Tilt - Alan Cumyn [61]
Janine Igwash was pregnant. By him.
Why?
He’d sworn he would never be here. He was not going to become . . .
His fucking father.
“You’re hurting my hand!” Feldon said.
He was holding Feldon’s hand. Feldon had the flowers. Stan had the fishing rod.
“Sorry,” he said.
It didn’t even sound like his voice.
In Family and Sexuality class, Mrs. Hardon had said sperm needed only the slightest invitation to cause irreparable parenthood. Even if you’d already . . . shot across the bow. There was still sperm in the nozzle.
Lurking.
He was nothing but the agent of his own nozzle.
“We’re not going to see Janine right now,” Stan said.
Instead, the flowers were for Kelly-Ann.
It was a touching scene. The house surrounded by cop cars, lights blazing, Kelly-Ann scrambling off the front porch — Stan thought she was going to trip and break her neck — then hugging Feldon so hard he yelled in alarm.
Stan’s eyes welled up. He didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t get weepy about anything, usually. But the sight of the little boy squirming, of Kelly-Ann nearly killing him with her own relief . . .
Stan, too, was going to be a parent. It just kept hitting him, one load of bricks after another. He’d have to leave school. He’d have to get a job, in a brick factory, probably. He’d be moving bricks from one place to another. Probably by hand. He didn’t know anything else.
He’d have to learn that, even.
He’d have to support Janine and the little baby. And his mother would be alone with Lily. His mother and Lily would unravel each other. And Stan would come home to Janine — to some filthy little apartment they couldn’t afford — after a long day of moving bricks, his arms stretched from the weight of it all.
Janine would look at him with that face mothers get, that end-of-the-world face.
He’d come back to his crying kid and his unraveling wife — her parents would probably make him marry her — and they’d be together in a squishy, filthy, stinking, dark peeling-paint apartment . . .
Desolate in the driveway, Stan gazed at Kelly-Ann Wilmer clutching Feldon and weeping. Everyone was weeping.
Stan wept for himself. His blood was turning to chalk.
He might as well call himself Ron.
They were all a huge public spectacle — cops, neighbors, Lily home from school, his mother. Lily was wandering around in circles talking to invisible people at her toes.
“He was just down at the river,” Stan said to nobody at all. No one was listening to him anyway.
—
Dinner was something from a box that went in the microwave and then came out hot and mushy. The colored parts were vegetables, Stan guessed. The whitish-yellowish parts were pasta. Gary poured wine for everyone — even Stan — except the children, who got berry juice.
The wine sat murkily on Stan’s tongue, like some token of the adult world that was hard to appreciate. Gary went on about — vintage, mustiness? — while Stan considered brick dust filling his lungs.
“To life!” Gary said, and everyone clinked. Stan’s mother was looking at Gary like . . .
“I have a word to say about life,” Gary said.
. . . like he was a Greek god or something.
“Some days,” Gary said, “you lose your job.” He looked over at Stan’s mother. So that was it. How were they supposed to live? But Gary was looking at her like she was the greatest thing since . . . “Some days you get accepted into a special school —” Gary glanced now at Lily chopping her mushy noodles into smaller and smaller bits — “or you lose your kid, then you find your kid.”
Kelly-Ann had Feldon on her lap, clutched like he was a parachute she hadn’t strapped on.
“It all could happen on the same day. What’s important, what really stays with you . . .”
Is what your nozzle caused you to do, Stan thought.
“ . . . is all of us together. I don’t care what anyone says, we are . . .”
Just agents of our nozzles, Stan thought. Our nozzles and our appetites.
“ . . . a family,” Gary said. Some kind of eye-based tractor beam vibrated between him and Stan’s mother.