Slide - Kyle Beachy [62]
My dad held up an empty bottle to the waitress. She raised two fingers and he nodded. It was amazing to see this, such cool disaffection, so minimal and right.
“There's no reason to lie about the beard. I don't know why I did that. I'm sorry. There are things I'm supposed to say tonight, Potter. I'm having a hard time.”
That morning on the Las Vegas strip, after Carmel had pulled away from our kiss and walked in one direction and I reflexively began in the opposite, I ended up in the MGM Grand at a craps table I could not in any way afford, dropping come bets and hard eights with abandon, bleeding my parents’ cash and drowning in a river's flood of white Russians. When my ATM cut me off, I had no choice but to return to our shared room. There I found friends slouched in chairs and curled onto blankets in the bathroom, piled like some denim ad in one of the double beds while Audrey slept alone in the other, curled around one pillow in her stomach while the other was behind her, fresh and new, waiting for me. I lay down onto my back. She rolled over and nestled her head into my shoulder. Whispered, babes.
The waitress brought our beers. Richard picked one up and repeated himself. “I'm sorry.”
Two words echoing over the restaurant's other voices, overpowering the voices of the broadcast announcers. I couldn't recall my father ever having cause to apologize to me. Surely he must have, at least once, but for what? And now—for what now? I dropped my eyes from the screen to the table in front of me. The game appeared in tiny warped reflection of an empty water glass. Dirty restaurant table right immediately here.
“Your grandfather would be good at this. I wish you could have met him. Of course that's ridiculous. People of his generation always had advice to spare, even when you didn't ask. I remember him sitting me down and talking about love. Only about a month before he died. I was thirteen, and there was this young girl, Angela McIntyre, driving me crazy. He asked whether I was in love with her and I said yes, because I believed I was. The old man nodded and looked me in the eye. He said, Always make sure you love her more than she loves you, and she will love you even more.”
The table began to rotate slowly. I watched plates and napkins and empty bottles of beer. Things pulled back, the view grew larger, out now to the table's edges.
“I have always tried to love your mother more.”
The hand around the bottle was my hand, it was my Budweiser. I moved my fingers and watched them move.
“We are going through some tough times, son. All marriages do, of course. This is what it means to be married. But recently things have taken a turn for the worse. There are no new problems, nothing beyond two people with conflicting ideas of what constitutes happiness. Anyway, right now, for the past few years, we've been in the middle of something difficult. I'm trying to say this clearly. There has been difficulty, and it's not going away. So there will continue to be difficulty. For everyone. I'm being honest with you. I knew this would be hard. I've been dreading it. But here we are. You and me.”
There was my head, and my dad's head, that full head of silver hair. My father's shoulders and arms and hands resting on the edge of the table.
“You're an adult, so I'm not sure how much I have to make clear. Whatever changes, nothing is going to change. This sounds ridiculous, but you know what I mean. I don't have to say that none of this is your fault. Of course you know that much. This is a child's concern, the guilt that drives young people into lives of therapy. You know all of this. What happens is you get to a point when you have to let the past go. To let go. This is one of the things we all know but few of us ever manage to actually do.”
Rapt. I saw Richard leaning forward on his elbows, empty bottle beneath interlocked fingers. His knit collared shirt bunched at the shoulders.
“I'm sure you've picked up on feelings around the house. You've seen your mother