Notes from the Blender (6 page)

“And did any of you feel close to the person you were paired with, even though you couldn’t see them?”

Nods yes, all around. Especially for me.

“I want you to remember that feeling the next time you’re praying, whether that’s to God or Jesus or Mother Earth or whomever. Just because you can’t physically see the presence of love and goodness doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Everything you need is out there in the universe—but it’s up to you to believe in it, to find it, and to let it in. Even if it’s from an unlikely source,” she told us. “Next session, we’ll probe further into this little mystery. Until then, be good—and be open to all the goodness in the world!”

Kids started piling out the door, all wondering out loud who their partner might have been. I grabbed Dec. “I think I’m in lust.”

“Well, hallelujah,” he said. “I’ve been waiting all year to hear you say that!”

I punched him in the arm. “Goofball.”

He pretended to wipe away a fake tear. “You mean, not with me?”

I gave him a look.

“So I’m guessing the lust is for the guy Aunt Sarah paired you with then?”

“Well, maybe,” I said, “
if
he was the hottie standing against the wall at the beginning of group. He totally disappeared after the game—poof! like magic—before I could find out whether he was my partner or not.”

“I think that was Criss Angel on the flat screen in the rec room, Colonel Mustard.”

“It was not,” I protested. “He was real.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Well, what about you?” I asked. “Did you wow all the chicks by telling them you wielded a big broom or something?”

“Nah,” he said. “The only girl I talked to other than you was my partner for the cheesy get-to-know-you game. And then I was feeling more subtle, what with the blindfold.”

“Was she metal enough for a guy like you?”

“Nope,” he said, “but she’s still sizzling.”

I gave him a squinty-eyed, suspicious look. “How would you know?”

“Because I peeked.”

“You sneaky bastard!” I said, impressed that Dec had blown off all the rules of his aunt’s church game. “You wouldn’t have possibly peeked at my guy while you were at it …?”

Dec shrugged. “I might’ve caught a tiny glimpse.”

“
Please
tell me he looked like Travis from We the Kings,” I begged.

“He just looked like a regular guy. Not like any rock star I’ve ever seen.”

I scuffed my black Converse against the cement floor. “Bummer.”

I knew the love-at-first-sight—and then without-sight—theory I’d been conjuring up in my head was too good to be true. Because if my blindfolded partner was, say, Mr. Forever 21 Purple Skinny Jeans, we just weren’t going to click on a physical level.

And knowing my luck, the hottie probably wasn’t my partner at all—but he probably was just another dickhead.

DAD IS SUCH AN AS SHOLE. I MEAN, I HAD A REALLY
great sulk going on that I figured I could keep going more or less until I graduated. I was prepared to stay mad at him, at least on a low level, for many hundreds of days.

And then he had to go and do something really cool. He and his babymama went and bought the single coolest house in our bullshit cookie-cutter suburb. I mean, this thing looked like the Addams Family moved out of it because it was
too
creepy. It was awesome.

It was also a total wreck. Which I thought was cool—it was more metal that way. I could totally picture Demonic Stain, my new favorite Scandinavian metal band, shooting a video in the entrance hall. When Dad heard me gurgling under my breath about Satan rending my flesh as we walked through, he just smiled and said, “I take it that means you like it?”

“Dad,” I said, “this is the most metal place I have ever even thought of. It’s the most metal place anybody’s ever thought of.”

“Well, Jimmy Page did buy Aleister Crowley’s house,” Dad said, smiling. “I looked into that, but, you know, it turns out to be in another country.”

I cracked up at my dad, the least cool person on Earth, invoking Aleister Crowley, famous English occultist. “Do what thou wilt,” I growled at Dad, because lots of metal bands used that Crowley quote.

“You know, they always get that quote wrong,” Dad said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what he actually said was: ‘Do what thou wilt. This shall be the whole of the law.… Love is the law, love under will.’ Now, I don’t really understand what he’s getting at there, but it’s a little more complicated than just do whatever you feel like. I think he’s working with a different definition of will than the one we use today.”

I was literally speechless. “Who the hell are you, and where’s my dad?”

“Dude,” Dad said in this stoner drawl, “if it has anything to do with Led Zep, I know it.”

Led Zep. I mean, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that my dad is into some geezer band they play on Cadillac commercials, but it was. I mean, as long as I can remember, Dad’s musical taste has run to Whatever Crap They’re Currently Selling at Starbucks.

So Dad was suddenly acting cool and buying the Mansion of Metal. But then he told me he was going to fix it up, which, I mean, I have to say I understood. I didn’t want my baby brother killing himself on some splintery door frame or getting a shock from the exposed wiring or taking a rusty nail through the foot.

And then he did something else cool. He wanted me to help him fix it up. For money. So I could supplement my sexton salary with some carpentry cash and learn some cool stuff in the process. In the unlikely event that I ever got a date, I might actually have some cash to spend on taking the girl someplace.

They closed on the house in record time—a quick computer search showed it had been on the market for a full five years, so we were in there painting and hammering within two weeks.

“Trust me,” Dad said one day as we were retiling the bathroom, “when you get to be an adult, the ability to do stuff like this will be way more attractive to a woman than the ability to catch a stupid ball.”

I looked at him—what little hair he had on his head was full of dust, his clothes were filthy, and his lush carpet of back hair was poking out of the back of his T-shirt collar—and I figured, well, if this guy can bag a MILF like Carmen Foster, maybe there’s something to what he’s saying.

“Yeah, I’d like to not have to wait till I’m forty to have a girlfriend, thanks,” I said, and then I nearly clapped my hand over my mouth. That one sentence was more information than I’d given Dad about my inner life in the last three years. He kind of beamed at me, which made it much worse.

“You won’t have to wait that long,” he said.

“Yeah, right. ‘Hey, baby. Want me to retile your bathroom?’ Not exactly a great pickup line.”

Dad laughed. “It is if you use the phrase ‘lay some tile.’”

It was at this point that I actually hooted with laughter. I don’t know if it was the manly act of sweating together, but my dad was suddenly approximating somebody cool. And we were spending all kinds of time together and having fun and stuff, which made it a lot harder for me to believe that the whole Carmen thing was about him wanting to get rid of me.

Ah, Carmen. I knew there was something I could stay mad at Dad about. He was happier and cooler than I could ever remember him being, but we were still packing up our house, the place where I could actually remember Mom being, the place where some part of me was convinced her ghost would be hanging around the house looking for us after we left.

Not that Dad didn’t try to outflank me on that score, too. I was in my room with Demonic Stain cranked up on my headphones, when the last track, “Blood of the Demiurge,” finished, and my ears took in silence for a few seconds.

And I heard something weird. It sounded like this: “Hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo!” All I could think was that Dad also had headphones on and was singing along to “Sympathy for the Devil,” which is one of the only geezer rock songs I can stand. I thought the sight of my dad rockin’ out Mick Jagger–style might be pretty funny, so I snuck over to his room to have a look.

I took my camera.

And then I had to kind of hide my camera behind my back, because Dad was there on the floor of his room, not singing along with Mick at all, but crying. And not some manly, tears-trickling-down-the-cheeks crying, but full-on girly sobbing, complete with the aforementioned “Hoo-hoo!” I was embarrassed for him and for me, and I was getting ready to bail when he looked up at me. He was on the floor in front of Mom’s closet, and he was putting stuff into a box. Not important stuff like her ashes or anything, just stupid stuff that he’d never gotten rid of—the shoes she’d worn when she went running, a hairbrush, a
People
magazine she’d bought and never gotten a chance to read.

Dad looked up at me like the smallest, most pathetic creature on the face of the Earth. “I’m sorry,” he said, snuffling back his tears. “It’s just…I just had this thought that I’m putting her in a box again.”

Well, that was it for me. Boom—instant waterworks. I kind of slumped down on the floor and cried, and Dad scooted over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I hope you know,” he said in this calm voice, because apparently me losing my shit helped him find his, “that I love Carmen, and I am excited about this new life we all get to have together, and that every single day of my life, your mom’s absence is a knife in my heart. It’s not something I will ever forget or get over. You understand? It’s a scar on my soul. So I don’t…I don’t want you thinking I’m forgetting her. I will never forget her. Never.”

Well, that was a hell of a speech, but I wasn’t convinced. “Then why are you doing this?” I asked.

“Because I love Carmen, because I love the child we’re having together, and because…because I’m still alive.”

I stood up because that just sounded so disloyal to Mom that I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him. “It’s not like she wanted to die, Dad. It’s not like she ran off with another guy or something.”

“Don’t you think I know that? What the hell do you want from me, Declan? Do you want me to spend the rest of my life moping in my room and listening to black metal and thinking about what used to be? Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do that. I know your mom didn’t choose to die, but I also know that she loved us too much to want us to be miserable for the rest of our lives.”

I couldn’t really come up with any kind of speech to match that. So instead I just said, “You suck,” and left the room.

We didn’t talk for two days after that, except for “Hand me a Phillips-head screwdriver” or “I need a three-sixteenth drill bit”—whatever kind of stuff was necessary to get little fix-it jobs done at the new house. Dad must have been pissed at me, too, because he wasn’t even trying to teach me about what he was doing. I guess he figured I could pick it up by watching and helping, but he wasn’t going to give me any instruction.

I was glad when the weekend came and I could head off to Sarah and Lisa’s house. Because I wasn’t mad at them; they were actually providing some stability in my life instead of turning everything upside down. So of course I sulked around their house and generally acted like a dick all weekend. It was weird—sometimes I felt like I could stand outside myself and see me being a dick, and I knew I should stop, but I didn’t know how. I felt horrible, and I had no idea how to feel better.

Sunday night Dad and I had our big reunion, and I guess he was feeling like enough time had passed that we could make up or something.

“Hey,” he said when I walked in the door.

“Hey,” I said.

“Are we okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Dad. I guess you are,” I said, and went to my room. I mean, am I supposed to lie to the guy? I felt pretty far from okay. I guess I just felt like it was one thing if he was thinking with his dick and the little guy made him temporarily insane and he forgot about Mom for a while. I mean, I can sympathize with that. But to see him there doing his “Sympathy for the Devil” sobbing and to know that he hadn’t forgotten Mom at all, and that he was marrying Carmen anyway—well, that just seemed a lot worse to me.

I thought about calling Neilly, since she was my only ally in this business, but really, she didn’t have any idea what I was going through. Yeah, her life had been turned upside down and everything, but not like mine. She had a life I could literally only dream about. I mean, I used to have that dream all the time—that Dad and I were at the mall or something, and I’d catch this glimpse of Mom in the crowd, and I’d go running toward her, and she’d hug me, and I’d say,
I thought you were
dead
, and she’d smile and say, No
, I’m not dead at all
, and I wouldn’t even be mad about all the time when I’d thought she was dead, I would just be so relieved to see her that I would cry. And then I’d wake up all happy for about ten seconds, until I realized Mom was dead after all, and then I’d cry for real. So yeah, I don’t think anybody with two living parents would have the first clue what the toxic stew in my brain was like.

The next morning I ate in silence and went to school. Neilly actually spoke to me briefly—we ended up in the lunch line together—and she said, “Hey, is your room done yet?”

“Yeah, the abattoir is almost complete. Unless you want the abattoir.”

“What the hell is an abattoir?”

“It’s a slaughterhouse. But I prefer the term killing floor.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “You know, the fucked up thing is, that house is so creepy that I don’t even know if you’re joking.”

I felt a little bad about being mean to the only person on Earth I could stand, so I said, “Yeah I’m joking. Actually, we spent the weekend working on the bathroom. New tile.”

“Nice! You all packed up?”

“Not even close. You?”

“About halfway there. Well, listen, I guess I’ll see you tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah, you know. Youth group?”

Oh, I knew about youth group all right. But I had been in such a foul mood that I’d totally forgotten about it, and if I had remembered, I would have decided to blow it off. But if Neilly was going to be there, well, it might be worth going through the corny-ass get-to-know-you games one more time.

That afternoon I went to church to do some work before youth group. Despite my best efforts to clean up the parish hall after coffee hour on Sunday, I can’t really say I get every single crumb of coffee cake that gets spilled in there, which means I have to be especially vigilant about the rodent control. So the last thing I do before I leave on Sunday is slip on some latex gloves, bait some snapping mousetraps with peanut butter, and set them around everywhere.

So on Monday afternoon I have to do corpse patrol. This Monday was a pretty good haul—two adults and three juveniles. I bagged them up, washed my hands, and went to see Sarah and Lisa, who were opening cartons of Chinese food in Sarah’s office.

“Hey,” Lisa said, “Mr. Sunshine. Want some Kung Pao Chicken?”

I take a lot of shit from Lisa. I don’t know why. There’s something about the way she delivers it that makes it easier to take from her than it is from Dad or Aunt Sarah. I weighed the impact of Kung Pao Chicken on my breath against my hunger and the inherent metalness of a dish packed with dried hot peppers.

“Got any mints? ’Cause that Kung Pao Chicken is smelling fantastic, but you know, it can be kind of close quarters there in the old youth group, and I don’t want my breath to send any of the lovely young ladies running for the exits.”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “Dec, you know youth group is not some meat market. It’s supposed to be a place where you guys can get in touch with your higher selves, not some kind of kegger with prayers.”

Lisa punched Sarah on the arm. Maybe this was why I took so much shit from Lisa—she dished it out equally and usually gave a lot more to other people than she did to me. “You’re full of shit,” she said to Sarah.

Sarah sputtered. “I—I am not …”