Chapter 7
Andrew
I drive back up to Huntsville the next afternoon and park in the main lot right across from the steps that rise between the English and the Fine Arts buildings. It’s nice out—cool, but sunny—and I lean against my car, tip my head back, and soak up some of the sun.
I have to squint when Robert pulls up next to me fifteen minutes later. He’s driving a late-model Camry, and my guess is it has more air bags than a kid’s birthday balloon bouquet.
“Nice car,” I say as he gets out.
“Thanks. It was a birthday present from my grandmother. Sweet sixteen.”
I smile and nod. “So . . . where are you really?”
He smiles back, guiltily. “At Nic’s.”
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll call your house?”
“Nic doesn’t call my house. You didn’t just drive in, did you?”
I feel my cheeks redden. “Come on. Let’s have a look around.”
I don’t know the Sam Houston campus well at all. In the fall and spring, my graduate classes are online (although I’m not taking a class this spring; I plan to be busy with the admin training program). And when I do come up for graduate classes in the summer, I park outside the education building, go to my classroom, and straight back to my car an hour or two later. I had to look at a map of the campus just to come up with an easy-to-find place to meet.
So we explore together.
The campus is largely vacant. We see perhaps two or three people as we make our way from one end to the other. The SHSU campus is not unlike others that I’ve been on—old buildings, new buildings, a memorial garden here and there, a student center, multistory dorms. The hills are perhaps its most distinguishing feature, and the muscles in my thighs are burning by the time we circle back to the fountain in the heart of the campus.
There’s a north breeze, and we have to stand upwind to avoid getting showered. The tile bottom glitters with coins.
Robert fishes in his pocket for some pennies and hands me one. He shrugs and grins at me. “Make a wish.”
“Okay.” I squeeze my eyes shut and make a wish, then toss the coin in. He smiles and does the same.
“So what did you wish?” I ask.
“Can’t tell you or it won’t come true.”
I laugh and start to turn away.
“I wished that my dad would be dead when I get home.”
That stops me. I search his eyes in the bright sunlight.
“What the L-M-N-O-P, huh?” he says, and smiles, but it’s a pained look.
“Yeah. What the L-M-N-O-P? You don’t mean that,” I say, but I suspect he does.
He shrugs. “I cannot tell a lie.” He kicks lightly at the bricks around the fountain with the toe of his athletic shoe, then grimaces, and I see his eyes are glistening. “I just want it all to be over, you know. The people always in our house, the smell, the resentment. Yesterday a priest came and gave my dad last rites.”
We sit down on a bench a few feet away from the fountain. One thing I’ve learned working with kids is this: When they want to talk, you shut up. I twist on the bench to face him and prop my head on my fist. He watches a mockingbird land in the mist from the fountain, flutter its wings some, and then fly away.
“I know he’s my dad and all,” he says finally, “but I feel like he’s just this thing that sucks all the oxygen out of the room. Like the world has stopped spinning and it can’t start again until he’s gone.” He folds his arms across his chest like he’s cold and tells me about the chicken soup.
“I just wanted to rip that oxygen tube away from his face and replace it with a pillow and just hold it down, you know. You would think he’d want to make sure that I was going to be okay, that his affairs were in order so we wouldn’t have to untangle everything after he died. But all he can think about is himself. It’s as if I don’t even matter. And they talk about him like he’s such a hero. I don’t understand any of it. And I can’t stand the way everyone acts like my mom is some bad person. She’s not.”
I rest my hand on the back of his neck. He slips into silence, as if he can’t handle any more naked honesty today.
“You hungry?” I ask after a while. “I know a little place. Great Mexican food. I’m buying.”
Robert
We leave my car in the lot and he takes me a few blocks down the street to Jack in the Box. I have my first good laugh of the day.
We take our tacos, onion rings, and drinks to a table next to the window.
“So,” I say, tipping a wrapper down and allowing the taco to slip out a couple of inches. “What do you like about being a teacher?”
“Hmm. That’s a pretty complicated question. Definitely not the pay. Definitely not the adoration of hundreds of teenagers. How about summers off and pizza or Chick-fil-A five days a week, thirty-six weeks a year.”
“Well, at least you’re honest.” He smiles at me and I feel myself go a little gooey inside. “But you don’t buy school lunch,” I remind him.
“Oh, yeah. How do you know that?”
“Because you have a five-quart cooler sitting on the floor next to your desk every day.”
“Five quarts, huh? That’s a little anal, don’t you think?”
I shrug, a little embarrassed. “The real question is”—I spin an onion ring on my finger—“what’s in it?”
“The real question?”
“There is some speculation.”
“About what’s in my cooler? Really? So what does conventional wisdom say?”
“It’s pretty much an even split between peanut butter and jelly and some kind of tofu crap. I peg you for a peanut butter and jelly guy.”
“Jif. Creamy. And jam, not jelly. Peanut butter on one slice of whole wheat, jam on the other. Eaten whole.”
“Who’s anal now, Mr. Mac?”
He grins. “Can I ask you a favor? Can you stop calling me Mr. Mac? It sounds like you’re talking to my grandfather. And, anyway, my last name is Mick-Nelis, not Mac-Nelis, like Mick-Donald’s.”
“It’s not Mick-Donald’s.”
“Sure it is. That’s how you pronounce the M-C.”
“Oh, really? Then why don’t they serve Big Micks instead of Big Macs?”
He looks at me a moment, then laughs. “Okay, you got me there. How about we just dispense with the whole issue and you call me Andrew.”
Andrew? “What happened to Drew? It’s, uh, on the school Web site.”
“Okay, then call me Drew.”
“No. I think I’ll call you Andrew.” The name feels a little foreign on my tongue, but in a good way; it’s going to take some getting used to.
“So, are you really considering Sam Houston?” he asks me.
“No.”
His eyebrows shoot up at my admission. I don’t give him a chance to follow up. “I’m going to LSU. Premed, then medical school.”
“Wow. That’s a big deal.” When I scoff, he follows up with, “You don’t seem too happy about that.”
I shrug again. “It was kind of decided for me. My grandfather left me a trust when he died. I’m the last of the Westfalls. He expected me to carry on the tradition. It’s been understood that I would become a doctor since I was born.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Does it matter?”
“I think so.”
“No premed, no medical school, no trust. No trust, no funds for college.”
Andrew leans back in his chair and studies me. I have a feeling I’m about to get a lecture, so I change the subject. “You wear an OU T-shirt on college day. Is that where you went?”
“Yep, I’m a Sooner. The pride of Oklahoma.” He scoops up the trash from the table and pushes it through the swinging door of the receptacle a few feet away, then sits back down. I glance out the window at the fading light. I don’t want to leave.
“Do you think I’m a bad person?” I ask.
He pushes his drink to the side and plants his elbows on the table, then rests his chin on his fists. “No. Definitely, emphatically, unequivocally no.”
“You seem a little unsure.”
He smiles. “Do you think you’re a bad person?”
“Sometimes.”
He doesn’t say anything further. He’s in listening mode and seems in no hurry to leave. So I start talking, trying to explain things I barely understand myself.
“Everything feels like it’s more than I can handle, you know? I keep thinking, you can’t hate someone who’s dying, right? Especially your own dad. But I can’t not feel this way. I want to close this chapter in my life and move on; I want him to die, but I’m so afraid that makes me some kind of monster.”
“Robert,” he says, reaching across the table and laying his hand on mine. His fingers curl around the edge of my hand and dig into my palm. “I don’t know your dad, and I don’t know what’s happened in the past, but I do feel like I know you. You are not a monster. I suspect that what you feel or don’t feel toward your dad has more to do with self-defense than it does any kind of pathology.”
I look at his hand gripping mine, and I desperately want to turn my hand over and feel our palms meet, our fingers lace together. I force my hand to remain where it is. “He doesn’t love me,” I say, lifting my eyes to meet his.
“Are you sure about that?”
“He resents me. Sometimes I think it’s because I have the opportunity to become what he couldn’t. I don’t know. The crazy thing is, he didn’t want to be a doctor any more than I do. But in the Westfall family, if you’re not a doctor, you’re nothing. They blame my mom for getting pregnant, which is just stupid. She quit school—another Westfall sin—got a job, and supported us while dad played at being a student. The seizures started during his final year of med school, and he just never finished. He’s never even held a job. But do you know that his sisters still tell people he’s a doctor when they talk about him or introduce him. That status is everything to them; it’s everything to him. And I’m . . . nothing.”
He retrieves his hand and props his chin on his fist again and studies me. My hand feels naked, and an ache blossoms in my chest. A silence grows between us, like he’s working out some problem in his head, and I’m waiting for the answer. Then he asks, “Do you know what chaos theory is?”
“Yeah. The butterfly effect.”
“The math of messes,” he says. “Tiny differences in starting conditions—the beat of a butterfly’s wings, a temperature differential of half a degree, a bottle withheld a few beats too long, an ear infection that went undetected for a day or more—any little difference can lead to a totally different outcome later on. The entire Back to the Future movie trilogy was based on that very concept.” He shrugs. “Who knows what little things made your dad the way he is. Maybe what he took from his experiences left him insecure and unable to develop into an independent, fully functioning adult and a loving father. I don’t know.
“But the point is, you don’t know either. And you probably never will. Don’t beat yourself up for feelings you can’t help because of the dad he couldn’t be.”
He offers to follow me home a little while later, with a very teacher-like admonishment: “No texting on the road, okay?”
But I’m not really thinking of him as a teacher anymore. I’m thinking of him as a friend.
Andrew
Tell a stranger that they’re beautiful.
Stop listening to Adam Lambert, my friend, or you will go blind.
Ha, ha. Good catch. Hey, Andrew, thanks. For meeting me today, for listening.
It was my pleasure.
I feel a warmth inside as I push Send. There is a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that you’ve taught your students well, that they’ve mastered the objectives set forth in the state standards, but that’s not what keeps teachers coming back to the classroom.
The pull is something a little less quantitative and a little more qualitative. It’s the knowledge that you’ve really touched someone, the knowledge that you’ve made a difference. It makes all that other stuff worth it—the grading on weekends when you’d rather be hanging out with your family, the pay that (on average) falls some twenty-five thousand dollars short of the income needed to meet basic middle-class needs.
I picture Robert looking into the fountain, making a confession no kid should have to make. I’ve seen that kind of raw honesty only once before. It was when Maya told me she couldn’t go on pretending to be husband and wife anymore. When she told me what it did to her every night when I retired to my room and closed the door. We thought we could make it work, for the sake of Kiki. But we couldn’t. And I’d had no idea what it was doing to my best friend and the mother of my little girl. I moved out the next day and she started trying to build a life without me.
I don’t know if all my talk about chaos theory really made a difference with Robert. It seemed intuitive at the time; now, I’m not so sure. Maybe he just needed me to be there, to allow him to get what he needed to off his chest, to let him know he didn’t have to carry that burden around all by himself.
MAC-Donald’s. Big MAC.
Don’t rub it in, smartass.
Ouch! Your language, my eyes!
I don’t give a damn what you think.
Nice. Eminem, right?