“Sounds like you're more pissed off about me abandoning the corporate ship than what I did at the funeral.”
“I'm pissed off about what you've been doing your whole life, Maddox,” he glared at me from head to toe. “And now, what? Look at you. What the fuck is this? Have you really lost it this time?”
“You could say that.”
“Maddox?” my mother asked, turning her head to the side, the way she always did when she was going to pose a question she was afraid of asking. “Are you on drugs?”
“No! No, I'm not on any god damn drugs! Jesus effing–” I stopped myself. A couple of elderly ladies out for their afternoon constitutional stood just up the sidewalk, watching. A gentleman walking his matching pair of long haired dachshunds paused across the street, stooped over to retrieve their offerings, staring at us all the while. An iPhone slid in between the shutters of a nearby Cape Cod.
“Look, Dad. Mom, I...” What was I going to say to them? That there was this girl who wanted to kill me because my heartless business practices inadvertently killed her sister, and her niece, but then we got shipwrecked, and after a few days of serious cock-teasing I saw the error of my ways and now all I wanted to do was make things right with everyone before she had me arrested? Oh, and this just in, I was in love with her?
“I'll take those back,” my mom said, reaching out for her tulips.
My father put his arm around her shoulders, protecting her from the big bad me, as I returned the bulbs.
“I'm...” I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what I should say. It was like my mind was blanking out, running out of words and unable to form what was left into sentences. Ideas. Perhaps an after effect of my time on the island. And perhaps, I should simply take the lead of my favorite Latina. Admit the obvious. “I'm a shit head.”
My mom's eye twitched, almost imperceptibly.
“I'm a shit head, a dick, a total disappointment to you and everyone else, and even though me saying 'I'm sorry' is the lamest, most pathetic, emptiest thing I can do... it's all I can do. I've got nothing else. I am an asshole, a schmuck, and I'm sorry. For everything. I don't know what went wrong with me, honestly, and there's nothing I can do to change anything. I really wish I could. I really wish I wasn't a fuck. And, going back to empty and pathetic, I'm really, really sorry.”
Mom's brow furrowed. There was a look that passed between her and my dad – a thousand words without making a sound. She adjusted her flat of bulbs.
I kicked at a little stone on the street, and jammed my hands in my pockets. The elderly couple had left by this point. Dachshund guy dumped two blue bags of dog shit into a the receptacle specifically designed and thoughtfully placed for such deposits, and shuffled back down the sidewalk.
There was no more phone in the window of the Cape Cod. Nothing more to see here. Nothing more to say.
“So, um,” I said, running my hand through my hair, looking around for another stone to kick. “I'll call a tow. Or, if you guys want to call it? That way you don't have to give me the access code, that'd be cool, too.”
My mom straightened her tulips, though they didn't need it, and looked to my dad.
“I'm going to put some coffee on,” she said, then turned her eyes to me. “The Auto Club can take forever.”
She made her way up to the house, letting herself in the side gate.
Leaving me and my dad.
To say we were experiencing the awkward moment of the century would be the grandest of understatements. He didn't say anything for a while, just looked at the truck. He sighed, then pointed at it.
“Chevy, huh?”
“Yeah.”
He caught my eye, then. My nine year old self figured he was just going to follow Mom through the gate. He didn't need my shit, and I would never blame him for that.
He sighed, stepped up to the front of the pickup, and slammed the hood down.
“You push,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Can't leave this hunk of junk in the middle of the street,” he said as he climbed into the cab. “Can't believe you bought a god damn Chevy. You don't buy anything from a corporation that needed a government bailout for chrissakes,” he said, then reached over to the passenger seat, and picked up the picture. He stared at it for a moment, then returned his gaze to me. “Maddox, your…” He cleared his throat. “Your mother's making linguine tonight. She always makes too damn much of it, so, if you want,” he shut the door, and stuck his thumb toward the back of the pick up, thereby indicating my pushing responsibilities were to commence. “God damn Chevrolet of all fucking things. Thought I taught you better than that.”
It wasn't easy, shoving a half ton pickup with a missing tailgate into the driveway, then, as per my father's not so subtle insistence, up into the garage. Because no way was Jonathan Petersen going to allow an of-all-fucking-things Chevrolet to muck up his cobblestone.
We never called the Auto Club.
Over too much linguine and a half bottle of Merlot, Dad said he'd like to keep the piece of shit Chevy and see if he could get in running again.
He told me later that he needed something else to keep him and his well-earned retirement company – besides tilling the soil for Mom's tulips. Something with more of a manly, greasy edge to it. Government bailout or not, the Chevrolet would suit that purpose quite nicely. I gladly handed over the key.
I'd also come to find out Mom was a level-expert gardener. She took me on an after dinner tour
