We told Bill we only wanted to see him. He called on our way up to his house. I sipped on a homemade smoothie. My other hand was on the wheel. I had one brown banana leftover from the smoothie this morning at home and I put it in the freezer before I left.
M52, the route to Perry, is long, straight, and boring if the wide, bucolic scenes aren’t worthwhile. Perry’s water tower is viewable ten miles out. Bill said to meet him in town at Charlie’s pub instead of his house. I told him I only wanted to see him. He laughed and said, how long? I sighed and said twenty minutes. I said to Mom, “Do they not want us to see the house?
I told Mom I thought Justin’s meth would have kept the house clean. We had no idea if there’d be glass shattered in the corner of a seatboard, piles of moldy denims in the corner, the kitchen drain clogged, or if they were cleaning dishes in the toilet. Justin sidled up to everyone with a cup.
My mom’s dad used to own the house. Now his son does. Mom said, if we saw how it was now, we’d taint our memories of the cozy wood burner, grandpa rolling newspaper for fire fuel, the side tables with bowls of pretzels and sugar candies, the creaky spiral staircase, the mulling spices, and cardinals flying from one tree to the next over the slope covered in fresh snow.
“You know that painting you said I could have? That seaside one by Ken Gore,” I said in the car.
“I never thought much of that one,” Mom said.
“I looked it up. It’s worth about fifteen hundred now.”
“It’d be nice to have that old shillelagh,” Mom said. “Bill said he thinks it’s still there.”
I decided I’d get the shillelagh back on Christmas.
I’d been trying to drink less, but on some mornings–like waking up at nine a.m. to drive two hours in December for brunch with an epileptic uncle and his son that no one else in the family will talk to–the glow of the chalk on a tap list is brighter than usual. We walked in the back door at Charlie’s and down a hallway with posters for a caroling group, a dart’s league, and free s’mores on Fridays at Schmidt’s used SUVs. I said to Mom, “We should have met him later. Then I could have a drink.” When Bill was a half hour late, at eleven-thirty, I ordered a beer.
Bill called again and asked if we were there. He said they were just leaving. I said, “just now?” Then I told him to tell his son, Justin, and Justin’s mom, Kathy, to stay in the car. Bill laughed again. A group of sober pavers, the only other people in the pub, drank diet cokes and walked around the pub on phone calls. In mid-December it was still warm enough for construction. The TV played a synopsis of Thursday Night Football. Another half hour went by while Bill and company made the five-minute drive. Mom said it’s a lunch thing. “They just want me to pay for their food,” she said. “I’ll pay and that’ll be it and we’ll drop the bike off. I don’t want it to be very long.”
Bill had asked Mom over the summer if they could fix up a bike at her shop that Justin had found on the street. She agreed, and it was in our trunk as we sat at the pub, waiting.
“Mom, you shouldn’t pay for them,” I said. “We should have some boundaries.” I folded a straw wrapper in half, then half again.
“I have boundaries. I want to keep a line of communication.”
“I want to call Justin out for scamming my phone.”
“No, because if we piss him off, he’ll take it out on Bill.”
There was maybe a little leeway there.
For a few minutes we just watched the door. Over the summer Justin tried to scam me through text with a link. I knew it was him. The text said to go to some website, and it mentioned Bill’s address. When I read it, I said I hoped Justin would just OD already. Mom said he didn’t have enough money for that.
When my brother was a kid, Justin wrapped an old banana in paper and gifted it to him on his birthday. When my brother opened it, Justin laughed by tucking his chin deep into his neck and pretending to hold back his real laughter, while pinching the sides of his neck. It made a folded square on his throat. He didn’t laugh “ha-ha.” He laughed, “ke, ke, ke,” as he strained his throat.
Every time one of the pavers came out from behind a wall I looked. The plan hadn’t been to meet at Charlie’s. The plan had been to meet at Bill’s house sitting on an orchard off a clay-dirt road that looked like bulldust and cut through thick forest. I missed driving underneath the now leafless canopy that overhung the road. It was the same rock-ridden path and tunnel of trunks that we’d gone through every Christmas growing up. Some of the family considered the house, that grandma had designed, lost to Justin’s deadbeat parasitizing.
“Marcy found a great place in Aruba. I have some pictures,” Mom said while we waited. My parents had a vacation planned for their fortieth anniversary. Mom’s other brother and his wife were joining.
“When are you going again?”
“January.”
“And that whole place is yours?”
“Yes, but the pool’s salty.”
“Mom, does anyone ever call Justin out for all that stealing?”
Because grandpa’s funeral was six months after his death, Bill had moved a lathe and a kiln into the living room and kitchen, respectively, before the black suits and twenty-one gun salute. He blew glass. A silver, tubular vent went from the lathe up and over the loft’s railing, and out an upper story window.
Grandpa used to hang the Christmas tree from a rafter that supported the loft. At night, he’d open the house’s skylight, sliding the cover open with a cane, so we could watch the stars as we dozed and stayed up looking for Santa on the roof. The chemicals grandpa used to spray the orchard with, Bill said, were what caused the throat cancer.
“I don’t want to stay long,” Mom said. “We should just pay for this and meet them in the parking lot.”
I still had half a beer left. “I don’t mind waiting a few more minutes.”
“Okay, we’ll leave at noon.” It was eleven fifty-three. Any moment I’d be eating across the table from a cousin who maxed out my grandfather’s credit cards as he laid on his deathbed.
I sipped my beer. “Why don’t we just tell them we’ll drive Bill back to his house?” I wondered if he’d have a stray bottle lying around for a swig. If he did it was left over from grandpa.
“We could,” Mom said.
“I’ll tell them they took too long, and we have to go but we’ll drive Bill back so we can catch up with him.” How would Justin react to being confronted about one of his scams?
Three weeks before, Bill had lay in a hospital bed after a stroke at home. Had he been at Sparrow, where his stepdaughter nurse, Michelle, mocked her diabetic patients in the MICU’s conference room? Wherever she worked, she brought donuts once a month.
Bill never answered his phone. Justin and Kathy controlled his phone. Thirty-five years ago, Kathy and her daughter, Michelle the nurse, tried to frame Bill for attempted murder. Bill thought they were kidding, but he won anyway. The man believed in bigfoot, not killing people. He never told me how he found out. And I never saw bigfoot. But Justin and Kathy answered Bill’s phone sometimes, now. We didn’t know Bill was in the hospital until he was out.
Mom said, “Let’s just get the check and wait in the parking lot. We’ve been waiting an hour now.” Then Bill walked in, alone.
A family of foxes had moved onto the land, shortly after grandpa gave each of the grandkids a baby pine to plant in their own yard back home. In December, grandpa always cut from his own land the tree he’d tie to the rafter and string with lights. One year, when he went to look for one, he saw orange and white foxes skulking in their den on the southwest corner of the property where the sleds nor the par three ever reached. That area of the acreage was the quietest. Deer ran through, causing the smallest crinkle of a broken twig, and we’d see them later, on the leeward hills where grandpa’s little shepherd dog pulled us through deep drifts of white powder.
Bill was gaunt. We weren’t surprised. He told us he’d had another stroke and when the ambulance that Kathy had called pulled up, he told them he was fine and didn’t need to go. Kathy and the paramedics talked him into going. She just wanted the house to herself for a few days. She and Bill didn’t talk. She was “the woman who rented a room,” according to Bill. They did a CAT scan in the ER, monitored for three days, and sent him home.
Even when he was in the hospital, we weren’t sure Bill ate every day, because it was hospital food.
“No Kathy and Justin?” Mom asked.
Bill sat down. “They decided not to come.”
If I’d weighed myself before and after I would’ve been ten pounds lighter for the stress that left me in that moment.
“You’re not an easy person to contact,” I said.
“I sent a postcard to your PO box. Did you get it?” Mom said.
“No,” Bill said. “No. I don’t think so. When did you send it?”
“A couple weeks ago.”
“Does Justin have access to that?” I asked.
Bill said no. He always exaggerated his facial expressions. The stroke animated them further. His eyes strained from his face, and he’d gained this patient anticipation that grandpa had in his later years. Bill was the more tired of the two. He wore a baseball cap whose lower edge above his right ear was folded up a bit and frayed.
“I’m gonna get this extension for the house, north of the porch,” Bill said. “A local guy does it, this guy I know. This one-bedroom thing, it comes like that. Get Justin out of there.”
The waitress came by, and two inches of her big stomach spilled out of her shirt. Bill asked what beer was on tap. The waitress listed the beers then suggested Two Hearted, or Modelo. Bill said, lady, I’ve had eight thousand of those, then ordered a domestic. He said we should order food, that he just wanted a cheeseburger, that those are always good, that he couldn’t read the menu anyway. I asked the waitress for a few minutes.
“North of the porch is the garage,” I said.
“On the other side of the garage.” Bill waved his hand as he spoke.
“So, it already comes pre-assembled?” Mom asked.
“And get this, it’s only two g’s. That’s only like eighty bucks a month for two years.”
Bill went to the bathroom. I asked Mom, why do I have the feeling Bill is going to be living in that extension?
Bill came back and started talking about Justin. He said he was a little psycho.
“That’s what years of drugs will do to you,” Mom said.
“That’s what years of drugs has done to me,” Bill laughed.
“So, you want a cheeseburger?” I asked.
“Yeah, that sounds fine. Justin wants this. Hey,” he said to Mom, “do you think you could get an extra one to go for Justin and Kathy? They can split it.”
“I think they’re adults and they should buy their own food,” I said.
“I’ll buy two so they can each have their own,” Mom said.
I looked over at the table of pavers. They’d been replaced by another group nearly identical to the first.
“That’s very generous of you,” Bill said.
“There’s specials, too,” I said. Bill couldn’t see it from his seat. A small, plastic Christmas tree blocked his view. He also didn’t see very well anymore. “Bowl of chili with fries. Eleven. Fried tilapia with tartar and slaw. Fourteen. Soup is bean.”
Bill concentrated.
“So, you’re gonna get the cheeseburger,” I said.
“Get one,” Bill said. “You’re gonna get a cheeseburger.”
“I can’t eat that much,” I said. “I’ll just get a side of fries.”
“It smells like gasoline in here,” Mom said.
“Got a lighter?” Bill said.
When the waitress came back she took our orders. When she walked away Bill said she had a tattoo of an anchor on her foot. Mom said maybe she was in the navy. I said maybe the navy was in her.
While we waited for the food Bill tried to convince Mom to see Justin’s kids. He had two and they were both under three. They had the same mother and part of the second pregnancy was spent in jail. That same mom kept stripping kid time away from Justin and he didn’t want to take her to court because he knew, despite cheery phone calls and sincere pleas for forgiveness, that he called banks, faked identities, and threw fists when the internet was out at Western Union. He knew she’d win full custody. Mom didn’t want to be roped in by a family angle, and I didn’t care about his kids.
“But they’re your family,” Bill said. “Just like you have this guy.” He pointed at me.
“I’m not meeting them,” Mom said.
Bill liked to talk about genetics. He said it was all genetic, wasn’t it? Justin’s bomb threat to the high school, winning lifting competitions at the YMCA, beating up college kids at the Peanut Barrel, calling a friend for the note on that Cadillac, placing first in a painting competition in Texas, then moving to Houston and running a scam company that imported patio flooring in cargotainers from China sometimes, and other times only selling the idea of patio flooring, then taking the money and filling the freezer with a key for three months.
“I declared bankruptcy again,” Bill said. His big eyes rolled as his jaw slacked and held open.
Bill ordered another beer when the food came. When the beer came he splashed half of it into my shorter, pint glass. I drank it and chewed French fries.
Mom paid the bill, and we left down the same hallway. Bill said, “Hey, Parky, free s’mores.” It reminded me of the time we walked past a tree trunk on display in Paw Paw and Bill had called it an Indian submarine.
I made him sit in the front of the car and we drove to his place outside Perry down that bulldust road thickly covered even in December.
On the way, I said, “Bill, you want me to pick you up for Christmas?”
He said yes and turned his head to pay attention, the same kind of acute attention grandpa could give, especially when it was my turn to talk. I trusted them as much as I trusted the lilies beside the house, the side where the extension was planned. I trusted them through the lilies.
We turned onto the black, winding driveway that we had turned onto for so many Christmases. Spruce branches dripped wet all December. A yellow H2 was parked perpendicular to the garage. Bill said it was Justin’s, but it was in Bill’s name.
“You want it?” Bill asked. “I’ll will it to you.”
“I’ll pick you up Christmas morning,” I said.
I pulled the bike from the trunk and leaned it against the garage. We each hugged Bill outside his front door next to a tall copse of white spruce. We kept an eye on the front door for Justin. The ground of the orchards was mush and rotten but fertile even though no one cared. I saw Mom eyeing through the window of the front door. In the car I asked her.
“That old shillelagh by the fireplace,” she said. “I saw it and it doesn’t look like anyone’s moved it. It’d be nice to have that. I asked Bill about it awhile back. You’ve seen it, right? It’s beautiful.”
“I think so. It looked like a cane.”
“It spirals at the top. It’d be nice to have it.”
I had to get that shillelagh back. I had a plan to grab it on Christmas and hope Justin was there, too, so I could grinch his holiday. The birds around the orchard zipped along routes far away from the house when they heard the squeak of haggard Yeezy’s on the driveway. Their parents had warned them of the slingshot. Bill’s Rottweiler, Roxy, was stolen years ago as part of Justin’s schemes. When I was fifteen, Justin told me that when I was eighteen he’d fight me, and win. He didn’t, of course, but I resented those three years.
It was quiet on the car ride then Mom would talk then words came to a close then someone would remember something. On M52, nothing changed; the purple-striped corner store, obedience to the speed limit, farmhouses either old or new after the 2019 tornado ripped a line through corn fields, the Snoopy mailbox in Manchester, bird houses built by boy scouts on the hilly stretch, and blind, two-way stops.
I dropped Mom off then drove back home to Detroit where the snow was less but still white enough to offer some sense of holiday season. Only in Detroit does anyone look south toward Canada. I drove past the riverfront where I ran almost every day to see the water and it was still. On the Canadian side nothing moved much on any day. Their front was frozen in a still snow globe.
On Christmas morning, I loaded gifts into my trunk. Red ribbons wrapped green pine paper, and candy-cane twine tied a cross on white folds. Back inside, I poured myself a cup of eggnog and sat at the kitchen counter eating toast with cranberry preserves until the eggnog was gone. Was it better with brandy, or rum? I slid a water bottle of vodka into my bag. I poured a little pickle juice into a tiny mason jar and screwed a cap on. And, as carefully as Santa packed his sack, I placed in my bag, on top of the booze and extra clothes, a gift with Justin’s name written on the tag.
In the car, on the way to Perry, I swigged the vodka then chased with the pickle juice. Jazzy Christmas songs wiggled out classic refrains and choruses and by the time I made it to Perry, I was a singing elf in gold, red, silver, and green.
Would I be walking into lit-up garlands, red candles smoking Camellia scent, the fire stoked and glowing, a tree hung from the rafters, cookies on plates, a table runner pressed and running images of dancing holly? Would the wind register on the windmill, would the hill sloping northeast be leveled with snow and dotted with Hawthorne, would the tree by the road once cut down by a trespasser have sprouted anew? Or would I walk into a pot den, a gingerbread house still standing in June, a sediment of scum and grimy blankets, the smell of chemotherapy and burned TVs, see Justin snorting lines, grab the shillelagh, and run?
The kid’s bike that Mom and I had brought earlier in the month still leaned against the garage and the spokes had begun to rust near the rim, along with the chain, now brown and rigid. Bill had said he burned part of the porch with spilled coals. From the wood stove, I guessed. Could the stove still be there, and functional?
Before I rang the bell, I looked down at the charred planks. The patio had mostly been stripped of its light blue paint. Any paint that remained curled at its fingered edges. The sound of a branch snapped in a pine grove to the south and ricocheted off the layer of ice atop an early morning snow. A suction-pop resonated from the inner door opening, and a draft pulled into the house. Bill walked through the small vestibule to open the main door.
I shook his hand and followed him into the main room. Half of it was shrouded by the loft. Despite the years of drugs, booze, and Mexico runs, Bill had most of his hair. It was long and stringy and when he was fresh out of the shower, as he was that Christmas morning, it was combed behind his ears in long lines down to mid-neck. And it was thinning, so you could see his scalp beneath.
“Justin, Parky’s here,” Bill said as we walked in.
The family photos were gone. An eight-foot TV took their place. Justin came out from a corner that led to a bedroom, an office, and a bathroom. I smelled the terracotta tiles of that hallway, the burny scent they offered from the corpses of dead flies along the sill at the bottom of a clerestory facing south.
Justin’s charm shined a spotlight on me. He was an expert salesman, naturally gifted, and if I wasn’t careful I’d forget his con game. I had to remain resolute. I saw his smile then looked to the left, at the chimney and wood stove, and there was the shillelagh, leaning against the fireplace beside an iron shovel, a poker, and a green canvas stoker. The canvas had mold.
“What’s up buddy?”
“Wow,” I said.
“Did you see Justin’s flat?” Bill asked.
“No,” I said.
“It started losing air in town and it was flat by the time we got back here,” Justin said.
“We can’t find a lug nut wrench,” Bill said.
I remembered, when walking in, the Hummer had seemed to tilt toward the front passenger side.
Justin asked me about my life. I had his gift in my jacket pocket. I acted tired and bored to give off an air of coolness, that no ill will existed, the plastic space of “all is well.”
“I know I did some things your mom wasn’t happy about,” he said.
I let him go on.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be raised by addicts?” he asked.
Bill stood in the background. Justin’s voice choked. The whole world owed him sympathy.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “But at some point it doesn’t matter.”
We were in the kitchen. The table hadn’t changed, and I thought the tablecloth hadn’t either; it was the same flower-patterned plastic grandma draped for the last time years ago.
“Are you kidding me? Of course it matters,” Justin pleaded. It was like he had said, “of course the world is flat,” offended at the suggestion of a globe. His face bunched and his brow caved in when he felt his point was impossibly important to make.
Was I being worked? “I know you scammed my phone,” I said. The more my heart thumped, the lower I lowered my eyelids, the more tired I made myself.
“I wouldn’t scam your phone,” Justin said through broken laughs. His lips got tight. “We’re family. We don’t do that to our own blood.” He picked up a light Boston accent when challenged. He made the truth sound like dispatches from Atlantis. After a hint toward confession, he doubled down on denial. I had to pull back.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s Christmas. Don’t worry about it.”
“We’re family. I wouldn’t ever do that to you, buddy.”
I looked out the window at the wrinkled crabapples encased in ice. “Remember that morning we went out and shot at birds with slingshots and they didn’t hear the BBs whizzing past their heads?” Justin could be turned by the right words.
“We had a lot of good times,” he said. “I love you and your mom. Who does something like that to family?”
“Be right back,” I said.
First, I went to the bedroom and placed the wrapped gift on the bed. Then I went to the restroom, washed my hands, came back out and said, well, we should go.
“By the way,” I said. “Justin, there’s a present for you on the bed. Merry Christmas and no hard feelings.”
Justin smiled like he was posing for his Pop Warner portrait again and stepped to the bedroom. I had wrapped the gift itself in paper, then put that in a box, and wrapped the box. The box was closed with packing tape.
I said to Bill, “Let’s go.”
He padded his pockets and turned for the door. I saw my chance. I looked down the hallway to the open bedroom and only saw a dark doorway but heard paper tearing. It was easy to miss the shillelagh, as quiet and wooden as Grandpa hidden in a rocking chair, its gnarled grip twisting into the curves of the river rock fireplace–the kind of stick you could look at twice without seeing. But once you found it, camouflaged so well, you saw the heavy knob like a buckeye, blooming out of the ray-straight dorn decorated with thorny and polished stumps of severed twigs. Once you found it the room emptied. I snatched it up and fit it inside my jacket then followed Bill to my car.
I walked the long way around Justin’s yellow Hummer to see the flat tire for myself. It wasn’t flat, it was shredded. A skeleton of rubber remained, and the inner steel of the rim shined except for the outer lip that was scratched and black. Justin had driven all the way back from town on a bare rim.
I took the shillelagh from my jacket and laid it in the backseat of my car then got behind the wheel.
The front yard–from the house’s windows to the orchard – had been converted into a U-turn space, a figure-8 demolition derby, marked by treaded mud tracks. When my grandparents had the house, we used the yard as a turnaround space, but we were gentle, and no one drove a straight axle way off the board, so the grass stayed green and sprung back upright after a tire had pressed it down.
At the end of the driveway I looked both ways, then into my rearview mirror. Justin ran out of the house with the brown banana in his hand. A chestnut-sized piece of red wrapping paper stuck to the banana’s side, waving. Justin held the banana at his waist as he ran toward my car. I watched him wind up his arm. I accelerated out of the driveway, turning right onto a slight downgrade. The banana flew with a wobbly spiral, professionally handled, turning about a center axis, but fell short and landed in the red bulldust of the country road, behind us.
I just caught the sight of Justin getting into his Hummer to follow me before wintered trees and thick brush obscured the view. His sagging pants almost tripped him. Ice on the dirt road kept me from driving fast. The hill let me watch in the rearview as the Hummer swung from the drive, sliding and pivoting around its tireless rim. The car spun around once before wedging itself into a ditch, and the driver’s side door pressed flat against an embankment, trapping Justin inside.
I stopped. “Justin crashed,” I said. I shifted into reverse and backed up the long hill.
“Is he okay?” Bill said. “Let’s see. How did that happen?”
“Stay here,” I told Bill. “It’s slippery.”
I opened the door and stepped out in one movement. My shoe slipped a bit on a frozen puddle. A winter robin flashed in the woods, and a single deer crossed the road near the bottom of the hill. Then a chainsaw roared to life behind the road’s tree line to my right. Maybe the kids there wanted a fire in the fireplace on Christmas. I glanced at the shillelagh in the backseat. I left it there.
The brown banana lay in the road at the end of the drive. The throw and contact with the dirt had split one of its seams so that the mushy and syrupy yellow fruit burst out. I walked over to it and picked it up. The neighbor, whose roof grew a bed of grass, hadn’t yet collected their bin from garbage day. I opened the lid and tossed the rotten banana inside. I turned back to Justin. He rolled the passenger side window down.
“That was a gift,” I said.
He laughed and started talking and I interrupted him. “And don’t litter either,” I said.
“It’s a banana.” He laughed again.
“It’s still littering,” I said then sat back in my car and slammed the door and drove to Christmas with the unwrapped shillelagh in the backseat.
