all by myself.”

      The party at Gotham Lake ended badly, at least for me. After I got high with the hockey team, I walked in on Hatch losing his virginity to Mary on the bathroom floor. I hitched a ride home with the third-string goalie, trying not to replay in my mind the image of Hatch’s bare, sweaty ass bouncing up and down against Mary’s splayed legs, her feet propped against the edge of the toilet and the bathroom wall. I walked through the front door of my house around 2:00 a.m. to find Mom sitting in the family room. She told me my father was driving around Gotham Lake looking for me. I tried to string a few words together before falling face first at her feet. Dad came home an hour later to find me passed out on the family room floor.

      “How much did you drink yesterday?” Dad asks.

      I bite down on a cracker. “Beats me. A case maybe?”

      “A case…of beer?”

      I look at my father like he’s one step away from the short bus. “Yes, it was beer.”

      “Did you happen to think about anyone else but yourself last night?”

      My throat constricts, the cracker sticking to the roof of my mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “I’ll tell you what it means.” Dad points at me. “Your father spent six hours driving around town to three different houses that you or your friends were supposedly spending the night at, until he ended up at a house on Gotham Lake at two in the morning.”

      I can tell Dad is pissed off. He always speaks in the third person when he’s pissed off.

      I’m reminded of how bad we fucked things up. Yesterday morning, I told Mom and Dad I was going sledding all day and then spending the night at Nicholas Truman’s house, Nick being my wrestling teammate. Nick told his parents he was going sledding and then spending the night at Joel Trudeau’s house, another wrestling teammate who I didn’t even hang out with. Joel, not in on the conspiracy, stayed home for family movie night and told his parents and my father sometime around midnight that he had no idea where we were. Meanwhile, a West German foreign exchange student named Marcus—name pronounced mar-KOOS who, like all European foreign exchange students, smells like dirty armpit, swears in English at inappropriate times, and wears ugly bowling shoes—told his sponsor family he was going sledding and then spending the night at my house. From what I can surmise from Dad’s manic rambling, he drove out to Gotham Lake, walked in on Hatch and Mary in an amorous state, figured out I’d already left, and then snagged Nick Truman as a consolation prize.

      “Six hours.” Dad points to my mother. She sits across the table from me, arms folded. “Meanwhile, a four-months pregnant mother was up all night worried sick about her boy. I wonder when her son was drinking that twenty-fourth beer if he ever thought about the possibility of his mother losing another baby.”

      I can’t believe Dad has the balls to even say this. Hell, his balls are the whole problem. I thought those few months before and after the vasectomy reversal were as close as the Fitzpatrick household would ever come to being dysfunctional, but Dad fucking Dixie cups and talking about sperm counts was nothing compared to Mom’s miscarriage.

      She got pregnant three months after the operation, lost the baby three months after that. Dad stumbled through a disaffected malaise. His interaction with the family was measured by the stack of greasy boxes on the kitchen counter and the hours he spent fishing alone in our backyard pond for largemouth bass and channel cats. Mom wasn’t getting pregnant mainly because Dad wasn’t trying to get her pregnant. And I came to the realization that when faced with death, at least the sudden and tragic kind, the invincible John Fitzpatrick threw in the cards just as fast as anyone else.

      “Are you listening to me, Hank?”

      If we were playing a game of euchre, Dad probably thinks he has the high card, the right bower. But, at best, he’s holding a guarded left, three low trumps at the most. I was there with Mom in the days and weeks after her miscarriage. You remember that, Dad? Those nights when you couldn’t handle it? When Mom’s son, not her husband, crawled in bed with her and stroked her hair until she fell asleep?

      I look at the hand I’ve been dealt. I don’t have an obvious play here, but I go for it anyway. “Don’t you need to go fishing or something?”

      It’s the equivalent of throwing out an off-suite ace to sneak a point early in the game or else force your opponent to burn trump. Mom looks at me with her don’t-go-there eyes.

      In Dad’s defense, he did put down the fishing pole. Although maybe not as soon as I would have liked, one day he put down the pole, scooped Mom up in his arms, and gave her an uncomfortably long kiss on his way out the door to work. That night, he stopped ordering pizza. The night after that, he stopped ordering Chinese. The night after that, Mom made us our first home cooked meal in a month. And the night after that, mere hours after Mom came back from her obstetrician with a clean bill of health, my parents starting locking their bedroom door again. They assumed I didn’t notice, just as I assume they don’t notice a son who goes through a box of Kleenex every other week without ever having a cold.

      “What did you say, Hank?”

      “Nothing, Dad.” Even with all this trump in my hand, I have no choice but to fold. “I guess I said I was sorry.”

      “You guess?” Dad raises his open palm next to his head, closes it, and covers his mouth with his fist. He gets up from the table, refills his coffee, stands at the kitchen sink. He looks out the window at the willow tree stump in our backyard, its decaying roots at the water’s edge breaking the pond’s frozen surface. Dad stands there for what seems like a long time but is no more than ten seconds. He turns around and sits back down, pulls his chair closer to mine. “Look, son, I know kids will be kids. And I know there are a lot of temptations out there your mother and I never faced.”

      “That’s an understatement.”

      I’ve made it through the worst part of the storm, but Dad isn’t in the mood for banter. “Don’t start with me, Hank.”

      Of course, what I hear is, Start with me, Hank.

      “You and Mom met each other at your college freshman orientation,” I say. “You dated exclusively for five years, and you both lost your virginity on your wedding night. Never mind zip code, you two weren’t in the same universe as me growing up.”

      “Don’t be so glib, Hank.”

      “How many times have you been drunk, Dad?”

      “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

      “How many?”

      “Maybe three or four times.”

      “In your whole life?”

      “Okay, son.” Dad dips his chin in deference to me. “For the sake of argument, I’ll concede СКАЧАТЬ