Angry Management (3 page)

“When I got home from the hospital, I stayed close to my mother. If she left the room, I howled; followed her everywhere I could. But it was like she wasn’t in there. I mean, she let me tag along through our tiny place, but she didn’t talk, didn’t sing to me anymore, or tell me how much she loved me. Nothing. She moved like a ghost, and I followed her like a ghost, but she was my mom and I couldn’t stand to have any distance between us. There was no more fighting. Dad came home and didn’t say a word, and my mother would figure out some way to get his dinner. He ate alone. She fed me before he got there.”

Sarah sighs, and I swear there isn’t a breath between us, but there are crumbs because I’m not holding to my dietary pledge. She shakes her head like a dog clearing its ears, bringing herself into the moment.
“Here’s
the worst thing,” she says.

“It’s night. My mom is home and Dad isn’t. I hear her crashing around upstairs in her room. I run up and see her throwing clothes into two suitcases on the bed, stuffing them in. I stand in the doorway and she doesn’t see me, just packs faster and faster. I say, ‘Are you throwing stuff away?’ and she sees me and gasps, then keeps packing. ‘Are you?’ I say. She kneels in front of me. ‘Listen, Sarah, I have to go away’ and I say, ‘No!’ ‘I have to,’ she says, and I say, ‘I’m coming, too.’ She says, ‘I have to go alone,’ and I start to cry.
‘I’m coming, too!’
She shakes me. ‘I’ll come back and get you. I have to get us a place to live,’ and I yell ‘No! No! No!’

“I hear a car horn and run to the window. The car is yellow. I’m screaming and holding on to her, so she says, ‘Okay, okay! Run and get your clothes. Hurry. Use the play suitcase I bought you. Get a dress and some underpants. Bring your bear. Hurry, your dad is coming.’ I run like the wind to my room, get my favorite dress and a pair of pants and a shirt. I stuff in some underpants and I look all around but I can’t find my bear and I’m so scared to leave it and I’m trying to hurry. I dig in the closet, and then I hear a car door slam and I panic. My heart
pounds
in my ears, and I run to the window in time to see a leg disappearing into the backseat, with my mother’s shoe on it. I scream at the window, but it’s
closed and no one looks up and the yellow car drives away.”

I’m so lost in this I’ve almost stopped eating. “A cab.
Please
tell me she came back.”

“She came back.”

Ahhh. “Really?”

“Nope. You said to tell you that.”

“She didn’t.”

The next time I saw her was in Reno, thirteen years later.”

“Reno? Nevada?”

“You know another Reno?”

I don’t.

“In grade school I got these postcards from there. No writing, just pictures of casinos and shows and stars who sang there. The casinos looked like castles. I dreamed the postcards were from my mother and when the time was right she would come get me to go live in one of the castles with her. My friend, Moby, the other fat guy, figured out when we were in high school that they
had
to be from her, and this teacher, Ms. Lemry, risked her job to take me there to find her.”

I look at the crumbs on the table in front of me. I’m thinking maybe the other fat guy wouldn’t have eaten them, which was why he was no longer the other fat guy.

Sarah breaks me out of my dietary reverie. “We found her.”

“You found her? You’re not saying that because you heard me thinking, Please tell me you found her.”

“We found her. She was a waitress at a restaurant in one of those casinos on the postcards. My teacher recognized the shame on her face when she saw a burned girl sitting in the booth, plus I had one
way
old picture. There couldn’t have been one chance in a million we’d find her, but there’s less chance than that to win the lottery and somebody always does. Anyway, she knew it was me somehow, and she tried to run, but Ms. Lemry chased her down. My mother sat right there in the middle of the street and refused to come back…said she knew she would rot in hell, but she was scareder than she was ashamed.”

I am pushing my finger into the last crumbs on the table, eating them slowly, trying to wrap my imagination around all this. “So losing your mother is a worse thing than getting burned?”

“You never get used to losing your mom,” she says. “I hate her. I mean, I
hate
her. I hate her worse than my dad, but I’d give anything to have her back, even if it was just to tell her to go to hell.”

Wow. “Where’s your dad?”

“Prison,” she says. “It’s amazing. He raised me and we had a
few
times that were okay, but I don’t care if I never see him again. She knew what he was like and she
left
me with him, but I
ache
to be with her sometimes. It’s
so
crazy. Maybe I just want her to know how much I hate her, but in my dreams…that’s not it. I don’t get it; most times I hate myself for wanting her.”

I sit, digesting her story, and the scones. I remember hating my own parents because they were gay and wouldn’t shut up about it. I hated them every time some kid brought it up or asked out loud how I thought I might have been conceived, and then described the possibilities. But my parents were
always
there. The one thing I’ve always counted on, come hell or high water, was that they were looking out for me. Maybe I was embarrassed by them, but by now I know that’s
my
problem. I live in two different houses with people I have to explain, but my back is covered, and those people love me like I’m the only kid in the world.

“It did help to get to see her that one time. She’s weak. It feels good to know she’s weak; that it wasn’t me.”

“So she looked you in the eye and…”

“…said no. I needed her to come tell what he’d done. No way could I prove it in court after living
with him all that time. I’d never let on to him that I remembered what really happened. I stuck with the spaghetti story. But he seemed crazier and crazier, wondering if I’d figured it out and was waiting to get far enough away to tell. I needed my mother to come put him away. She said she was too scared, but I think the other part was that she would’ve had to come back and face the shame of leaving me with him.”

“So how did your dad get caught?”

“He got crazy when I ran off to Reno, thinking the jig was up, and he went after Moby to find out where I’d gone. Moby wouldn’t tell and he got violent and Moby’s stepdad hunted him down.”

My jealousy surprises me. This other fat guy not only went Jenny Craig on me; he, like, saved Sarah’s life. “So this Moby, are you sure you guys weren’t…you know.”

“No. We weren’t you know.”

“Why not?”

“Look at me, you dick. Besides, he liked a prom queen. And even though he got all buff, I remembered him as the dweeb he was when I met him.”

I am looking at her—my glasses are in the car—and she looks
fine.
I’ve been running around after pretty girls all my life, and to understate it a little, it
hasn’t
been working.
Something crazy is going on inside me. “How’d he lose the weight?”

“Well, he didn’t eat four scones with every cup of coffee. And he turned out for swimming.”

I brush the crumbs off the table.
“That’s
not fair. I was a football player.”

“I kind of owe him everything, but that’s about what he owes me, so it’s even.”

“Swimming, huh?”

“It’s not for everyone.”

At three-thirty in the morning, an hour before Sarah usually gets here, I sign in to 24-Hour Fitness. There’s only one other person here, if you don’t count the girl behind the counter and the guy running the vacuum and washing mirrors. Mirrors are the one thing I’d have taken out of this place if I ran the zoo.

In the dressing room I take a swimming suit out of my workout bag that was designed for Shrek. Man, how did this Moby guy get through those first days swimming? At some point he would have had to don a swimming suit of similar design and hit the water, in front of an entire swimming team. Gutsy dude.

I pull on the suit, reach under my gut to tie it, throw an extra-wide-body beach towel around my shoulders,
and make my way to the pool. No
way
is anyone here ahead of me.

Someone’s here ahead of me. And she is not the person I want witnessing the maiden launch of Tugboat Angus. She is like an arrow—an arrow with breasts—and could make four of the suits she’s wearing from my one. She stands under the showerhead stretching, touching her toes; looks up to catch me staring, smiles, and reaches for her toes again. It’s too late to run, so I walk onto the deck like I’m not afraid it will give way under my poundage, clutching my towel like Superman headed into a deep freeze.

I stand, goggles in hand, waiting for her to choose a lane and get her head underwater where she can’t watch Mr. Goodyear dive in and empty the pool.

Only she isn’t a swimmer. She’s an aqua jogger.

The reason I believe in God is so I can curse Him. And I know God’s a man, by the way, because no way a woman would put me through the stuff I go through. Aqua joggers
run
in the water. Their heads do not go under it. She hauls out the Styrofoam dumbbells and resistance paddles, hops into lane one, and begins jogging toward the other end, head high, only one lane removed from the spectacle that will be my entry.

I curse the Lord God once more, drop the towel,
and lunge. The slim beauty next to me almost loses her balance in the wave action as the lane separators undulate to the far end of the pool and back. I adjust my goggles and start the first lap of what I generously call swimming, vowing to hunt this Moby dude down like the dog he is.

“Let’s go find her.”

“Been there, done that,” Sarah says.

“Yeah, but like you said, she was afraid to come back because your dad was still on the loose. You said he’s in prison till he’s a bona fide geezer. You don’t even have to bring her back now. I mean, look, she had to feel ambushed when you guys showed up that first time, but she’s seen you now. You’ve seen her. We can go back to Reno and get all your questions answered.”

“What you need to worry about is taking me someplace besides to coffee,” she says. “If you don’t take me on a real date pretty soon, people will start to believe you think I’m ugly.”

Man, you get nothing past this girl. When my eyes go soft—like out of focus—or with no glasses, there’s nothing ugly about her, but she’s right; I’ve been avoiding going on a real date. I tell myself it’s not because she’s scarred, and I believe that. It’s that I’m scared I’ll
blow it with her like I’ve done in spectacular fashion with every girl I ever allowed into my weirdball fantasies. Sarah Byrnes has so much…
substance.
When I first see her, the scars are evident. But then they disappear the minute we’re talking. Jesus, maybe I’m getting mature.

“A date it is,” I tell her. “Circus Circus. Coupons for free breakfast and a roll of nickels to play the slots. Yours with no questions asked. What happens in Reno, stays in Reno. I’ve got superb wheels, thanks to my parents’ collective guilt; we could be there in two days easy. Drive straight through, we could do it in one. You drive, right?”

“Yes, Angus, I drive.”

“That’s it then,” I tell her. “I’ll even let you plug
your
iPod into the radio.”

“This must be what love feels like.” Man, this girl has sarcastic
down
. But she didn’t say no. We’ll miss one of Mr. Nak’s groups, but shit, we should get extra credit for this.

There is such excitement building in me. Crazy as my life has seemed, if I lost either of my parents the way Sarah lost hers, I don’t know that I could stand up every day. I want her to feel better. I’m telling you, having parents that love you trumps everything, even I know that.

We’re shooting through the Palouse, past rolling wheat fields, about a hundred miles south of Spokane, near the Idaho border where Washington State University and the University of Idaho play Dueling Universities just nine miles apart. Sarah is supposed to go to WSU in the fall; I’m headed for U of I. Nine miles apart; could be worse.

“If I say turn around, we turn around,” Sarah says.

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“I’m serious, Angus.”

“Do I look dumb enough to keep going if you tell me to turn around? Don’t answer that. But I’m serious, too. If you say turn around, I’ll show you true stunt-driver action.”

“Even if I say it at the Reno city limits.”

“Even if you say it at the front door of the restaurant,” I say back. “Even if you say it when we’re sitting in the booth.”

“If you’re just saying that, and you think you’ll figure some way to change my mind if it happens, I’ll punch your stomach so hard your
cousins
will double over.”

“Man, that other fat guy must have been a deceiver of the first order.”

She’s quiet a minute. “That other fat guy did play fast and loose with the truth on occasion.”

“Not all fat guys are alike.”

“All guys are alike,” she says. And then, “All humans are alike.” She plugs her Nano into the radio and turns the sound high enough that I know to shut up. It’s a beautiful day, cool for midsummer, hot for any other time, and the contrast between fields and deep blue sky is so stark we seem like figures in a masterpiece. Words begin to stream through the speakers.

“Who is that?”

“John Dawson Read.”

“Who?”

“Old guy. English. You wouldn’t know him.”

“He’s good,” I say.

“He’s better if you shut up and listen.” She flashes a smile.

“Going blind, huh? There’s a thought.”

“What?”

“Nothing. He’s singing about a guy going blind.”