CHAPTER FOUR #3
“I’m going to the wine store,” he said, fumbling for the doorknob. “I’ll see you in a bit. Maybe ask my mom if she needs help with anything.”
“Yeah, sure, once I’m done here,” Lillian said, flapping her hand at him like he was an especially chatty chambermaid.
Carver pulled the door firmly shut, yanking the doorknob toward himself like he could trap all fucked-up shit inside that room forever, then went back down the hall and knocked on his parents’ door again.
His dad came out a second later, smelling of cologne.
He examined Carver with his typical dispassion and said, “Shall we?”
“Lead the way,” Carver said, gesturing toward the staircase and falling in step behind him.
It was always excruciating for Carver and Doug to try to make conversation when alone, but it was worst in the car, when they had nothing to mutually focus on.
Today they barely even tried, which Carver was grateful for.
He filled the drive’s fifteen minutes by checking his email and Slack channels until he’d bled them dry, then stared at the dashboard the rest of the way.
As they were looking for a parking spot, Doug cleared his throat and said, “So.”
Carver looked over at him, suddenly irrationally afraid that the Silver Fox had sold him out. So… my golf buddy put his fingers in you, son? Yes, Dad, he did, and are you going around telling people that I’m a basket case?
“Lillian mentioned you two were looking at real estate out this way,” Doug said.
“Oh,” Carver said, relaxing. “Yeah. As an investment, yeah. A rental or an AirBnb.”
“Uh-huh. Not to move out here?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“So if you had kids, you’d, uh —” Doug broke off for a moment as he parallel parked with smooth precision. “You wouldn’t raise them in the city, would you?”
Carver tried to picture his children. He could only picture miniature versions of Lillian, whether male or female. “Uh. I don’t know,” he said.
“Because, you know — kids really do benefit from a backyard.”
“There’s Central Park.”
Doug turned the car off. “Junkies shoot up in there, Carver, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I used to get accosted by hookers on my walk to work.”
“Dad, you haven’t lived in Manhattan since the eighties. I promise it’s better now.”
“I don’t care. I’ve never seen a junkie shoot up in a suburban backyard.”
“You remember Conway’s friend Michaela? Her mom had a huge coke problem when she was growing up.”
“God damn it, Carver, you know there’s a difference between some troubled housewife doing drugs in the privacy of her own home and having your child accosted by a filthy vagrant who you don’t know from Adam.”
He punctuated this by getting out of the car and shutting the door. Carver followed suit, reflexively checking his reflection in the passenger window.
“I don’t know why you’re so attached to that city,” Doug said as they strode down the sidewalk, passing women of leisure whose arms were laden with their Friday afternoon shopping — bags from Tiffany, Sephora, Eileen Fisher and Whole Foods.
They reached the wine store, and Doug held the door open for him, the shop bell ringing over their heads.
Carver went around the aisles, snatching up good labels in the major categories — bold red, delicate red, sweet white, dry white, rosé — while Doug trailed behind him and tucked each bottle he handed him into a basket.
“Do you gentlemen need any help?” a smiling woman in a store apron asked them as they turned the corner of an aisle.
“No, he’s got it,” Doug said, which Carver appreciated.
When she was gone, Carver glanced at his father and said, “I probably wouldn’t, uh, raise kids in the city, no. Mostly it just sounds like a giant pain in the ass.”
Doug’s shoulders relaxed almost imperceptibly. “Good.”
“I didn’t think you guys were even worried about that. Chip lives so close.”
“That’s Chip,” Doug said. “He’s under a lot of stress, don’t put it all on him.”
Carver stared at the label on a bottle of rosé without really reading it. “What’s ‘it’?”
“Your duty to this family.”
“My duty to reproduce?”
“Your duty to be present and involved.”
Carver thrust the rosé at his father without looking at him, grinding his teeth.
“Have kids or don’t have kids, fine, it’s your decision,” Doug said, “but you barely know your niece and nephew. You live less than an hour away, yet you’re a stranger they see a few times a year. You don’t find that odd?”
“I find a lot of things odd, Dad!” Carver said, stalking away toward the cashier. “I find it odd that we can’t have some polite small talk? I find it odd that I’m always on trial?”
“Lower your voice,” Doug said.
Carver remembered Silver Fox’s identical comment and almost started laughing. The cashier watched them both with wide eyes as she rang up bottle after bottle and they stood there scowling with a foot of pure static between them.
When she announced the total of $561.21, Carver tried to hand over his Amex Black but was blocked by Doug shoving forth his debit card.
“Receipt is in the bag,” the cashier chirped.
“Thanks,” Doug said, and headed for the door. Now it was Carver’s turn to chase him.
“Lillian and I spend all of our holidays here,” Carver said to the back of his father’s graying blond head. “Do you realize how unusual that is?”
“We know that’s only because your wife doesn’t get along with her family,” Doug said.
“So?”
“So, the only time you come see us is when it’s a foregone conclusion. You have to go somewhere for Christmas.”
“No, we don’t! We don’t even have to celebrate Christmas at all!”
Doug let out one of his wry laughs. When they got to the Range Rover, Carver held the back door open for him so he could put the wine under the seat.
“Thank you,” Doug said stiffly. “What I’m saying is, we don’t see you often enough to have these serious discussions any other time.
I don’t like to get into this stuff on the phone.
We want to talk to you about your future, we’d like to know what your plans are.
We’re both retired, we don’t want to hang around waiting for things that might not happen. ”
“What, you want to move to Florida like Scott’s parents? But you literally already have grandkids tying you here, Dad. You have Chip. I’m genuinely confused.”
Doug shut the back door and turned to him. Carver wobbled on the curb, then leaned against the car. “Chip is more reliant on us than you or your sister,” he said. “For childcare, for advice, for work, sometimes a loan. He would follow us, I think, if we moved.”
Carver looked at him, still confused. “So…”
“So — it’s a lot of house your mother and I have.”
“And?”
“And we might not want to stay there forever. But we don’t know where we would move. And you and your sister have been endlessly putting off kids. You both say you want them, but don’t act like you do.”
“I — Dad, it’s a huge question.”
“It’s really not,” Doug said. “You froze embryos, didn’t you? Why? Just to do it?”
“I —” Carver exhaled. “Dad, I…”
“And,” Doug said, leaning in, “when I look at you, Carver, I do not see a man with the desire to lead a family. I see a man who’s happy to let his wife drag him around by the nose, I see a man who’s very vain about his clothes and hair and weight, I see a man who lets his work stress get the better of him more often than not —”
Carver’s eyes and throat grew hot. “You know what — you were totally obsessed with work the first twelve years of my life —”
“I worked hard to provide so that your mother could feel comfortable cutting back her workload to stay home with you all when you were little. But I came home every single night for dinner. I came to your recitals and games. I helped you with your homework. I was —” Doug’s voice broke a little, and he looked around, but the sidewalk was empty.
“I wasn’t as on top of things with your older brother.
Your mother was alone a lot when he was small.
When you were born, I — I did things differently.
And you have no appreciation for that, I understand, but that’s part of why I worry that you wouldn’t do the same for your children, because you don’t even see the value in it. ”
Now Carver’s eyes were stinging dangerously. He meant to protest, but what slipped out was, “Then maybe you’re right, maybe I shouldn’t have kids. So can we just drop this? Can we just say I’m not having them and drop this?”
Doug stared at him, then heaved a massive sigh and got into the car. Carver took a moment to get a grip on himself before he got in, too.