Family Affair (20 page)

“How dare you spirit them away like a thief, even after I made a whole plan with your mom!” she screams, throwing her arm out in my mother’s direction but getting only a frightened look in return. This is the scariest any of us has seen her—and for me, that’s saying something. “I did a rémoulade! I had boccie balls!”

“That’s nuts!” I shout back, then glance around, hoping no one will make a joke about our afternoon excursion. No one does. When I look back at Layla, I start wondering whether she’s carrying any of the boccie balls in her purse, and I keep a good distance just in any case.

“You were grabbing a bucket of KFC. It was no big deal,” Trish interjects, looking apologetic.

“So I lied,” Layla hisses. “It was a
huge
deal. Two kinds of chardonnay, chilled! Cloth napkins! Napkin rings!”

“Well, Mom and Dad could have spoken up and—”

“Of course they didn’t,” Layla says in disgust. “They moved right through fear into the Stockholm syndrome. Otherwise, they’d have ratted you out to those cops by now for parent-napping.”

The two troopers are still a distance away, watching. I’m sure they were hoping for something tidy, for everyone to apologize and go home. I was hoping for the same thing. There’s a guy cop with short brown hair and a caterpillar mustache—a giant of a man you’d think twice before crossing in any circumstance—and a lady cop who’s really quite pretty, projecting smirking authority with her sex-fantasy-tight uniform and dirty-blond hair tucked up into her hat.

The guy—Officer Paul Kramer, I see from his name placard—steps up to my car, watching Layla and me dubiously. It’s almost dusk, and he shines a flashlight into the backseat to see my mom, Scott, and Trish. They stare back at him with a mix of disbelief and amusement. The female cop approaches next. Both troopers then stare at me, looking as though their patience is waning.

“Officer,” I say, “this is a huge misunderstanding. These are my parents, my brother, my sister … my family. This was a family outing.”

“True,” Trish says. “Breakfast was nice. The kidnapping didn’t enter the picture until afterward. That’s when things got really
nutty.”

I shake my head and glower at her, and she smiles.

Kramer is clearly an old hand at family conflict, so he knows enough to look past the verbal shoving match between children, whatever their ages. “He’s your son—and him, too? And she’s your daughter?” he asks my mom and dad, shining his light around at each of us, the true Fosters.

My dad speaks up. “Sorry at this moment to say it, Officer, but yes, they’re mine. Ours.”

“This is … not usual,” my mom says, looking horrified, which drives my humiliation further home. “They’re usually so much better behaved.”

Scott groans. He tumbles over Trish, flings the back door open, and tears off toward a row of bushes with his hand pressed tight over his mouth.

“We’ve got a runner,” Kramer barks to his partner, and he stumbles backward a little and fumbles for his nightstick before giving chase.

“He’s not a runner,” Trish shouts helpfully. “He’s just got diarrhea or something.”

Sure enough, Scott manages to just barely make it to where the bushes begin before he bends at an inhuman angle and throws
up, hard. His arms are raised like airplane wings, steadying him, and again he lets loose. After a few coughs and spits, the worst is over. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve, looks at the sleeve in disgust, then turns to Officer Kramer, who has his nightstick in hand.

“Don’t shoot!” he says, waving his hands wildly. Then, after spitting one more time, he leans over, spent. “I just had too much cider.”

Kramer holsters the nightstick. “No crime in that,” he admits, wincing at the smell.

Agreed
. But a crime has taken place here, and my ex is responsible.

“I’d like to report a kidnapping,” I say to Officer Kramer, who’s returning from watching Scott leave the contents of his stomach in a row of bushes.

“Who was kidnapped?” he asks.

“Them,” I say, pointing to Brett’s car, where Ginny, Bill, and Trish are staring at us. “And him,” I add, pointing to Scott.

“Good news,” he replies. “Case solved. There they are. Looks like they’re fine.”

“No, you don’t
understand,”
I say. “The older lady, she’s my
mother
. Well, not literally. Technically, they’re all in-laws, but it feels much closer than that.”

The cop is staring at me, waiting for a punch line. He sighs and then begins speaking into the little radio mic on his shoulder.

“Female, approximately …”

“Twenty-seven,” I suggest helpfully.

“Twenty-nine!” Brett interjects. “Twenty-freakin’-nine and not one second younger!”

“Female, approximately… twenty-eight, initially reporting a two-oh-seven—”

“Is that kidnapping?” I interject. “Because this was
definitely
a
two-oh-seven. He’ll say he was just going for a nice drive with the family, but this is a two-oh-seven all the way, and don’t waste money on a trial, because he’s guilty!”

“For God’s sake, Layla, we were on the way home!” Brett shouts. “You didn’t have to go all O.J. on us!”

“You
stole
them!” I scream, then wheel toward the cop. “What’s the code for human trafficking?” I lean toward his shoulder mic so the dispatcher can hear. “It’s a two-oh-seven in progress—and the suspect is a complete friggin’ jerk!”

The trooper shoots me an angry glare and lets go of the talk button on the mic. “Ma’am, I’m the one who gets to talk into the radio. Do that again and I’ll tell them I’ve got a three-ninety, possibly a fifty-one-fifty, and I’m bringing her in.”

I look questioningly to the lady cop, and she kindly tells me, “Drunk, possible mental case.” She leans closer. “Don’t worry, he knows you’re a ten-ninety F-one.”

I give her the same bewildered look.

“Domestic dispute, no violence alleged.”

Watching the two-ring (Brett and Layla) circus unfold and collapse before my eyes is hardly fun anymore. Though I love them both dearly, I pride myself on detachment. For instance: Right now I’d like to detach each of their heads from their bodies and kick them out onto the freeway.

I mean,
honestly
. Sure, they got married young. Sure, they had sizable differences that only revealed themselves well into their time together. Sure, Layla became too dependent on us as a surrogate family and forgot that a traditional marriage is still one man and one woman, or something like that, but certainly not one woman, a guy, his brother and sister, and his borderline-elderly parents. Sure, Brett glommed on to someone who worshipped him, who basically bought all his shit, and then practically loaned him the capital to go replenish his inventory. Sure, all of those things. But at the end of the day, they’re both
killer
people—two smart, attractive, accomplished professionals, both reduced to trying to get each other arrested.

To tell the truth, I’m slightly cold, tired as a six-year-old after one of those birthday parties where parents rent an inflatable moon jumper, and sick to my stomach from watching Scott hurl
up the afternoon’s festivities (also like a kid coming off a moon jumper). Plus, I’m disgusted by this spectacle of watching two people try to overcome loving each other, two people who I think probably still do. Though you can’t tell from their foaming mouths and glistening fangs.

“A ten-ninety F-one. No violence.” The lady cop looks at me sideways, then at Brett. “And you’re going to keep it that way, right?”

“I’m letting him off easy, that’s for sure,” I reply.

Brett is staring with disgust at Scott, who continues to stick his tongue out and spit into the dirt near the bushes. “Ugh, tell you what,” he suggests to me. “Take this one off my hands, and I’ll pay
you
the ransom.”

With the help of the officers, who apparently feel obligated to see this silliness resolved, we hash out a plan. Scott and Bill will go home with Brett, and I’ll take Ginny and Trish. The women all seem so tired that they’d just as willingly go to jail to get some rest.

A little chatter comes across the police radio. Something more pressing has come up, and I feel particularly embarrassed about wasting the cops’ time. They get back in their car, but not before the lady trooper turns to me. “I feel a little jealous of people like you,” she says. “It takes a really big love to make anyone that crazy. Or a lot of crystal meth.”

And with that, they’re gone.

Singlehood (or is it singledom?) is actually kind of sweet. When I first moved out, some of the benefits of living alone occurred to me. One was that I hadn’t slept alone for the better part of ten years, other than occasional angry layovers on the living-room couch or that horrible mattress in the guest bedroom. (What can I say? We didn’t get many guests, and they were usually just my unwelcome friends sleeping one off.) That first Sunday I woke up not because someone’s knee banged into my ass or a hand lazily covered my mouth and nose and stopped my breathing but because my body had gotten enough sleep, and I could watch football in my underwear until midafternoon without someone ragging on me to “at least put on some pants or a T-shirt.” Jesus, could I now live my life free, as the Founding Fathers intended? Damn straight. And just about now I was beginning to hit my stride. Any minute.

At UCCC, as you might guess, we don’t cast a very wide recruiting net. Not when we can’t offer football scholarships to entice people. Mainly, we stick to recruits within the surrounding region, a car ride away. Rarely, there’s an overnight. And when that’s not happening, when Coach Wells and I aren’t visiting high
schools and eating casseroles with kids and their parents, and when the team’s not practicing or playing or reviewing film, I’ve got all the time in the world. Now that the wife and all related running around has been eliminated from the picture, suddenly the world is my oyster. I can catch up on all the
Entourage
and
Two and a Half Men
I can shake a stick at. Better yet, I can stop putting off my brilliant idea for body-tight athletic apparel that regular people can actually afford.

Or, rather than trying to lose myself in work, I can quit trying to give myself a guilt trip and just wind down from a fairly momentous event in my life. I can call over a buddy—whichever one of my supposed lifelong friends isn’t caged at home for the night by his wife in a way that’s surely not nearly as interesting as it sounds.

Significant others. Wives and husbands. How people change when they become a unit. What a person did when they were single just doesn’t happen afterward. A guy or girl just can’t do all the stuff they used to. They go without. They
sacrifice
. When I think about how I was when I was independent, self-sufficient … Come to think of it, was I ever alone, independent, self-sufficient? From as early as I had a driver’s license, I was with Layla.

Well, no more. I’m back to being something I never was: on my own. And you know what? It’s a little slow-paced sometimes, but it’s nice. It’s really an opportunity more than anything. Now’s my time to shine. Not glow—not like one of those green necklaces kids wear at fireworks fairs. I’m going to
explode in glory
, like the fireworks themselves.

I explain this to Jared, who’s over watching a Monday-night game. He didn’t react much to the stuff I told him about the walnut picking and the “kidnapping,” but now he says, “You go, man. Don’t let anybody piss on your flame. More important … you got anything to eat in this house? Watching football makes me hungry. I’m like Pablo’s dog.”

“Pavlov’s dog?” I correct him. I remember at least this from Psychology 101.

“Him, too,” he says. Then he starts talking about the mudballs Layla used to make. They were some sort of Rice Krispies, chocolate morsel, butterscotch, peanut, and marshmallow combination. Neither of us wants to go into superlatives, because it’ll make us both miss them more, but we’re on the same wavelength: They were unbefrickinglievable. They even overcome my annoyance at her.

He sighs.

“Don’t say it,” I say.

“I’m not,” he replies. “Any mention of the mudball would just bring us both down.” He sighs again. “But …”

“Now you’re going off all John Wayne Bobbitt on me.”

“What?” he asked.

“Half-cocked,” I explain—but it’s already too late, because the idea is already planted in both our minds.

My rush to the kitchen yields a bag of pretzels—or what was a bag of pretzels but now is mostly salt. Being the good host, I offer it to Jared first.

“You know, when these go empty, you can just recycle them,” he remarks.

We sit in silence until the next commercial. It’s a life insurance ad.

“I’ll make the fuckin’ mudballs,” I cave at last. So I get up and run to the front door before he can talk me out of going to the supermarket.

In fact, he’s thinking just the opposite. “And don’t waste time chatting with some floozy,” he says.

“Well,” I say, not missing even a beat, “if I see your girlfriend there, I’ve gotta at least say hi. And can she check for my socks in her sock drawer?”

The door slams on some reply beginning with “F—”

There’s an old episode of
The Twilight Zone
where a man with a hideously deformed face lives as an outcast until he boards a spaceship and gets sent to a planet where everyone is like him. Even though Rod Serling, that weird music, the black-and-white pictures, and the bongos always creeped me out, this moment always made me cry. The pain and dislocation of a solitary soul wandering the world, looking out through a hideously deformed face … It’s vividly real, particularly now.

How to describe my oppressive feeling of dejection, rejection, and swollen-eyed reflection? It’s like walking through a steady drizzle, but it’s a drizzle that’s not cleansing like water… more like tree sap. It seeps into my ears, and I can’t hear what people are saying. They speak to me, but it doesn’t register. I’m literally moving more slowly. I’m being careful not to cross streets if Don’t Walk is even flashing, because I’ll never make it in time.