2 #2
Thank god that’s all I have time to get out before her phone goes off. “Ooh, I’ve gotta answer this. Text me, kay?” She plants another kiss on my cheek before turning away to answer her phone.
Driving is another entry on the long list of things that are weird now that I’m back in Riverside. When I lived in the centipede house in Ecuador, one of the guys I roomed with had a car, and I’d borrow it sometimes, but other than that, until a month ago, I hadn’t driven since I was eighteen.
One of the first things I’d done when I’d gotten over my jetlag was get my driver’s license reinstated. If you live in Riverside and don’t drive, your only option beyond however far you can walk is the once-a-day drop-off and pick-up the county bus service makes on its way through town.
Along with his rundown hoarder’s delight of a house that he’d in turn inherited from his grandparents, Dad left me his Chevy. It’s exactly the sort of truck that three quarters of Riverside drives. Huge, dingy, at least a decade older than I am, and as loud and smelly as they come.
Fortunately, it’s the same monstrosity I learned to drive in, so the adjustment hasn’t been as bad as it could have been.
And of course, having a truck has come in useful for the dozens of dump runs I’ve taken, wholesale tossing out most of the cluttered mess that filled every room of the house, along with the useless, broken shit Dad kept in his shop that might come in handy someday.
The two or three trips to the dump I have planned tomorrow should get the last of it off my hands.
When I’d gotten the call telling me that Dad had died and left me the house, along with his surprisingly solid savings, I’d thought it was a scam.
Yeah, pretty much all of my memories of him included a half-full beer can in his hand, and the high school football star’s body he must have had before I was born was long since lost to a resulting beer gut, but Dad was only nineteen years older than me.
And even if he really had dropped dead of a heart attack at forty-four, would he actually have left me anything?
Growing up, he’d never been the warm, fuzzy kind of parent. Unlike the dads of some of the other kids I’d gone to school with though, he’d actually given a shit, even though more often than not, I’d wished he hadn’t.
Dad was in his senior year of high school when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant.
He was the football team captain and had a full ride scholarship to a state school to play college ball.
The ticket out of Riverside he’d always dreamed of.
Instead, the fall of what would have been his freshman year of college found him with an eighteen-year-old wife, a newborn baby neither of them wanted, and a life thoroughly stuck in the town he’d been determined to leave behind.
Maybe he would have been the one to leave if my mom hadn’t beaten him to it, but by the time I was two, it was just Dad and me.
The message drilled through my head as I grew up was that my one and only responsibility was to get the fuck out of Riverside and do something with myself. By which my dad meant follow in the footsteps he’d been cheated of.
The way he saw it, football, or some other sport as a second-best option, was my ticket out, just like it had been his, and he was going to do everything in his power to see that I got it.
What he would have thought of my version of getting out of Riverside if it hadn’t been for what happened when I was fifteen, I’m not sure.
Maybe he would have made his peace with the fact that, while I hadn’t vicariously fulfilled his athletic dreams, I had at least gotten just about as far from our backwoods town as it’s possible to get.
That I’d set a goal and made it happen and had full and unfettered control of my own life.
The thing I think he most wanted but never had.
I’ll never know though. By the time I made that a reality, any relationship the two of us ever had was long since gone.
It's not that what happened that day ten and a half years ago was the one and only event that made everything between Dad and me blow up and go to hell. The two of us had been on thin ice for years; me tiptoeing around his expectations while keeping as much of my real self hidden from him as possible, him pushing harder and harder the clearer it became that I wasn’t shaping up to fulfil his one-track vision of success.
The fact that I knew the names of every tree and bird and mushroom and could happily spend an entire day out wandering the forest behind our house was all well and good when I was eight, but by the time middle school rolled around and I didn’t even make the JV football team, it had become a failing.
When everything between the two of us exploded, I’d thought it was entirely mutual.
I spent the next three years saying as little to the man I lived with as possible, staying as far away from him as I could.
If I’d had anywhere else to go, believe me, I’d have gone.
And from what I could tell, he’d wanted as little to do with me as I’d wanted to do with him.
So when I’d found out three months ago that he was dead, I hadn’t known what to do with that knowledge.
I hadn’t known what to do with the fact that he’d left me his house. All his savings. His truck.
I hadn’t known what to do with the fact that he still cared about me.
Even less had I known what to do with the crushing realization that, even if it didn’t change anything that happened between us or make any of what he said that day any better, underneath it all, I still cared about him.
That, fuck, I still loved him, no matter how much I also still hated him.
The squeal of brakes and the sudden stink of burnt rubber jolts me out of my thoughts just as thoroughly as the way the seatbelt snaps against my chest, jerking me back into the seat.
It takes me a good several gasping breaths to realize that I didn’t hit anything, just reflexively slammed on my brakes to keep from ploughing into the silver SUV that’s halfway through the four-way stop I didn’t stop for.
Even though I didn’t hit it, the front end of the Chevy made it far too close for comfort to the other vehicle’s driver side door.
My heart’s still going crazy in my chest and my sweat slick hands are shaking on the steering wheel as I look up from the too-small gap between the vehicles to see the driver of the SUV gaping at me out the window.
For one crazy, free-falling moment, all I can do is stare. Because the face that’s staring back at me is so much like the one that’s haunted me for the last ten and a half years that I almost call out his name.
And then my adrenaline blurred vision comes into sharper focus, and I’m able to see past the glasses resting on the short, slightly upturned nose and beyond the soft roundness of the face enough to realize that, not only is it not him, the SUV driver I’ve nearly just killed is a woman.
Glaring fit to kill, she gives her short, blue-streaked haired head a hard, disgusted shake before flipping me the bird as she uses her other hand to crank her wheel hard enough to skirt around my truck.
As an irritable horn sounds from the car at the stop sign behind me, I shakily put the truck back in gear and slowly accelerate out of the intersection.
Charlie Lancaster is not in Riverside. He’s somewhere out in the wide world, and if he remembers me at all, it’s as the douchebag who couldn’t be bothered to keep a promise to the best friend he ever had.