After the Parade (41 page)

“There,” said his father.

His mother stood with the dripping wooden spoon in her hand. She still did not speak. “You're not going anywhere 'til that's cleaned up,” his father said, his voice smug.

His mother crouched with a handful of paper towels and swabbed up the stew, but her calmness seemed to anger his father even more and he snapped open the refrigerator and began flinging food onto the floor until they were surrounded by a moat of broken eggs and mayonnaise, leftover hotdish and milk. He squirted mustard and ketchup on top, the colors creating a festive icing.

“Jerry,” said his mother. “You're just making a mess for yourself.”

“You want to see a mess?” said his father. He was panting. “Fine, you go ahead and leave, but Aaron stays with me. Then you'll see what a mess I can make.”

His mother rose with the stew-filled paper towels and turned toward the garbage can. “Try to stop us,” she said. “I'll call your friends at the station and have them escort us out of the house.”

His father lunged, grabbing his mother and twisting her right arm behind her until she was bent over, her upside-down face peering at Aaron. He could see that it hurt, but his father yanked her arm higher.

“Jerry, please,” his mother said, and his father stepped back, releasing her. “Let's go,” she said, talking to Aaron now, and his father turned and saw him there. His mother walked fast down the hallway to his room, and Aaron trotted to keep up. She boosted him onto the bed and picked up his shoes, the shoes with which he had kicked the sitting-down Paul Bunyan. “They're getting tight,” she said. She gripped his ankles hard and forced them onto his feet.

“My suitcase,” he said.

“I know,” said his mother, and she went over to the closet and bent in.

Aaron saw his father come in and move toward the closet. He could have called to her then. “Watch out,” he could have said. “Watch out for my father.”

Instead, he watched his father place his hands on his mother's buttocks and push her into the closet the way he had pushed her into the oven, as though he were Hansel
and
Gretel, and she the witch. Her head hit the wall, and his father scooped him up and dropped him inside with her. The door shut. He heard his father fumbling for the key that they kept above the door, fitting it inside the lock.

“Jerry,” called his mother. She jiggled the knob and banged on the door.

Aaron heard his bed creak loudly as his father settled on top of it. And then they waited.

Eventually—Aaron was not sure how long it had been—they heard his father rise from the bed and leave the room. His mother
spoke to him then, whispering, “He'll let us out. He will. He's just trying to teach us a lesson.” She reached for his hand, but there in the dark he imagined that her hand was a snake or a mouse, not his mother at all. He pulled away, startled, and she did not try to touch him again. When his father returned, the smell of bacon and eggs came with him, wafting under the closet door. They could hear him setting things—a plate, cutlery, a glass—on the nightstand and the bed creaking again.

“Jerry, Aaron is hungry,” said his mother. He had not said that he was hungry.

His father did not reply, but they heard his fork scraping, the sound of him chewing and swallowing, the glass knocking against his teeth each time he drank. His father belched, as he did at the end of every meal.

“What did you have?” asked his mother encouragingly. “It smells like bacon.”

“Did I ever tell you my favorite bacon story?” his father said.

“Why don't you open the door and tell me while I clean up that greasy pan?”

“The pan is fine,” said his father. He sounded relaxed, like he was enjoying himself. “Once the grease sets, I might spread some on a slice of bread. I'm going to need a midnight snack.”

“I can make dessert,” said his mother. “I'll make a crisp. We still have some of those apples left from the motel.”

His father snorted. “And have him puke all over my arm again? Anyway, I have my own dessert,” he said, and they heard him take another drink.

“Jerry,” his mother said, “you know you don't like drinking.”

“Actually,” said his father, “I do like drinking, and this is a special occasion.”

“What's special about it?” said his mother.

His father laughed. “How can you ask such a silly question?” he said. “First of all, do you spend most nights in the closet?” His father paused to take another drink. They heard the steady expulsion of his flatulence. “No,” said his father. “You don't spend most nights in the
closet, because you have a bed, and Aaron has a bed, but you don't care about that, about how lucky you both are to have beds.”

“Jerry, are you drunk?” his mother said.

“I'm celebrating,” said his father. “Tomorrow I'm going to be in a parade, and tonight I'm having bacon and eggs for supper, and I was just about to tell you my favorite bacon story. Don't you want to hear my story? Do you have something else to do?”

“No,” said his mother. “I do want to hear it.”

“It's short, but it's very funny. When I tell the story, I want you to laugh for once in your goddamn life. Okay?”

“Okay,” said his mother. “Tell me the story, and I'll laugh.”

“Okay,” said his father. “It's about the Jews. Do you remember the first time I met the Jews?”

“Yes,” said his mother. “You came by to pick me up. We were going out—bowling, I think.” She paused. “What does this have to do with bacon, Jerry?”

“Well,” said his father, “that's the funny part. You see, I brought a slice of raw bacon with me when I went to pick you up from the Jews. They probably thought I didn't know anything about Jews—they were snobby like that—but I had the bacon wrapped up in tinfoil in the glove compartment, and just before I went up and knocked on their door, I took the bacon out and rubbed it all over my hands, and when the Jews opened the door, I shook hands with them, both of them.” From the other side of the closet door, Aaron heard his father laughing while beside him, his mother remained silent. “I don't hear you laughing,” said his father. “Don't you get it? I had bacon grease all over my hands, and they didn't even know it. They just acted so polite and pleased to meet me.”

His father grunted. “You see—not a damn shred of humor between the two of you.” His glass kept clinking, but he did not speak again. Soon, they heard his deep snores on the other side of the closet door.

His mother wet herself first. When Aaron smelled it—a wild, frightening odor amid the smells of dust and wool and moth balls—he thought that it was his own bladder betraying him, even though he had been focusing on holding it in. He relaxed, a defeated letting go,
and felt the sudden warmth of urine seeping across his thighs, pooling beneath his buttocks.

“Jerry,” called his mother, “we need the bathroom.”

His father rolled over heavily on Aaron's bed. “How am I supposed to sleep with all this racket?” he said, his voice thick.

“We need the bathroom, Jerry. Please.”

After a very long silence, his father said in the same thick voice, “What if I can't live without the two of you?”

“You don't need to, Jerry,” said Aaron's mother. “Open the door so we can all go to bed. In the morning, I'll clean everything up, and then we'll go to the parade.”

“I don't think you understand,” said his father.

“Understand what, Jerry?” said his mother. “Tell me.”

Aaron heard his father moving around on the bed, heard him mumbling. “I don't think the two of you understand what a good life I gave you,” he said at last.

The gunshot came immediately, an exclamation point on his father's words.

“My god,” screamed his mother. She began to kick at the closet door, calling his father's name.

It was August, a humid month. The heat from their bodies was trapped in the closet with them and gave substance to the smell of urine and sour clothing and fear. Aaron could not breathe. It was like being in the iron ore mines, like being underwater.

“Aaron,” his mother said, “ask your father to let us out.”

“Can we come out?” Aaron whispered.

“Remind him about how you kicked Paul Bunyan,” said his mother.

“I kicked Paul Bunyan,” he said.

“He did that for you, Jerry,” his mother said, but there was no reply, no sound at all from the other side of the door. His mother's sobs settled into a steady whimper, and the whimpers gave way to silence. Inside the closet and out, there was only silence.

*  *  *

Aaron awakened to the sound of birds. There were nests in the eaves above his window, which his father sometimes sprayed with the garden hose, blasting them loose, eggs falling to the ground along with bits of feather and twigs and dried grass. But new nests always appeared. Aaron never told his father about the new ones because he liked waking up to the cooing of birds. The closet was still dark, but the light beneath the door had changed. It was morning. His stuffed giraffe nudged his chin, though he did not remember taking it out of his suitcase during the night. His mother breathed steadily beside him, asleep on his leg.

He heard a key in the lock, and the closet door swung open. His father stood over them, haloed in light, still wearing his police uniform. His shirt was coming untucked, the belt hanging undone. His gun was snapped into its holster. Aaron's mother sat up, the smell of urine rising with her, a stench like gas station bathrooms.

“I thought you were dead,” she said, her words breaking into sobs.

“I was just having some fun,” said his father. “But as usual, you two don't get the joke.” He laughed and stretched in a leisurely way, then brought his hand up over his nose. “Jesus, did you two shit yourselves? Get up and get changed,” he said. “In five minutes we're leaving for the parade.”

A
aron awakened at eight his first morning back. He had fallen asleep at eight the night before, a symmetry that might have comforted him, except twelve hours was a long time to sleep. Ahead lay a day of getting up and going to school, teaching and coming home. Each of these tasks alone seemed beyond anything he felt equipped to do, but he got out of bed and ate, cold, the rest of the spaghetti with butter he had made the night before, after he realized that he had no interest in going out to buy groceries, had no interest in anything.

When he walked into the school an hour later, his colleagues greeted him as if it were a normal day, as if he had not been gone for nearly two weeks, as if Bill were not still suddenly dead,
THE PRIVATE EYE SCHOOL
sign gone, Bill's students gone also. Aaron had been the only person from the school to attend Bill's funeral, which was held at Mission Dolores. It was easy to pick out Bill's sisters, one large and disheveled like Bill, the other tiny, both of them looking dazed. “Bill was such a joker,” they said to Aaron when he went over to offer his condolences. Earlier, he had watched them approach the casket, holding hands and peering inside as though they expected Bill to leap up and scare them. “He had a delightful sense of humor,” Aaron agreed, and they looked up at him like he was mocking them.

He walked into his classroom at precisely nine, which meant he was on time, strictly speaking, but the students had all arrived early, imagining he would be excited to see them. “Welcome back,” they said.
“We've been looking forward to seeing you.” He had taught them that expression right before he left.

He set down his satchel and tried to smile.

“How was your vacation?” they asked. Vacation was what he had told them—anything else, namely a mother he had not seen in almost twenty-five years, seemed too complicated.

“Fine,” he said. “It was fine. Thank you. Now, let's get started.”

He moved toward the board to write out phrasal verbs for review, but his legs felt weak and he detoured to his desk, where, he told himself, he would sit for just a minute, but his mouth was like a drain: as he talked about the difference between
put off
and
put aside,
his last little bit of energy flowed right out of him. When classes ended at one thirty, he was still sitting. He could see the confusion on their faces, which evolved into sadness over the following weeks as he continued to show up at nine, right at nine, with no time for pleasantries or questions, no time to help with college application essays or explain the best way to ask an employer for time off. When they straggled back from break late like everyone else, he said nothing, just sat at his desk at the front of the room, flipping through magazines that the former teacher had left behind.

*  *  *

After he left Gloria's farm, he had driven back to Minneapolis and straight to Winnie's house, where no one was home because no one was expecting him. It was Wednesday. They were at either work or school. There had been no plan. When he called Winnie from the airport hotel on Monday night, they had spoken for fifteen minutes, just long enough for him to stop crying and tell her about his mother, about how she was living with Gloria and had been all these years, about how Bill had found her and then died, about how he had booked a flight and gotten on a plane and now he was scared.

Winnie listened.

Right before they hung up, he said, “I'm so sorry, Winnie,” as he had on his birthday, an apology meant to include everything, from the way he had left without telling her to the fact that he was calling,
out of the blue and sobbing. He had taught his students that adding
so
in front of
sorry
made the apology stronger, more sincere, but as he listened to himself say these words to Winnie, now that he had treated apologizing as a matter of semantics, they sounded empty, disingenuous.