I ease out of the house and close the front door quietly behind me. Ray startles me out on the front porch. He’s still wearing his suit. He’s plastered.
“Dad’s dead,” Ray says. “Did you know that?”
I sit down beside him on the top step.
“I waited him out,” Ray says, his words a thick slur. “And what did I prove, except that I am, in fact, the awful son people think I am?”
Ray is drinking straight from Mom’s vodka bottle.
“What do you think Nicole has told him?” Ray asks, and I know he means Michael. “That I’m in jail? Or dead. I’m dead, just like Dad,” Ray says with finality.
“No,” I say, finally finding words. “You’re not. You’re drunk.”
“Same difference,” Ray says, taking a swig with one hand and holding the little picture of Michael in the other.
“He’s talking to me.” Ray holds the picture so it’s face-to-face with him. “You hear him?” He tilts his ear like he’s listening closely, then fakes a little kid voice.
“‘Man up, mister,’” he makes the little boy in the photo say. “‘Cut the crap and do what’s right for once in your pathetic, wasted life.’”
Ray looks at me and shakes his head. “I want to tell that little face to watch his mouth,” he says, faking a stern face and voice. “But I got it coming. I want to say my name’s not ‘mister.’ But so far as he knows, it is.”
He’s a little face in a photo and Ray’s an awkward question, a subject best changed.
“Ray,” I say, but I don’t know how to finish the sentence.
He sets the now-empty bottle on the porch and tucks the photo into his wallet. He shucks off his coat and tie. He undoes the button at his collar and takes a deep breath.
“Are men supposed to be able to breathe in a suit?” he asks, forming his words like he has a mouth full of rocks. “Maybe that’s why men in suits look so uptight. They can’t breathe, and everything is a very deliberate effort not to choke to death.” He laughs out loud.
I smile a little. Ray always had a sense of humor—when he’d let down his guard.
“Give me your keys, Ray,” I say and hold out my hand. Go sleep in the bathtub.
He doesn’t resist.
“I went to the service,” he says. “I sat in the back of the church. Me and some guy from Dad’s nursing home. He asked me who I was, and I said I was the guy who mowed the family’s lawn.”
“Mom should fire you,” I say, attempting a joke. “The grass looks awful.”
He smiles at me. It’s a crooked, drunk smile, but I can see Ray underneath the cover of alcohol.
“Where are you going?” he asks me, looking me up and down. “It’s after dark.”
“Out,” I say. “It’s getting hard to breathe.”
“That’s because you got your tie tied too tight,” Ray says, tripping over the alliteration.
That may very well be.
Ray struggles to stand up. He wobbles a bit, but manages.
“Going to sleep?” I ask.
“That’s a nice way to put it,” Ray mumbles and goes off to pass out somewhere.
As a teenager, Ray squealed tires in and out of the driveway, banged in the front door, shot the stink eye at whoever was in his line of sight, then tromped upstairs to his room. He was determined to be angry. Determined to stay agitated and ticked off and if he stepped on your toes on his way across the room, all the better.
I think he hoped we’d kick him out of our lives if he was gruff enough. I saw on the news once where a man had “committed suicide by cop” or some such phrasing. For a time, Mom was sure Ray would do something like that. Pull one of his stunts and get himself killed. But Dad called it. He knew us all so well. He said that Ray wasn’t about to get himself killed. Dead, he couldn’t go on torturing himself and everyone in his path. Dad didn’t say it angry; he didn’t mean it as an insult. It was just the truth.
Ray did pull a few stunts that got him handcuffed and locked up for a bit here and there. He’d leave town, then turn back up with a new tattoo but the same angry face. He’d make a halfhearted effort and then disappear. Then he finally got himself put away. Dad said that was what Ray wanted. What better place from which to loath the world and your place in it than prison?
That was right before the stroke.
Now, with Ray safely inside the house, I pull out of the driveway and head into town. I don’t want to be alone, but I don’t want to talk to anyone either.
There’s not much open after nine p.m. on a Thursday except bars and restaurants and both are too lively for someone mourning the dead. So I go into the Book Exchange—a late-night cavernous maze of old books and busts of dead writers with low lighting from antique lamps and soft armchairs to fall into.
I wind my way past a few other patrons who are talking softly to each other over cups of coffee and leaning in to chat about stories other than the ones they are living. This seems the perfect place to hide from the world. I find a spot in the back corners of the room and sink down into a low couch. I lay my head back and close my eyes. I don’t find solitude for long.
“Remember me?” a voice says. “Oliver, from Elm Village.”
I raise my head and open my eyes. It had only been a few days ago that I had hugged him a good minute longer than was socially acceptable and then kissed him full on the mouth. His hair is the color
