Chapter 18
Andrew
My head is pounding, my eyes feel like someone dumped a bag of sand into them, and my mind keeps losing track of the problems as I work them on the board. From behind me I hear a snicker. I take a deep breath and write:
3x2 + 8x + 4
My intention is to show how to factor by grouping, but the snickering behind me distracts me to the point where I can no longer ignore it.
I turn and lean against the aluminum rail below the whiteboard. Stephen Newman has his foot out of his athletic shoe, and he’s poking his socked toes under Kristyn Murrow’s thigh. She slaps at his foot and giggles while I watch, unamused.
“Mr. Newman,” I bark. He draws his foot back and snaps to attention with exaggerated and annoying precision. He relaxes his face into a false expression of piety, but when giggles erupt around him, he cracks into a big goofy grin.
“How would you solve this problem?” I ask, tapping the board with my marker.
“I guess I’d tell me to shut up and get out,” he says, referring to the other problem in the room. More giggles.
Ah, they know me too well.
“Then shut up and get out,” I say.
He stands and makes his way to the door, arms clamped to his sides, head down, the very image of shame, although I have no doubt that that child has never in his life felt a shred of shame. He does, however, know the game.
I dart a look around the classroom, and the other kids get quiet, but the smiles remain.
Stephen baby-steps out of the classroom and closes the door behind him, then immediately reopens it and steps back in. “I apologize for disrupting the class, Mr. McNelis. May I please return to my seat?”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer, but takes his seat again, then flashes me a smug smile.
God, save me from freshmen. I turn back to the board and get through the lesson as quickly as I can.
In the last ten minutes, I get the kids started on their homework and collapse at my desk. I’m nauseated from lack of sleep and too much coffee and a double heaping of guilt.
I scan my e-mail for the one I know will come today. And there it is, just below a heads-up for a fire drill scheduled for fifth period.
| To: | Fabiola Cortez, Bob Benson, Annet Nguyen, Richard Gorman, Susan Weatherford, Andrew McNelis, Bette Flowers |
| From: | Lynn Lincoln |
| Subject: | Robert Westfall |
Teachers—
I’m sad to inform you that Robert Westfall’s father passed away late last night. According to Mrs. Westfall, it was a peaceful passing. Robert will not be in class the rest of the week as the family deals with their loss. When he returns, he will need your support, your understanding, and your flexibility as he catches up with his coursework. Please keep the family in your thoughts. I will provide you with funeral details as soon as I receive them. Thank you as always for all you do for our students.
Ms. Lincoln
Twelfth Grade Counselor
Twelfth Grade Counselor
I lean back in my chair and close my eyes and try to imagine what he might be doing right now. Do his fingers itch to text me the way my fingers itch to text him? Do I dare text him at least a word of sympathy, an acknowledgment that I’m thinking about him? Would he welcome my text? Would he even read it? Would I be opening a door that I’d only have to close again later?
I’m mulling over these questions when someone farts loudly and the class erupts in laughter. God, I’m not in the mood for this. Fortunately, the bell rings and the kids hustle on to their next class.
I poke around in my desk drawer for something to nip this headache, but all I come up with is a still-sealed box of Imodium, a little gift from the woman who heads the math department. The anti-diarrheal had been in my welcome basket last year, tucked among dry erase markers, Hershey’s chocolate Miniatures, pencils, and assorted notepads. There’d been a small bottle of Motrin also, but that bottle is long gone. I actually consider the Imodium for a moment before shoving it to the back of my drawer.
Hey, Jen. You got some Tylenol or some Motrin?
I have Midol.
Good enough. I’ll be right over.
“Kidding,” she says when I enter her classroom. She holds out a small gold pillbox with the lid flipped up. “Pick your poison,” she says, discreetly dumping the contents into my hand behind her desk. I have no idea what’s what, but I choose two matching pills and funnel the rest back into the box.
“Gates open at six thirty,” she says as I toss the pills into my mouth. She hands me a water bottle. “You want me to pick you up or you want to pick me up?”
I take a sip of water and use that moment to try and get my bearings. Gates?
“Hey, Ms. Went!” a student in a Houston Texans hoodie calls from the center of the room. “Can I go to the bathroom?”
“That’s what passing period is for. Take a seat, John.”
“But I have diarrhea.”
And I’ve got some Imodium for you, kid. Diarrhea. The only diarrhea that kid has is coming out of his mouth.
Jen rolls her eyes. “Go. Make it fast,” she says to him, then turns back to me.
Gates—Pavilion—Iron Maiden. Right. “Um, I’ll pick you up,” I say. “Six o’clock?”
I return to my full classroom as the bell rings and wonder what I was thinking accepting her invitation.
There’s no need to mark Robert absent sixth period. The attendance clerk has already entered a PN (parent notification) in the online record for him for the rest of the week. I open my Web page and make a few additional notes in the class calendar so he’ll know exactly what he’s missed if he’s keeping up. And knowing Robert, he’s keeping up. Will he notice the more detailed notes? Will he read between the lines? I hope so. I really hope so.
Robert
I’m still thinking about those fish in the freezer when I curl up on my bed for a nap. I have a couple of hours before we head to the funeral home, and I plan to spend them sleeping. But those frozen eyeballs keep floating across the inside of my eyelids. I’m not surprised that Mom turned them into fish sticks the first chance she got.
Mother’s Day, four years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday, like all the dramatic moments in my life—the day I lost my first tooth in a rush of blood when the kid down the street accidentally slammed me in the mouth with his Buzz Lightyear, the day I took my driver’s test and bumped the curb parallel parking and failed, the day Luke called me on the phone and asked if I’d like to meet for a soda, the moment I realized I was just a no-fly zone between him and Curtis.
Dad was up, showered, and dressed early that morning. He told Mom he needed to run some errands, and I can’t blame Mom for expecting that those errands had something to do with the fact that this was her day, even if she had to drive. But I could feel the temperature in the car drop when Dad said he needed to go to the fish store.
He charged over two hundred dollars that day—money I doubt we had to spend—on some live plants, a couple of rainbows, a clown fish, and a plecostomus, plus a new whisper filter and an all-glass deluxe hood (custom fit to reduce evaporation).
It was then, as Mom and I shuffled around the store for over an hour, pretending that this wasn’t awkward, pretending that this was a day just like any other, that I finally understood her reaction to me another Mother’s Day, a few years earlier.
Like a Russian nesting doll, I open that memory too.
I’d been running errands with her that morning when she’d suggested we stop by the mall for a Mother’s Day gift. I had a few dollars saved up from mowing lawns over spring break, but it was money that I’d planned to spend on some new games for my Xbox. So, lacking any fatherly direction, I had innocently responded, “I’m not spending my money on you.”
She’d turned the car around, headed straight home, then sent me to my room. I could hear her crying through the closed door. I didn’t really get why she was so upset at the time; I was just mad that she wouldn’t take me to get my games.
I got it that day in the fish store, the humiliation of being dismissed by her own husband on Mother’s Day and by her own son, who was seemingly growing up to be just like him. But I wasn’t like him; I was just clueless. And if I’d had a driver’s license at the time, I would have taken the keys and Mom and just left Dad there. I would have taken her to lunch, bought some leftover flowers at H-E-B, tried to make her feel special.
Instead I closed myself in my room when we got home. I made her a Mother’s Day card on Publisher and printed and carefully folded it, then signed my name at the bottom. But before I could give it to her, the fighting started. Even through the closed door, I could hear them.
“I don’t believe you,” she yelled. “I am his mother, and you are his father, and it’s your job to teach your son what it means to show appreciation to the women in his life. Your job to help him pick out a card or flowers or make a goddamned piece of toast for me.”
I can still hear the ice in his voice when he told her, “You’re not my mother.”
He just didn’t get it. He never did. I suspect those frozen fish were more self-aware at the moment of their demise than he ever was. Someone or something had to pay for the hurt he’d inflicted on her that day, the way he’d simply dismissed her. The fish were just guilty by association.
I actually believed that when Dad died, my aunts’ influence ended. But as I sit next to Mom and across the table from Aunt Whitney and Aunt Olivia, I realize how wrong I was.
The funeral director sits uncomfortably at the end of the dark, highly polished conference table. He shifts the knot in his tie a little, then thumbs through the papers in front of him as Mom glares across the table.
They’ve already bullied Mom into a 2,700-pound, lined concrete burial vault that is guaranteed to protect Dad’s mahogany casket—with a Memory Safe drawer for securing private mementos and messages and a Memory Shelf for the subtle display of keepsakes and photos—in perpetuity.
Now they want to hire a bagpiper.
“We cannot afford all this,” my mom argues. I can see she’s embarrassed at being forced to fight for economy and angry at the suggestion that she’s being cheap.
Aunt Whitney’s face is stony. “That’s what Wes’s life insurance is for.”
I glance at Mom. Her face is flushed, her jaw tense.
“No,” she says finally. “No vault, no bagpipes, no five hundred prayer cards. We’ll have a simple funeral.”
Aunt Whitney looks at her like she’s a cockroach she’d like to smack with her shoe. “My brother is not having a pauper’s funeral. I’ll pay for it myself if I have to. But I just want you to remember something.” She points her finger at my mom. “This is my kids’ money that you’ll be spending here. What I have to put into this funeral to give my brother the dignity he deserves takes away from my kids.”
Mom pushes back her chair and storms out of the room. I follow her into the vestibule.
She’s crying and hugging herself, and I’m suddenly so angry at my aunts I can’t see straight. I don’t like seeing Mom like this, broken. She’s always been the adult in the house, the strong one.
“Fuck them,” I say.
She smiles a little as fresh tears spill down her face.
I look out onto the cemetery grounds beyond the glass doors. The plots are divided into two sections—those with flat markers, and those with headstones and monuments purchased by families who apparently cared enough about their loved ones to drop the cash. I can’t help but notice all the flags and trinkets and photographs that mark the flat graves. Maybe the other section is similarly adorned, but it’s hard to see past all that granite.
“You can put him in a pine box for all I care,” I say. “If they want anything more, then let them pay for it.”
In the end, Mom signs over almost the entirety of Dad’s measly whole-life policy and pushes the papers down the table to the funeral director.
I drive Mom home in silence, then lug the aquarium out to the back porch, and with Dad’s scarred, hand-carved, wooden tribal cane from Africa, reduce it to tiny shards of glass and dented metal. I cut my right thumb when I pick up the pieces and bleed all over my band hoodie.
A double Band-Aid stems the flow, but the bleed-through leaves a watery red smudge on my keypad a little later as I delete the text messages in my in-box one by one, reading each one one last time before I let it go forever. There are 199, one short of the maximum my phone will hold. I’ve already pared them down repeatedly, saving only the most recent and the most personal. I don’t keep any of them now.
Just another homework assignment that I will dutifully complete because he’s the teacher, and I’m just the student.
The most recent text, however, is from Nic, sent minutes after school let out for the day, about the same time my mom was signing away any small hope I had of pursuing a college education of my choosing.
OMG OMG OMG. Your dad! I just heard. I wondered where you were this morning. You must be completely devastated!!! I know I am. Krystal and I are going to make you something tonight to make you feel better. Oh, and if you get a new suit for the funeral, be sure to buy one with skinny legs. Trust me on this.
On a low shelf that runs along the far side of my desk, next to a sticky ring of something red (Hawaiian Punch, maybe) are the Iron Maiden tickets my aunts gave me for Christmas. I hadn’t mentioned them to Nic.
I pick them up and notice the date. I know that if I step outside, I’ll be able to hear the relentless bass two miles away. But I don’t go outside. I drop the tickets in the wicker basket next to my desk, delete Nic’s text, and go to bed early.
Andrew
When I told Jennifer I’d take her up on the concert, I wasn’t thinking about actually going to the concert. I was running for cover, hiding my privates like a kid in a locker room who’s just been pantsed.
Despite another dose of pain killers and a glass of wine at home, I am still strung tighter than a drum, irritable, and wanting to be anywhere but in a car on the way to a concert with Jennifer Went—especially a concert by a band that’s not only a little long in the tooth, but is known for squirting fake blood from a papier-mâché mask on stage. It’s unfair to Jen, but I can’t seem to shake my bad mood. She attributes it to a bad day at school. I don’t dispute that.
“Come on,” she says, reaching between the seats for the blanket she tossed back there when I picked her up. “I’ll buy you a beer, then give you a back rub. You’ll be chillin’ and enjoying the music in no time.”
Not likely.
It’s hard to chill at a metal concert, but I don’t argue when she takes my half-empty cup of Shiner Bock later, sets it aside on a level square of trampled grass, and insists I assume the position.
I read somewhere that the lead singer—Bruce something-or-other—could raise the dead with his powerful vocals. I don’t know about that, but his powerful voice and the thundering bass drum and crashing symbols are like spikes in my brain. Still, I think I actually doze as the band blisters through its first set, Jen’s thumbs digging into my muscles, easing the soreness that still lingers from Friday night’s guard practice. I don’t even complain when she slides her hands up under my shirt and works her way up and down my spine. I just let myself experience it, and let my mind drift, unguarded, to a blue-eyed, blond-haired kid with chewed-up hems on his jeans and a killer smile.
I see him close his eyes and bite his lower lip as he pops and locks to the music, the sweat beaded up behind his ears as he spins and comes up on his toes like a skateboarder, then loses his balance and stumbles forward, the grin when he challenges me to prove myself in the parking lot. I feel the warmth of his hands when he positions mine on the rifle, the solidness of his body when he embraces me before saying good night. I won’t say that I imagine the fingers that have slipped beneath the waistband of my jeans are his, and I won’t say that I don’t.
I will say that when a couple of my students call out a hello to us as they head to the concession area for sodas during the band’s break, I don’t turn over. Still lying on my stomach, I take a sip of warm beer and reluctantly let go of his image.