“And if someone suggested that about your mother? How would you have reacted?”
Dad was smiling again. He was riding some kind of high from the adrenaline rush of combat or maybe pride in his grandson. Al Bolitar had been born poor in Newark and grew up on the city’s tougher streets. He started working for a butcher on Mulberry Street when he was just eleven. The majority of his adult life was spent running an undergarment factory in Newark’s North Ward near the Passaic River. His office, as it were, loomed above the assembly line floor, all glass so he could see out and his employees could see in. He tried to save the plant during the riots in 1967, but the looters burned it down, and while Dad eventually rebuilt it and went back to work, he never quite looked at his employees or the city the same again.
“Think about it,” Dad said. “Think about what you said to Kitty. Suppose someone had said that to your mother.”
“My mother isn’t Kitty.”
“You think that matters to Mickey?”
Myron shook his head. “Why would Kitty tell him what I said?”
“What, a mother should lie?”
When Myron was eight years old, he got into a pushing fight with Kevin Werner outside Burnet Hill Elementary School. His parents sat in the school office and heard a stern lecture from the principal, Mr. Celebre, on the evils of fighting. When they got home, Mom headed upstairs without saying a word. Dad sat him down in this very room. Myron expected a fairly severe punishment. Instead his father leaned forward and looked him dead in the eye. “You’ll never get in trouble with me for getting in a fight,” he said. “If you find yourself in a situation where you need to step outside and settle it, I’m not going to question your judgment. You fight if you have to. You never run away from it. You never back down.” And as crazy and surprising as this advice may have seemed, Myron had indeed backed down from fights in the years to come, doing the “prudent” thing, and the truth-a truth that probably explained what his friends described as his hero complex-was that no beating hurts as much as backing down.
“This is what you wanted to talk to me about?” Myron said.
Dad nodded. “You need to promise me you’ll leave them alone. And you already know this, but you shouldn’t have said what you did to your brother’s wife.”
“I just wanted to talk to Brad.”
“He’s not around,” Dad said.
“Where is he?”
“He’s on some kind of charity mission in Bolivia. Kitty didn’t want to give me the details.”
“Maybe there’s trouble.”
“Between Brad and Kitty?” Dad took a sip of water. “Maybe there is. But that’s not our business.”
“So if Brad is off in Bolivia, what are Kitty and Mickey doing here?”
“They’re looking to settle back in the States. They’re debating between this area and California.”
Another lie, Myron was sure. Way to manipulate the old man, Kitty. Get Myron off my back and maybe we will want to live near you. Keep him bugging us and we move across the country. “Why now? Why did they come back home after all these years?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“Dad, I know you like to give your kids privacy, but I think you’re taking this not-interfering thing a little too far.”
He chuckled at that. “You have to give them room, Myron. I never told you how I felt about Jessica, for example.”
Again with his old girlfriend. “Wait, I thought you liked Jessica.”
“She was bad news,” Dad said.
“But you never said anything.”
“It wasn’t my place.”
“Maybe you should have,” Myron said. “Maybe it would have saved me a lot of heartache.”
Dad shook his head. “I would do anything to protect you”-he almost glanced outside, having proved the point mere minutes ago-“but the best way to do that is to let you make your own mistakes. A mistake-proof life is not worth living.”
“So I just let it go?”
“For now, yes. Brad knows you reached out-Kitty will tell him. I e-mailed him too. If he wants to reach back, he will.”
Myron flashed to another memory: Brad, age seven, getting bullied at sleepaway camp. Myron remembered Brad just sitting out by the old softball field by himself. Brad had made the last out and the bullies had taunted en masse. Myron tried to sit with him but Brad just kept crying and telling Myron to go away. It was one of those times you feel so helpless you’d kill to make the pain go away. He remembered another time, when the entire Bolitar family went to Miami during the February school break. He and Brad shared a hotel room, and one night, after a fun-filled day at the Parrot Jungle, Myron asked him about school and Brad broke down and cried and said that he hated it and had no friends and it broke Myron’s heart in about a thousand places. The next day, sitting out by the pool, Myron asked Dad what he should do about it. His father’s advice had been simple: “Don’t raise it. Don’t make him sad now. Just let him enjoy his vacation.”
Brad had been gawky, awkward, a later bloomer. Or maybe it had just been growing up behind Myron.
“I thought you wanted us to reconcile,” Myron said.
“I do. But you can’t force it. Give them room.”
His father was still breathing hard from the earlier altercation. There was no reason to get him all upset now. It could wait until the morning. But then: “Kitty is using drugs,” Myron said.
Dad raised an eyebrow. “You know this?”
“Yes.”
Dad rubbed his chin and considered this new development. Then: “You still need to leave them alone.”
“Are you serious?”
“Did you know that at one point your mother was addicted to painkillers?”
Myron said nothing, stunned.
“It’s getting late,” Dad said. He started to get up from the couch. “You okay?”
“Wait, you’re just going to drop this bomb on me and walk away?”
“It wasn’t a big deal. That’s my point. We worked it out.”
Myron didn’t know what to say. He also wondered what Dad would make of it if he told him about Kitty’s sex act in the nightclub, and man, he hoped that Dad wouldn’t use another Mom-did-same analogy on that one.
Give it a rest for the night, Myron thought. No reason to do anything hasty. There will be nothing new until daylight. They heard a car pull into the driveway and then the sound of a car door slamming shut.
“That will be your mother.” Al Bolitar rose gingerly. Myron stood too. “Don’t tell her about tonight. I don’t want her worrying.”
“Okay. Hey, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Nice tackle out there.”
Dad tried not to smile. Myron looked at the aging face. He had that overwhelming feeling, the melancholy one he got when he realized that his parents were getting older. He wanted to say more, wanted to thank him, but he knew that his father knew all that and that any additional discussion on the subject would be unseemly or superfluous. Let the moment alone. Let it breathe.
19
At two thirty A.M., Myron headed upstairs to that same childhood bedroom he’d shared with Brad, the one that still had the Tot Finder sticker on the window, and flipped on the computer.
He logged on to Skype. The screen opened on Terese’s face, and as always, he felt the heady rush and, yep, the lightness in his chest.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he said.
