CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Careers, Cheers, Tears and Fears
Tim lurked in the corner like some scoundrel selling scalped concert tickets at the coliseum. The twisted smirk on his face made Aiden shake his head in amusement as he neared him. His best friend laid his hand on his shoulder and said with an exaggerated sigh, “Today is the day, champ. Give it all ya got, Rocky!”
“Get tha hell outta here. Don’t you have work to do?” Aiden chuckled.
“Seriously, good luck, man. Your big interview for that great kahuna management position is today, and that’s a big deal. You’ll even be travelling to other branches, get a big pay raise… a nice fat check I imagine. I’ll need to borrow some money right away if you land this.”
“I’m sure you will.” They both burst out laughing.
“Treat us peons under you well. Remember the little people.”
“Oh, shut up. Nobody is a peon. We all work our asses off. Well, most of us. Anyway, thanks, man.” They gave each other daps. “I appreciate the well wishes.” Aiden glanced down at his watch. “In five minutes it’s show time, so I better head on over to H.R.” He pulled out a tin of spearmint flavored candies and popped one in his mouth. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“You do that!” Tim called out as Aiden started his walk toward the unknown. Each step he took felt surreal. He was either nearing his future, or staying in the present. Either way, he accepted both as viable options, but he had high hopes that his track record would speak for itself. As he headed towards the elevator, Mark passed him in the hall.
“Hey.” The man’s face split in a greasy smile. “On your way to interview for the big gig, huh?”
Aiden crossed his arms and grimaced at the son of a bitch.
“I just came from there,” the fucker continued. “May the best man win.”
“Well then there’s no competition because there’s only one man standing here, now isn’t there? And it sure as hell isn’t you.” Aiden jammed his finger on the ‘up’ arrow button and waited by the double metal doors.
Mark burst out in full forced laughter, bending at the waist, carrying on like a loon. When he stood erect, his face was bright red and his perfectly coiffed dark hair slightly disheveled.
“That’s a good one, Aiden… that’s funny. Say.” The man ran his finger contemplatively against his chin. “I wonder what the big wigs would have to say about us employees fucking our clients?” Aiden’s blood went cold, but he refused to allow the bastard to see him squirm under the heat. “Do you think they’d let that slide? Hmmm, it could make all the difference in who gets the job offer, couldn’t it?”
The son of a bitch cast him a wink, turned on his heels, and walked away. When the elevator doors opened, Aiden promptly stepped inside, chewing his inner jaw as he tried with everything within him to regain his composure. As the damn thing went up a flight, he pushed the altercation out of his mind and hoped and prayed for the best…
The glaring red and blue lights of several police cars blinded him, the vehicles parked side by side outside his mother’s apartment building. Aiden sat in his car a good while, staring at the place, his mind morphed to a blank canvas. His heart became numb, and yet, he was there, in the eye of the storm.
He’d had an awesome interview, then gave Tim an update that included the roundabout warning from Mark. After bouncing it off one another, they decided calling the fucker’s bluff was the best bet and if he did sing like a wounded bird, he’d handle that bridge when it was time to cross it. This right here though was a gut clenching ending to fairly positive day. Deciding to take the situation by the throat, he shoved the car door open and exited his vehicle, slamming it behind him, then approached Perry, who was talking to four cops, his arms flailing about and his voice loud.
“But she’s not here!” Perry continued before they met eyes. “Aiden, thank God.” His brother’s shoulders slumped and a look of relief came over his tense face.
“Sir, who are you?” one of the officers questioned, a concerned look in his eyes.
He must be new. Everyone knows who I am by now…
“I’m Barbara’s son, Aiden. Perry’s brother.”
The cop nodded in understanding. “Aiden, your mother, is accused of striking her neighbor, Ms. Appleton, with a rolling pin. They’d had an argument and it escalated. We’ve went to her apartment and she isn’t there. Do you know where she might be?”
“No. I thought she was home actually.” He winced from the spastic lights going around and around. It hurt his vision even more now that he was closer to them. He tried to ignore all the partially opened blinds in various apartments with silhouettes of heads looking on at the freak show. Just behind the police officers, he took note of Perry’s old white thunderbird. He could have sworn he saw movement in the backseat. He blinked a few times, then focused back on the officers who rattled on about how they were basically sick and tired of his mom. They weren’t the only ones…
“There’s that drunk, crazy bitch!” someone yelled. Everyone turned around and took note of a tall, thin man walking briskly towards Perry’s parked car. “You hit my mother in the head! Hey! She’s over here!” The guy pointed straight ahead, his oversized rust shirt moving about in the cold breeze and his eyes dancing in the strangest of ways. The police raced to the Thunderbird, the new guy with his gun drawn, and peered inside with a flashlight.
“Get out tha car!” the cop hollered. Aiden tossed a menacing glance at Perry, who turned sheepishly away, avoiding eye contact.
“You stupid son of a bitch!” Aiden spat under his breath through all of the commotion. “They could get you on obstruction!” Soon, the cops were dragging Mom out the car, her slurred curse words making him cringe.
“You get your goddamn hands offa me! Go arrest a real criminal, fucker!” Her hair slung in a million directions, and her shirt hung off her shoulder exposing prominent collar bones and a twisted bra strap. Her knees buckled and she struggled hard, her tiny body giving them what for.
Perry rushed towards them, only to be severely warned by two officers telling him to stay back. The screaming all around him became so much that his head began to throb and ache. Aiden got down on the sidewalk. His ass hit the cold concrete and he sat there with his legs wide open, hands over knees, staring down at the ground. The blood rushed to his head and he did everything within him to gain his inner peace. His cellphone buzzed in his pocket, but he ignored it.
“Aiden!” His mother’s voice was so shrill, it made him jump. He looked up at her, now handcuffed and being shoved in the back of one of the police cars. Her eyes filled with tears. Perry jumped about, cursing and carrying on until he, too, was in handcuffs and pushed against the side of the one of the patrol cars.
“Please let him go! He didn’t mean it!” Aiden hopped to his feet and protested with his hands up, his anger and angst marrying one another within him. He stood beside one of the cops who knew him by name, Officer Steven. “Perry is a good guy, you know that. He’s just afraid for her. Please! I promise he won’t bother anybody.” Perry began to calm down and his voice quieted as he stared at his brother with fear in his blue eyes.
“You’re lucky.” The cop unlocked the handcuffs and snatched them off his brother’s wrist. “You should be going downtown. You lied to us. You hid her and then tried to interfere. If it wasn’t for Aiden, trust me, that would be it for you!” The cop jammed his finger in Perry’s face, but thankfully, the crazy bastard remained quiet and didn’t test the waters.
Before Aiden could form another thought, his mother was driven away. She pressed her forehead against the window and they looked at one another until she couldn’t be seen anymore. Two of the officers gave him some papers and information, the usual run down. It had been years since Mom had been arrested, but he recalled the prior time like it was yesterday. Moments later, the people peeking behind the blinds seemed to vanish, their lights turned off, and the cops faded into the night like crimson and indigo ghosts. The small, nosy crowd around them broke apart like puzzle pieces dumped onto the floor and it, too, dissipated. He and Perry stood shoulder to shoulder, with so many things to say but not a word uttered.
“We gotta bail her out,” the man finally said, his chest rising and falling fast and hard. Aiden snatched his car keys out of his pocket and stomped towards his vehicle.
“Where are you going, man?!”
“Home!” He snatched the door open.
Perry chased him down and stood before him, looking crazy.
“You’re not goin’ home until we get this sorted out. Now, what can you spare? We gotta call a bail bondsman. We gotta get her out as soon as possible.”
All the hate and hurt in Aiden’s heart flooded into his body like thick, black poison going directly into his blood system.
“We don’t have to do shit! I told her I was done, and I mean it.” With that, he slammed the door closed and drove away, leaving Perry and the spirit of his mother behind him…
He counted down the minutes…
It was only a matter of time before Perry would come banging on his door like an enraged Incredible Hulk. Aiden stood in the kitchen at 2:00 AM, wearing only a pair of loose jogging pants, guzzling down milk out of the carton. He’d spoken to his baby for about twenty minutes, giving her the rundown of his extremely fucked up day. She’d offered to come over immediately, even though it was her first week of work and she needed her rest while getting acclimated.
He declined, wanting her to have a productive and good time meeting her new coworkers and getting into the groove of things in her new position as a Speech Pathologist. Like clockwork, a series of rapid fire thuds came hard and heavy at his door. The doorbell rang frantically as if some bird was using its beak to peck it to death, then more thuds followed.
“You haven’t been answering your phone. Open the damn door!” Perry yelled. Aiden took his time placing the carton of milk back in the refrigerator. When he swung it open, Perry stood there with sweat all over his brow, nostrils flared like bat wings, and his right hand balled in a tight fist.
“You want to fight me?” Aiden sneered. “I have enough anger right now to tear you from limb to limb so I think you better pull yourself the fuck together before you come in here.”
Perry’s lips moved to say something slick, but he stopped short and unfurled his brow. He stormed into the condo, knocking Aiden in the shoulder as he did. Locking the door behind him, Aiden dragged himself back to the kitchen on the hunt for the leftover quiche Addison had left at his place. It was her slice, but he sure as hell hoped she didn’t mind.
“Aiden, I’m not asking you. I’m telling you that we gotta get Mom outta jail,” the man barked as he plopped down at the kitchen table. Aiden grabbed the quiche that was enclosed in aluminum foil out of the refrigerator. As he slowly unwrapped it, he glanced into his brother’s eyes.
“Perry, we won’t be helping her by doing this. Do you know that Ms. Appleton had to get twenty-three stitches tonight? Twenty-three fuckin’ stitches in her head.” He tore at the foil and was happy to see it wasn’t some old thing, rotten and moldy, that he’d forgotten about. It was the motherload, the cheesy quiche with the light, flaky crust. He tossed it onto a paper plate and plopped it in the microwave.
“Mom didn’t mean it. She was drunk. She needs help, man, not to be in jail!”
“That’s the whole damn point! She’s always drunk. This has to stop, Perry. She needs to sober up and start to take her life seriously. I’m not her father, and neither are you. When are we going to let her grow up? She will never hit rock bottom if we keep saving her. We have to stop helping her!” Perry looked away as if he didn’t want to hear anything else he had to say. “She pitched a fit because I stopped paying her phone bill the other day. I quit buying her cigarettes, too. I stopped talking to her when she’s drunk; I hang up now. This last stunt was nothing but a way to get my ass over there and do what I always do. Save the day, pour some water on the flames that she started. I’m not a fireman! It’s time she feels the heat. Queen of manipulation. I’m done, man! Done!” He waved his arms like a referee calling, ‘Out.’
“I will keep saying this until I’m blue in the face, Aiden. She can’t stay in jail. She’s not strong enough and what type of asshole are you to leave your own mother in jail?!”
“The type of asshole who has given away his whole damn life to a woman who can’t even call me to say hello with no strings attached! The type of asshole who has sat in my car on the verge of a nervous breakdown believing my mother was going to die after finding her unconscious in a pool of her own vomit! The type of asshole who tap-dances for the cops that visit her apartment for the umpteenth time in one month just so they won’t drag her ass off to jail! I’m done tap dancing. I’m done being her janitor and maid! I’m done bein’ Mom’s slave. We are slaves to her addiction, Perry!”
His brother looked away sharply, his lower lip trembling as his eyes glossed over.
“What? Are… YOU… gonna do when she’s dead, Perry?!” He stormed towards his brother and sat right beside him, his eyes tearing up with rage and a broken heart that he was certain would never fully heal. “We’re helping her kill herself! When the cops were taking her away, I looked at her, Perry. I looked at her real close, and for a split second, I could see the young lady who’d had two sons and took care of ’em, so long ago. No, she wasn’t perfect back then, either, but she didn’t drink all the time. She showed up to our school for events, and she helped us with our homework, broke up our fights, took us out to eat, ice-skating and to the movies. She talked to us; she was there for us. She laughed, she was fun, not much of a disciplinarian, but we knew she loved the hell outta us. But then, something happened.”
“It was like a light switch, wasn’t it?” Perry’s voice quivered.
“Not really. She was declining, but maybe you were too young to see it happening so to you it seemed to happen all at once. The beer or two a week turned to every day, then that turned to four to five a day, then more, then the pills. I don’t know what exactly she was running from but something was going on with Mom, something we didn’t understand or see coming. I know people don’t just wake up overnight and ask to become alcoholics or drug addicts, Perry… but something breaks inside of them.”
A tear streaked his brother’s cheek as he began to rock back and forth in the chair.
“Nobody at my job knows Mom drinks too much. It’s not so much because I’m ashamed of ’er, it’s because I’m trying to protect her. But hiding her secrets doesn’t help her… saving her doesn’t help her, either. We’ve already tried that countless times.” He snatched a napkin off the dispenser on the table and handed it to his brother. The poor man’s eyes dripped liquid pain onto peachy skin. The tears would eventually dry and be gone, but their source would linger forever.
“Well, what do we do?” Perry dabbed at his eyes and sniffed.
“We wait. And then we do the humane thing. We offer her a chance for a new life or allow nature to take its course. It’s ultimately her choice. If something happens to Mom because she continues on this path, neither you nor I are to blame. It took me a long time to realize that, but I do now.” He rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “She took our voice. She made it about her and we ended up wailing her song on her behalf, while our own lyrics got lost in her sauce. You’re here right now not because of what you need, but to feed the monster inside of her. We can’t afford to do that anymore. It’s gotta stop.”
“Monster… yeah, it’s a monster all right.” Perry swallowed. His lips parted and his face scrunched hard, as if he were fighting the next tear.
“It’s a selfish monster. She has no idea how hard you work,” Aiden said. Perry glanced away, the tears flowing faster than before. “She doesn’t know what you like to do, how your life has been. It’s all about what she needs. She doesn’t even know your girlfriend, Perry.”
“Denise asked to meet Mom a bunch of times, but I keep coming up with excuses. I felt like a fuckin’ ass, man. Didn’t even tell her what was going on… I don’t want anybody to think bad about her, you know? It’s like, once you tell someone what’s going on, they’ll judge her. I mean,” Perry shrugged. “Some of my friends know, like Robert, but I’m funny about who I tell, ya know? And you may not have been ashamed of ’er, but I was.” He swallowed hard and shut his eyes. Aiden gave him a minute, and rubbed on his shoulder to soothe him.
“You’re not ashamed of her. You’re ashamed of what she’s doing to herself and how it all makes you feel. We don’t have a mom; we haven’t had one in years. That’s why we can’t call an attorney. We can’t call her landlord. We can’t call the neighbors and offer to pay for the hospital bills if they just drop the charges. We can’t call the cops and try to put the runaway horse back in the barn. We can’t call a bail bondsman. We can’t put ourselves on the line and go down with her! She doesn’t know who we are because she’s forgotten who she is! We’re her sons, and she doesn’t know us. She doesn’t even know your favorite football team. She doesn’t know I’m in love, met a wonderful woman. These are the things we should be able to tell her and share with her, but we can’t. We can’t because of the drinking, the fucking booze that she can’t let go of. It doesn’t care whose life is ruined in the process, it just wants to be fed and to bleed its host dry. You know I love Mom.” His voice cracked. “But I love ’er enough to step away, too…”
“I can’t believe this!” Addison grinned at her boss, Mrs. Kaplin, who was searching for her workout videos online. “Addison, these are great. How long did it take you to do this?”
“Well, I only have two done and had to pay for production and editing. Hopefully when I get a bit more money I can finish the series of five videos through Paetreon and then after that, release other videos that focus on nutrition, health related matters in general. We have DVDs as well, but that’s more for promotional use or for those that prefer it. I just want to ensure that I cover all bases.” The woman looked over Addison’s shoulder at her desk, staring at the screen. She’d had Addison pull up the Amazon website to show her the goods, a result of the rumor mill that had already made the rounds about her side hustle.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. Well, not set up this way. You’ve shown very easy ways for some of our more physically challenged clients to get exercise in a fun and really cool way! I love the choices in music, too. I love how you explain the benefits of each and every exercise and how you give three different levels to each one, so they can build up. And look at these reviews! Some it seems are from physical therapy agencies.”
“Yeah, see what I did was I sent out two videos free to quite a few hospitals and agencies. I also gave a bunch away to some of the local gyms. Some of them were kind enough to check them out and leave reviews, but I’m just glad that I’m helping people. It seemed some of the other products on the market weren’t geared to be as motivational, and I wanted everyone to know there’s something for almost everyone. What can begin at five minutes a day can increase to ten, and so on. Don’t force it, just watch it happen and if they are distracted because they’re having fun, well…” She shrugged. “Then I’ve done my job.”
“Do you mind if I show this to Carl?”
“No, not at all! In fact, I can send you some copies.”
“That’s fine but I also want to purchase a subscription. I think this would be quite beneficial to some of our clients.”
The woman tapped her shoulder and left out of her office with cheer in her step. Addison sat there for a good few minutes before bursting out laughing with excitement. Not only had her sessions with her new clients gone splendidly that day, she now had her boss interested in her workout videos that had barely gotten off the ground. The lady was going to tell the head honcho, Carl, and that man had some real pull, not only at Golden Farms, but nationwide. Should he like what he saw, the opportunities would be endless.
She reached for her phone to call her baby and tell him the good news, but then she remembered; he was going to be indisposed for a while. Her jovial mood dampened as her thoughts drifted to Aiden. Things had come to a boiling point and he was in dire straits. She was ecstatic that he was sharing his feelings and concerns, but his situation was a nightmare, even by modest proportions…