Parting Shot

Twenty-six Cal

I couldn’t see us making Manhattan that night. But I didn’t want Jeremy to spend the night at my apartment, in case there were people who already knew we were here. The black van I’d seen out front had rattled me. It might or might not have anything to do with the brick that got thrown through the front window of Madeline Plimpton’s house. It had not been a black van I’d seen speeding away from her place.

I grabbed my bag, and the cooler, which we had packed with the sandwiches and a few other snacks, and headed down to the street. I locked up my place, dumped the stuff into the car, and told Jeremy to get in. There was something else I had to do first.

I got down on my knees and, with a flashlight I took from the glove box, inspected the undercarriage of the car. Then I felt inside the wheel wells, patting my hand on the insides of the fenders. Finally, I gave the bumpers a good going-over.

“What was that about?” Jeremy asked when I got in behind the wheel.

“One time,” I said, “somebody attached a tracker to my car. In fact, not one, but two.”

“Whoa,” Jeremy said. “Cool.”

I glanced over at him. “No, it wasn’t. I got someone killed.”

“Oh, shit. When was this?”

“Four years ago.”

“What happened?”

I ignored the question.

I got us out of Promise Falls and went south on 87 toward Albany. The plan was to get around the capital, then continue on in the same direction toward New York. We dug into the cooler and killed off all the sandwiches in the first hour. Jeremy didn’t have much to say, and I didn’t feel all that much like talking.

We were about to pass the exit to the Mass Pike, around Selkirk, when Jeremy suddenly said, “Can we get off at the next exit?”

“What for?”

“It’s right here. Get off! Get off!”

I hit the blinker and took the exit. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“When you get to the end of the ramp, take a right,” he said.

“What I’m gonna do is pull over until you tell me why you made me get off the thruway.”

He seemed to need a few seconds before he could work up the nerve to tell me.

“You have to promise not to tell my mom,” he said.

“Come on, Jeremy, don’t make me promise something I might not be able to do. You tell me, or we carry on south.”

“My dad lives here,” he said. “Like, close. Yeah, turn here.”

I made a right where the ramp ended. “Okay,” I said. “So we’re going to visit your dad. That would upset your mom?”

He shrugged. “Kinda. Probably. She doesn’t like him.”

“That happens a lot when people split up.”

“Yeah, but this is different,” Jeremy said.

“Different how?” I glanced over, tried to read his face, but came up with nothing. “Was your father abusive to your mother?”

Gloria’s own father had been abusive, and sometimes people went with what they knew, even when it was bad for them, because it was all they knew.

“He never hit her or anything,” Jeremy said. “Nothing like that. You make a left up here.”

“Didn’t you say your dad’s a teacher?” I asked.

“Yeah, high school.”

“Why do you want to drop by?”

Jeremy gave me a look that suggested any faith he might have had that I had half a brain had been misplaced. “Because he’s my dad,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Point the way.”

He directed me into an old neighborhood and told me to stop out front of a modest storey-and-a-half brick house with a couple of dormer windows poking out of the roof. While the house was small and unassuming, the yard was immaculately kept, with spring flowers that looked as though they had just been planted.

“Don’t freak out or anything,” he said, getting out of the car before I had a chance to ask about what.

I followed him to the door. He rang the bell, and ten seconds later it was answered by a balding man in his mid-fifties wearing glasses, a pullover sweater and jeans.

“Oh my God, Jeremy,” the man said with what struck me as limited enthusiasm. They faced each other awkwardly for a moment, then the man put his arms around the boy and hugged him. “What are you doing here?”

“We were just kind of in the neighborhood,” Jeremy said.

The man was looking over Jeremy’s shoulder at me, and his eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And this is?”

“This is my bodyguard,” Jeremy said. “Dad, this is Mr. Weaver, Mr. Weaver, this is my dad.”

I extended a hand. “Cal,” I said.

“Jack Pilford,” the man said, eyeing me suspiciously. “Bodyguard?”

“Not really,” I said. I managed, in three sentences, to explain my presence.

“Okay,” he said, dubiously. “Listen, Jeremy, you know I love to see you, and it’s great that you’ve dropped by. Without, you know, calling ahead. But this is not really the best—”

The door opened wider and another man, slightly older than Jack, appeared. He looked at Jeremy, took a moment to register who he was, then said, “Oh, wow, look who’s here. America’s worst driver.”

“Jesus, Malcolm,” Jack said. “Don’t be an asshole.”

Malcolm set his eyes on me next. “And you must be Bob.”

“No,” I said. I identified myself.

“Mr. Weaver’s been hired to protect Jeremy,” Jack said.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” Malcolm said defensively.

“Not from you.” Jack shook his head. To Jeremy and me he said, “I’m sorry about this. I was trying to tell you, this isn’t a very good time.”

“Lovers’ quarrel,” Malcolm said.

“Maybe we should go,” I said to Jeremy, who had the look of a kid who’d been picked last for a team.

“Why didn’t you come?” Jeremy asked.

“Jeremy, we talked about this,” his father said. “You know—”

“Because of your cunt mother, that’s why,” Malcolm said.

Jack said, “Enough.” He gently pushed Malcolm back into the house. Malcolm allowed it to happen, even showing some satisfaction that his behavior had brought about that reaction. Jack closed the door and stepped outside.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “And Jeremy, you know I wanted to be at the trial, I wanted to be there for you, but Gloria, your mother—”

“You don’t have to do everything she says,” Jeremy interrupted.

“She said to me, and these were her exact words, ‘We don’t need a couple of gaylords turning the trial into a circus.’ That’s what she said.”

“You could have ignored her.”

“It wasn’t just her,” Jeremy’s father said.

Jeremy said, “Who?”

Jack Pilford hesitated. “Madeline called me. She said she’d been talking to Grant Finch, who more or less agreed with your mother. That they had a defense worked out, that bullshit about you not understanding the consequences of your actions. They didn’t want to complicate the message with stories about your father — about me — being gay. I guess Finch and Madeline thought gay was the same thing as sensitive, and if that’s what I was, how come none of my influence rubbed off on you while your mother and I were still together. It was all a crock of shit, far as I was concerned, but if they had something worked out, I didn’t want to mess it up. I didn’t want to do anything that might work against you. Not that the world didn’t find out about me anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Jack tipped his head back in the direction of the house. “That’s what’s got Malcolm riled up. I’m sure it’s just a fraction of what you and your mother are dealing with, but we’ve been targeted, too.”

“Targeted?” I said.

“Harassing phone calls, being mocked online. I’m the Big Baby’s faggot father who didn’t teach his kid right and wrong. How could I, half of them say, considering I’m a sick, twisted pervert.”

It was like a cancer, all this social-media shaming.

“Malcolm’s furious that I’ve had to endure this,” Jack said. He smiled wearily at his son. “But I’ll survive it. One day, when it all blows over, we can do something, get together. How does that sound?”

Jeremy looked at me. “I guess we should be going.”

I said, “Okay.”

“No, wait,” Jack said. “Maybe we could go somewhere, get a cup of coffee.”

“I hate coffee,” Jeremy said, already walking back to the car.

We lost about half an hour detouring to Jeremy’s father’s house, so making it to New York tonight was no longer an option. As we neared Kingston, I felt it was time to start looking for a place to bed down. There was a Quality Inn we could see from the highway, but there were plenty of other hotels to choose from if we were willing to drive a mile or two.

I pulled up in front of the Quality Inn. “Wait here,” I said to Jeremy. He’d been pretty sullen since we’d left his father’s house.

I took the car key, and parked close enough that I’d be able to see my Honda from the registration desk. I wasn’t convinced Jeremy wouldn’t make a run for it if the mood struck him. So far, he’d seemed pretty agreeable to the whole road trip idea, although he had to be thinking dropping in on his dad had been a bad call. Then again, he could be setting me up. Maybe he’d figured out a way to get a message to his girlfriend Charlene, and she was waiting around the next bend in her Miata.

I went to the desk and asked if they had a room available with two beds. Single, double, queen, didn’t matter. While the woman was scanning her computer for availability, a young couple came through the main doors.

I could hear their conversation as they walked through the lobby in the direction of the elevator.

“That was him!” the woman said.

“That was who?” the man asked.

“From the news. The Big Baby kid. That was him in the car.”

“Seriously?”

They slowed, the man craning his head around to look back at my car.

I said to the woman on the desk, “Never mind.”

“I’ve got something,” she said. “Two queen beds and—”

I shook my head. “No thanks.”

I got back into the car, put the key in the ignition and started the motor. I reached for the seat belt, buckled myself in.

“Full up?” Jeremy asked.

“Yup,” I said.

The Hampton Inn and the Courtyard were full, but the Best Western had a spot for us. At all three places, before heading in, I made a point of not parking under any bright lights where someone might be able to spot Jeremy. Once I had us a room, I hustled him through the lobby as quickly as possible.

“They’re going to think you’re some sort of pervert who likes little boys,” Jeremy said.

“You’re not a little boy. You’re eighteen.”

“Oh, so it’d be legal?”

“That’s not the point I was trying to make.”

The room was adequate. First thing Jeremy did after tossing his bag onto one of the two beds was grab the remote and troll through all the available channels. “Wanna order a movie?” he asked.

“No.”

“There’s dirty ones, too.”

“No.”

“You think it’s weird that my dad’s gay?”

“No.”

“That he’s living with Malcolm?”

“No.”

“I’ve never liked him.”

“Malcolm?” I said.

“Yeah. Not because he’s gay. Well, sort of. Because my dad fell in love with him, because they’re both gay, so that meant my mom and dad split up. But mostly I don’t like him because he’s a dick.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I mean, if your dad’s gonna leave, you’d like to think he had a really good reason, right? That the person he was leaving you for was going to make his life better.”

“You don’t think he and Malcolm are happy?’

Jeremy shrugged. “I don’t even care.” He propped up some pillows at his back so he could sit up on the bed. “What are we going to do?”

“Did you bring a book to read or anything?”

He shook his head.

“I brought three,” I told him. I unzipped my bag, intending to toss them out for his perusal, when my cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Weaver?”

“Hello, Gloria.”

“Is Jeremy there?”

“Of course.” I looked at him and mouthed, “It’s your mom.”

His head went down like a bag of sand. Blindly, he held out his hand and let me drop the phone into it.

“Hi, Mom... Yeah, we had some sandwiches... I don’t know.” He looked at me. “Are you going to get me a hot meal?”

“That’ll be breakfast,” I said.

“He says I’ll get a hot meal at breakfast.” He gave me a look that suggested his mother did not think that was a good enough answer. “It’s okay, I’m fine. No, we drove straight here. No stops along the way. We’re in Kingston now. I think we’re going to New York City.”

I shook my head.

“I guess I wasn’t supposed to tell you that... Yes, I know you’re my mom and you deserve to know where I am... Are you going to call Ms. Harding in the morning and tell her what’s going on?”

I gave him a puzzled look. He whispered to me, “My probation officer.”

Then, back to his mother, “Okay... Yes, I’ll check in. Okay... Yes, I love you too. Goodbye.”

He handed back the phone. I put it to my ear, wondering if Gloria was still on there, wanting to give me a piece of her mind, but she’d hung up.

“She really does treat me like I’m five sometimes,” he said.

“And she probably always will. Kids are kids to their parents no matter how old they are.”

“She had kind of a rough time when she was little,” he said.

I nodded. “I read about that.”

I went back into my case and brought out three books. “I’m reading this one,” I told him, holding up an old copy of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany that I had bought at Naman’s. “But you can have one of these if you want.”

Onto his bed I tossed two paperbacks. Early Autumn, by Robert B. Parker, and The Stand, by Stephen King. The latter was about five times the thickness of the former. Jeremy gave them a cursory look, then picked up the remote.

“I wish I had my phone,” he said.

He watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory while I tried to read, but I found it hard to concentrate with the background noise. Finally, I said it was time to turn in. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, then made way for Jeremy. He closed the door. I heard the shower running, but he was in there a long time after the water stopped.

I called out to him, “You okay in there?”

“Yeah,” he said quickly. “Tummy’s kind of off. I think it was one of those sandwiches. We should have gotten a pizza or Mickey D’s.”

The sandwiches hadn’t upset my stomach.

At long last, he came out and slid under the covers of his bed. Light from the parking lot filtered through the drapes, so we weren’t in total darkness once I’d turned off the bedside lamp.

“Do you snore?” Jeremy asked.

“I’ve been told I do.”

“Great. I heard Madeline say you aren’t married or anything.”

“Not any more.”

“You got divorced?”

“No.”

Jeremy went quiet. There was no sound from his side of the room for a long time, and I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep.

I was wrong.

“What will happen to me?” His voice came through the darkness like someone in the distance calling for help.

“What do you mean?”

“What kind of life am I going to have?” he asked. “I mean, the whole world knows who I am and hates me. What happens when I have to go back to school? What about when I want to go to college or something? If I even decide to do that. Or after that, when I want to get a job? Who’s going to hire me? They’ll google my name and find out who I am and what I did and they won’t want to have anything to do with me. I’m like the world’s biggest asshole.”

“No you aren’t,” I said. “I think that might be Galen Broadhurst.”

I heard an actual chuckle from him.

“Sorry,” I said. “That was unprofessional.” I shifted onto my side so that, even if Jeremy couldn’t see me, my voice would project more clearly to him. “Look, I don’t have all the answers. I sure can’t claim to have been the greatest father that ever lived.”

“You’ve got kids?”

“I had a son.”

“Oh.” A pause. Then, “But not any more?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“The thing is,” I said, “you did what you did, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. You own it. You can’t hide from it. If you don’t tell people up front, and they find out later, they’ll think you’re trying to put something over on them, even if all you’re doing is what anyone else would do. Wanting people to respect their privacy.”

“Yeah, sure. So I put on the top of my résumé, I’m the kid who ran over that girl?”

“No. You did something stupid. All kids, by the time they’ve reached your age, have done something stupid. The others are just luckier than you. Maybe they drove drunk, too, but nothing bad happened. So that’s tough. But you have to accept responsibility for what you did. You can’t go blaming others. You have to say, ‘I did it, I own it,’ and every day moving forward you have to learn from that.”

Silence from the other bed.

“Does that help any?” I asked.

“Not really.”

I heard him turn over and pull up the covers.

We were done.