Empty Mile

CHAPTER 9

I stayed the rest of the weekend at Marla’s place and by the end of it she had agreed to a permanent relationship again. Even though our exhibition in the forest had played a role in this reconnection Marla seemed haunted by the episode.

“Sometimes, I can’t believe what we’re capable of. The things we do… it seems like we’re programmed to destroy ourselves.”

“Forget about it. It was a crazy afternoon, that’s all. We’ve got to leave the past behind us.”

Marla looked at me skeptically. “I really don’t think you’re made that way, Johnny. But what choice do we have? You want to be with me and I can’t live without you. We’ll have to go through it until it all falls apart again.”

“It’s not going to fall apart. There’s nothing to say we can’t have a great life together.”

She smiled sadly. “We’ll see.”

About eleven o’clock on Monday morning I got home to find Stan in the kitchen sitting at the table eating a large bowl of cereal and reading a comic book.

“How come you’re not at work?”

“’Cause Dad wants to take us somewhere. He said it was a big surprise. I called Bill, it’s okay.”

“What sort of surprise?”

“I don’t know, Johnny, that’s why it’s a surprise.” Stan pushed the cereal box toward me. “Have some breakfast. Nutrition’s important. And guess what? Bill’s leaving the key to the warehouse with the girls at the counter. Can we go check it out after?”

“Sure, you bet.”

“Awesome!”

Stan got up and stared shunting around the room like a train, chanting, “Business-man, business-man, businessman…”

Half an hour later my father came home. He was carrying a flat package wrapped in brown paper. We followed him into the living room and watched as he tore open the wrapping and lifted out a framed black-and-white photograph about two feet long. He set it on the back of the couch so that it leaned against the wall.

Stan bent forward and examined it. “Is it around here?”

“Yes, not far.”

It was an aerial photo of forested land. The dark line of a river curved in from the right of the frame and made a pronounced bulge around what looked to be some sort of rock spur. Trees lined both sides of it. In the upper half of the photo they were unbroken, but below the river there was a patch of cleared land. On the bottom right-hand corner of the picture a serial number was imprinted and the image itself looked slightly grainy, as though it had been blown up from a smaller print.

“Did you go up in a plane and take it, Dad?”

My father laughed. “Not me, Stan.”

“Are you going to put it on the wall?” Stan sounded dubious.

“I was planning to.”

“You should have gotten something with colors.”

“This is a special picture. What do you notice about it?”

Stan squinted hard at it, then stepped back and blinked his eyes rapidly. “Whew, that made me dizzy. It’s just a river, Dad. Is it the Swallow River?”

“Well done. See anything else?”

“Yikes, you’re going to make my head spin round. I can’t see anything. Ask Johnny.”

“It’s just trees and a river to me too.”

My father smiled and looked at the photo and shook his head as though he couldn’t believe his luck.

“Come on. We’re going for a drive.”

We left the house and got into my father’s car. As we rolled out of the driveway Stan put on a pair of mirrored aviator shades and tied a patterned silk handkerchief around his neck.

The place my father took us to was called Empty Mile. Once we were out of Oakridge it was about a twenty-minute drive, the last few miles of it along a single winding lane of blacktop known only as Rural Route 12. Along the sides of this road dusty wooden poles supported an old electricity feed that served isolated dwellings erected over the years by a handful of families who preferred a more reclusive lifestyle. Neither tourists nor townsfolk had any reason to come out this way-there was nothing to see here that couldn’t be seen closer to town or in more scenic surroundings. The only sign that the area was inhabited came from occasional boards, hand-painted with family names, that marked the entrances to unpaved trails.

At one of these my father turned off the road and onto a track that was just two tire furrows worn in the earth. We drove along this through sparse forest until we emerged at the top of a wide meadow of deep grass that sloped downhill for several hundred yards. My father stopped the car and we got out.

The trees we’d passed through were behind us and to the left and ahead of us also the meadow was bordered by forest. On our right the land rose in a steep rock wall about seventy feet high.

In the top left corner of the meadow there was an old wooden house that needed paint. It was set off the ground and had a short flight of steps leading up to a roofed veranda. A beaten-up orange Datsun was parked beside it and in an unfenced garden washing hung on a line.

On the opposite side of the meadow from this house, about halfway down the slope, there was a much newer log cabin. This too had a stoop along its front and there was a large rainwater tank and a small shed out back.

Stan lay down on the grass. He rolled over a couple of times, then stood up and brushed himself off. My father was wearing a suit as he almost always did. He had his hands in his pants pockets, his jacket hooked back behind his wrists.

“What do you think, boys?”

Stan looked perplexed, trying to figure out what answer my father wanted. “It’s not any good for rolling.”

“What about you, Johnny.”

“Nice spot. Are you marketing it?”

“I own it.”

“Really?”

“Closed the deal today.”

“The whole field?”

“Most of the meadow and on down through those trees at the bottom. The Swallow River runs on the other side of them and that’s where the property ends. That log cabin comes with it too, but the house over there is on a separate title.”

Stan ran his hands nervously through his hair. “Oh boy, Dad. Oh boy.”

“What’s the matter, Stan?”

“Are we moving here?”

“No, we’re not moving.”

“But you bought a place with a cabin.”

“We’re not moving, Stanley. Don’t worry.”

Although I didn’t share Stan’s nervousness about moving to a new house I could understand his confusion. The piece of land my father had bought appeared to have no other use than as a place to relocate to. It had nothing going for it as an investment. It was too far from town and too isolated to subdivide and sell off in property lots. And as something to do with the tourist trade it was also a washout. Pretty and peaceful as it was, it had nothing that anyone would spend time traveling to see.

My father strode off across the deep grass. He swung his arms as he went and there was a jauntiness to his step that seemed put on, as though this man who had so much difficulty with his feelings was making a deliberate attempt to communicate his happiness to us.

We entered the trees that lined the bottom of the meadow. They grew thickly at first and there was grass underfoot, but after about ten yards the ground became dusty and the trees weaker and thinner and more widely spaced. My father stopped here and looked around as though he had no interest in continuing to the river. He scuffed at the dry earth with the toe of his shoe then walked a few yards to his left to a small hole someone had dug in the ground. Stan and I waited for him to start moving again but he seemed lost in a daydream, looking at the hole and nodding to himself. Stan cupped his hands and raised them to his mouth. He made a noise like static on a radio.

“Earth to Dad. Come in.”

My father lifted his head and chuckled and started walking again. Twenty yards further on the trees ended and we stepped out onto the bank of the Swallow River.

After the Swallow passed under the bridge at the southern end of Oakridge it ran through ranks of quartz-bearing hills until it joined the middle fork of the Yuba. It was nowhere near the size of famous Gold Rush rivers like the American or the Feather, but it had been well known as a river that was consistently rich along its length. We stood now on the inner curve of a bend in its path where the water ran shallow and wide. To our right, looking upstream, I could see the ragged end of the meadow’s rock wall sloping down through the trees to the edge of the riverbank.

Stan looked knowingly back and forth along the river. “I know where we are, Dad. This is your photo, isn’t it? This is the river in that photo.”

“Correct, Stan.”

“I thought so! Cool.”

I knew my father didn’t have the kind of money to go around buying land for the heck of it and it crossed my mind that after a lifetime of financial failure, of looking after Stan single-handedly, he might finally have succumbed to some sort of mental illness.

“What are you going to do with this place, raise crops?”

My father tapped the side of his nose. “You’ll see, John. You’ll see.” He took a deep breath and clapped his hands. “Remember this day, boys.”

We followed him back through the trees and up the meadow to where we’d left the car. As we came level with the wooden house I heard Stan draw his breath in sharply. Two people were sitting on the stoop in the afternoon sun. One of them was the girl from his dance class. He tugged my sleeve and whispered, “It’s Rosie!”

The girl saw Stan and lifted her hand in a weak wave.

“You better go over, dude.”

“But what am I going to say?”

“You talk to her at dance lessons, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Will you come with me?”

My father was a little way ahead of us. He turned when he heard our conversation. “You two go over for a few minutes, if you want. I’ll wait in the car.”

The boards that made the steps up to the stoop were bare and worn soft with age. In the sun they gave out a faint papery fragrance that dried the back of the throat. Rosie was standing now. Beside her in a bent-wood chair was a thin woman of about seventy. Her gray hair was long and held by a pencil in a slowly collapsing bun and though her skin was sun-singed and deeply wrinkled, her eyes still held a sharp brightness and it was not hard to see that she had been good-looking in her youth. A light crocheted shawl lay across her knees and her fingers pushed a small collection of crystals absently back and forth across it.

Rosie rocked gently from side to side and watched Stan. She was barefoot and there was dirt between her toes. She wore the same faded pink shift as she had when I saw her last.

The woman smiled at us and said hello. Stan coughed uncertainly.

“Um, I’m Stan. I go to dance lessons with Rosie.”

The woman nodded. “Yes, Rosie told me about you. I’m Millicent Jeffries, Rosie’s grandmother.”

Stan raised his hand quickly at Rosie. “Hiya, Rosie.”

Rosie shifted on her feet as though she was tired and said, “Did you come specially?”

“I didn’t know you lived here.”

Millicent squinted across the meadow. “Is that your father over there?”

Stan nodded. “Yeah, he just bought the land.”

“Oh, I know him. He should have come and said hello.”

Rosie held her hand out to Stan. “You can come inside if you want.”

“Is it okay, Johnny?

“Sure, not too long, though.”

Stan and Rosie went into the house and Millicent gestured for me to sit on the chair next to her.

She picked a small glass ball from her lap. Its surface had been cut with triangular facets and as it rested on the flat of her palm small rainbows quivered against the dry skin of her wrist and across the woollen shawl that covered her knees. She moved her hand a little and smiled as the rainbows danced.

“Look at that. You’d never think there was all that color just waiting inside light, would you? And all you have to do is look at it a certain way. Beautiful, don’t you think? My Rosie mentioned your brother. She likes dancing with him. Is he a little slow?”

“He had an accident when he was young, but he isn’t slow.”

“A little… different? Rosie is a little different too. Only it wasn’t any accident that did it to her. Life just knocked her around until she couldn’t see any joy in it anymore. She’s lived with me since she was nine. She supports herself now cleaning people’s houses.”

“What happened to her parents?”

“Her mother was a heroin addict. In the evenings, after she’d had her fix, she liked to sit on the windowsill to catch the breeze. They lived in an apartment building and one night she just fell out. Rosie saw it happen. Her father wasn’t the sort of man who could see through to the other side of things so he started drinking and about six months later got in his car and never came back.”

She set her crystals and her shawl on a small table beside her chair and stood up.

“Some folks might have reservations about someone like Stan and someone like Rosie starting up a friendship. They might say it’s bound to end unhappily. But you get to my age and it seems like happiness is only ever temporary anyhow. So if they can pretend for a little while that they aren’t so different from everyone else, I’m just going to be happy for them.”

She went into the house and a couple of minutes later Stan and Rosie came out.

“Rosie put the stereo on and we practiced a dance.”

Stan looked flushed and excited. Rosie leaned against the railing that ran along the outside of the stoop and stared out at the meadow. She sighed and her eyelids drooped a little.

“Can you hear the wind in the trees? I can hear it. Sometimes I wish it would blow through my head like that, then all my thoughts would be untangled. Like ribbons.”

Stan looked uncertain. “I gotta go now, Rosie.”

She turned from the view and kissed him on the cheek and wandered back into the house. Stan called goodbye as the screen door bounced against its frame.

We climbed down off the stoop and started back toward the car. Stan was quiet and I wondered if the whole thing had been too much for him.

“Everything go okay? You still like her?”

“You bet. I hope she doesn’t think I’m a dumb-o.”

“Didn’t look that way when she said goodbye.”

“Yeah, I know! And in the house, when we were dancing, she kissed me on the lips. It made my head spin round.”

My father dropped us back at the house and went into town to finish off his working day. Stan and I took the pickup over to the garden center to check out the warehouse we’d just leased. Bill Prentice wasn’t there when we arrived, but the manager, Rachel, had a set of keys for us and a business card for a plant wholesaler in Sacramento.

The warehouse stood to the side of the garden center at the end of a short white-gravel driveway. It was made of pressed steel and had a row of corrugated fiberglass skylights down each side of its roof. From its front entrance the view was as beautiful as that from the garden center-a sweep of meadow, a line of trees, the river on the other side of the road, and then forested hills marching back into the distance.

Stan and I unlocked the sliding door that formed part of the front wall and went inside. The layout was simple-a single open space with a small office built into the back left corner. The concrete floor was dusty and the air in the place was hot and stale. The fiberglass panels let in a diffuse light that made the place feel vaguely churchlike.

“Wow, Johnny, this is it! This is the beginning of everything. I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it, man. The papers are signed, no one can take it away from us, not even Bill if he changes his mind.”

“I’m going to be something, Johnny, something!”

We poked around for a bit, talking through what the best way to arrange the place would be, how we were going to kick off the business.

“I got a great idea for that, Johnny. What we’ll do is get a whole lot of leaflets and put them in all the stores’ letter boxes and all the rich people’s houses. Advertising is essential. We better call those plant people too. And we have to tell Dad.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He’s going to feel a lot better about me now.”

I wasn’t sure that my father would see things in exactly the same light Stan did. I could already hear how it would waste Stan’s hard-earned money, how it was irresponsible of me to enable this fantasy, how it was a lousy idea…

“Listen, Stan, let me tell him, okay? I want to make sure he doesn’t get the wrong idea about what we’re doing.”

Stan shrugged.

“Okay, Johnny, if you want.”

We locked up the warehouse and headed back to the pickup. On the way we dropped into the garden center so Stan could grab a Coke. While we were there Rachel asked us if we could take a couple of flowering plants around to Bill’s house. He was working from his office in the town hall and wouldn’t be coming into the garden center. He wanted them delivered to his wife that day.

Bill and Patricia Prentice lived a half mile north of the garden center on a plot that was almost the size of a playing field. The house was a large white single-story Californian with green shutters and a brick driveway that made an S from the road up to the front door. Patricia’s olive Mercedes was parked carelessly under a tree in front of the house.

There was no answer when I rang the bell beside the front door. From inside the house I could hear the babble of a talk radio show. I rang a couple more times, but no one answered.

“Maybe we should just leave the plants out front.”

“But she’s got to be here, Johnny. Her car’s here. She just can’t hear us because of the radio. I don’t want Bill to get mad because we didn’t do what he said.”

I tried the door. It was unlocked and swung open to show a foyer tiled in white stone. We could have left then, it would have been easy enough to do. We were only dropping off a couple of plants, after all. But there was a feeling about the house that didn’t seem right to me. A car out front, a radio on, someone who should have been home…

Stan and I stepped through the doorway. After the heat outside the house felt cool. From the foyer I could see into a sunroom on my right and, directly ahead, a large living room. It was from there that the radio noise was coming. The blinds in both rooms were down and the light in the house was muted and didn’t fully dilute the shadows that pooled in corners and under furniture. Air-conditioning whispered through vents near the ceiling. There was no one in either of the rooms.

Stan shouted nervously, “Mrs. Prentice, it’s Stan! We’ve got some plants!”

When no one answered we put the plants beside the door and with Stan glancing about apprehensively and holding onto my sleeve we went through the living room and turned right into a long hall that followed the rear wall of the house. On our left, as we walked along it, there were windows that must have looked out onto a back garden, but these were shuttered and I could see only thin strips of sunshine around the inside of the frames. On our right there were three doors. Two of them were closed, but the last was open and it was through this that we found Patricia Prentice in what was obviously the master bedroom of the house.

There were curtained French doors at one end of the room and a large bed with a white cover and a wide space of pale carpet. Against one of the walls there was a writing desk and a chair, and against another a wide-screen TV made a sound like surf, its screen effervescent with static.

Patricia Prentice lay on top of the covers of the bed. She was wearing clothes similar to those she’d been wearing the day I’d seen her with my father-a knee-length skirt, a peach-colored blouse, black patent leather sandals, one of which had fallen from her foot. It looked like she’d gotten up that morning and dressed to look nice.

Perhaps when she lay down on the bed she had composed herself, positioned herself elegantly on her back, her arms folded across her breasts, legs crossed at the ankles. Perhaps… She looked anything but composed now. She was curled on her side and her clothes were twisted about her body as though she had slept through a fever. Her tongue was swollen and dark and stuck obscenely through lips that were drawn back over her teeth. A blot of milky vomit had collected around her neck and the lower half of her face. The back of her skirt was wet.

On a nightstand beside the bed there was a collection of empty Halcion blister packs and an empty half-bottle of whiskey. Beneath the bottle there was a slip of notepaper with a single line of writing: I waited as long as I could.

When my mother died in her car my father had insisted on a closed coffin to spare Stan and me the sight of her injuries. So I had never seen a dead body before, but I could have told anyone who asked that Patricia Prentice was dead beyond any hope of resuscitation. Even so, I checked for a pulse in her neck. Her flesh was too cold and too solid and I had to steel myself against its touch.

“Should we do mouth-to-mouth, Johnny?” Stan was rubbing his hands rapidly back and forth across his chest and his voice trembled.

“She’s dead. It wouldn’t do any good.”

“She killed herself.”

“Looks like it. The pills and everything.”

“Poor thing.” Stan’s voice broke and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Bill’s going to be so upset.”

We were silent for a moment while I worked up the nerve to start calling people. As I was about to reach for the phone Stan groaned and put his hands over his ears.

“That TV noise is freaking me out.”

There were two remotes on the floor by the side of the bed. I picked them both up and hit the power button on one of them. The tray in a DVD player beneath the TV slid out. The hissing electron jumble on the screen went black and quiet. I pressed power on the second remote and turned the TV off.

“Thanks, Johnny. My head was going crazy. She must have been watching a movie.”

Wondering what someone might watch while they killed themselves I checked the disk that sat in the player’s tray, but it had been burned on a computer and there was nothing on its surface to identify it beyond a small smiley-face sticker. I left it where it was.

“Can I go outside, Johnny?”

“Yeah, go wait out front. I’ll be along soon.”

I picked up the phone, called the garden center, got Bill’s cell phone number from them, and called that. When he answered I did it as well as I could, but there was nothing I could say that would make anything any easier for him. He cried out and dropped the phone. I waited a long time but I didn’t hear anything else, so I hung up and called the police. After that I went outside and sat with Stan on a large ornamental rock at the edge of the driveway. He looked pale and stunned. I put my arm around his shoulders.

“I don’t understand how anyone could do that, Johnny. I can’t think how it would even be possible.”

“She must have been very unhappy.”

“Can we go home?”

“Not yet, we have to wait.”

Stan leaned into me and put his head on my shoulder. A few minutes later Bill’s BMW SUV skidded to a halt in front of us. He threw himself out of the car and ran for the house. His face was set and he was shouting as he passed us.

“Where is she? Where is she?”

But he didn’t stop for me to answer and ran on through the front doorway as though by his speed he could somehow turn back what had happened. I let him have five minutes alone, then I went inside to check on him.

As I walked along the corridor to the bedroom it seemed to me that the air was not as silent as it had been, that there was an ambience to it, a sense of space, as though the outdoors could be heard inside.

The door to the bedroom was almost closed now. I knocked, not wanting to walk in without warning. Bill shrieked an obscenity and I heard him move across the floor. The sound in the air stopped.

I wasn’t sure what to do, but I felt obliged to at least offer some sort of support. After hesitating a moment I pushed the door open and went into the room.

I thought I might find Bill with his head bowed over his wife, broken, crying, on the point of collapse. But he was nothing of the sort. He was standing near the TV holding the remotes. His light windbreaker, which had been open as he ran from his car, was now zipped closed. I glanced at the DVD player. The disk with the smiley sticker was gone.

Bill’s face twisted when he saw me and he began screaming. The torrent of abuse shocked me but the man’s wife had just killed herself so I put it down to grief. I took a step forward, intending to comfort him, but he raised his fist and told me to fuck off. It was obvious that he was beyond comfort, at least from any I could offer, and, figuring that maybe I was doing more harm than good by being there, I backed out of the room and left him alone.

An ambulance was pulling into the driveway as I joined Stan outside again. A cruiser from the Oakridge police department had already arrived and two uniformed cops were climbing out of it.

They both had mustaches and one of them wore yellow-lensed sunglasses. They asked us briefly where in the house Pat was and how we came to be there, then the one with the sunglasses and the two ambulance men, who’d just pulled a gurney from the back of their wagon, went inside. The other cop got out a pad and took our details and asked more questions and wrote down our answers. In a little while the ambulance guys came back out and told the cop there was no chance of resuscitation. They got into their truck and started the engine for the air-conditioning and sat in the cab making notes on a clipboard. The cop said he wanted us to walk him through exactly what we’d done inside and took us into the house.

When we got to the bedroom the cop in the yellow glasses was standing with Bill by the writing desk and it looked like they were just finishing up. Bill’s anger seemed to have dissipated and he was reasonably composed, but as I entered the room he shot me a quick hateful glance which neither of the cops caught. Stan and I reenacted what we’d done. When I mentioned turning the DVD player off, the cop with the glasses went over and looked at the machine. When he saw there was no disk, he asked me what I’d done with it.

Bill spoke before I could answer. “I took it out of the machine. I’m sorry, I didn’t think it was important.”

“What did you do with it?” The cop’s tone was only one of mild inquiry. We hadn’t been rushed or cross-examined during their inquiry and as far as I could tell no one here was treating the scene as suspicious.

“I put it on the pile.”

“What was it?”

Bill looked blank for a moment.

“I can’t remember.”

“That’s okay, don’t worry about it. Was it this one here?”

There was a stack of DVDs on a cabinet beside the TV. The cop took the one off the top and held it up. “This it?”

Bill nodded. “It must be. I didn’t look at it.”

The cop took the disk out of its cover and nodded to himself. “Barefoot in the Park. I like that movie.”

The DVD was a commercially recorded rental and certainly not the disk I had seen when Stan and I first found Patricia. Bill was lying. I was pretty sure he had the real disk concealed under his windbreaker. But what difference did it make? If Pat had been watching something more personal than a Hollywood love story-a family video of happier times, perhaps-who was I to interfere if Bill wanted to keep part of this horrible event private? So I said nothing. And Stan, who had paid no attention to the DVD beyond wanting the TV to be quiet, had no idea that there was anything to say nothing about.

Stan and I went outside again, but Bill stayed in the bedroom with his dead wife. We spent another half hour making formal statements which the cops typed into a computer in their car; after that they told us we could go.

When we got home, Stan put on his Captain America suit, jammed his glasses on over the mask, and settled himself in front of the TV. I made him the peanut butter sandwiches he asked for and he sat and munched and focused his attention on some Japanese action cartoon.

“How come you put the costume on?”

“Huh?”

“The costume. Why?”

Stan looked down at himself and smoothed the red, white and blue material over his belly. He turned his attention back to the TV and said without looking at me, “Protection.”

He didn’t answer when I tried to talk to him further, so I went into the kitchen and called my father and told him about Pat. The conversation was not long. I outlined what had happened, he asked for details and then he was silent. He cleared his throat a couple of times but was unable to say anything else. Eventually he thanked me and we hung up.

I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and called Marla on my cell and gave her the same news. After we’d arranged to meet the next day I put the phone down and turned on my side and closed my eyes. The windows were open and a hot, slow breeze moved over me.

I woke to Stan shaking my shoulder. It was dark outside but the light was on in the room and moths pestered the bulb. Stan was still in his Captain America suit.

“Dad’s downstairs. Something’s wrong.”

“What time is it?”

“He came in and went into the kitchen and when I said hi he wouldn’t lift his head up. He just kept staring at the table. He’s got a bottle of booze.”

“Booze?”

“Yeah, booze.”

“He’ll be all right, don’t worry. I’ll go see him. You go to bed.”

“Shouldn’t I come down with you?”

“No, just let me talk to him.”

“Okay, Johnny.”

I walked Stan along the landing to his room. He climbed under the covers of his bed and took off his glasses and mask.

“Aren’t you going to get rid of the costume?”

Stan shook his head.

“Are you okay about Pat?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to worry about me, Johnny.”

He nestled against his pillow and for a moment I saw him as a young boy again and was freshly overcome with a sense of loss for all the time that had passed while we were not together.

I turned out the light and went downstairs to see my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his suit. His tie was loose at his throat and his hair was mussed. There was a half-full glass and a bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him. He looked up as I came into the room and smiled weakly. He was a man who rarely drank and he seemed embarrassed at himself.

“I’m afraid I’m a little drunk.”

“Are you okay?”

“Just had a few at the office after work.”

“Dad, I know you were seeing Patricia Prentice. Marla told me about the room.”

“Oh… I see.”

He nodded slowly. Everything about him was heavy-the words he pushed from himself into the over-bright kitchen air, his head on his shoulders, his arms bent on the table. His gaze would not hold mine and slid constantly to his hands. He seemed a man monumentally overwhelmed by the weight of being alive.

He lifted his glass and drank from it like a child forcing down medicine, then coughed and wiped his eyes.

“Pat was a person who needed emotional support. Her mistake was looking for it in me.” He shook his head disgustedly. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I did. I just didn’t have it in me.”

“I don’t think there was much you could have done either way. She was a sick woman.”

My father poured another drink and swallowed it. He was very drunk. His words were beginning to slur.

“What sickens me is that I always had it in the back of my head that if I stayed with her long enough some of her money might rub off on me. And all the time I was thinking about money, she was thinking about killing herself.”

He slumped forward on the table and put his head in his arms. I waited for several minutes until I thought he must have fallen asleep. I was going to rouse him and try and get him up to bed, but when I shook him he lifted his head and told me to leave him where he was. There wasn’t much else I could do, so I put a glass of water on the table next to him and headed out of the room. As I reached the doorway he called to me.

“Johnny, that friend you used to have-Gareth.”

“What about him?”

“He isn’t the sort of man you want to be mixed up with.”

He pointed his finger at me. His face was swollen and loose and his eyes were bleary.

“You hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“Good…”

He dropped his head into his arms again and his breath came out in a sob.

The room felt abandoned, as though everywhere outside was empty and gone. The electric clock on the stove ratcheted painfully through the minutes and the light from the ceiling bulb made things dirty around the edges. I felt terribly sad standing there watching my father. It seemed to me, at that moment, that the world was nothing more than a place where lives fell apart.