Lamentation (5 page)

Early Saturday morning, most people still in bed following the storm, the streets empty, nothing open yet besides the Dunkin’ Do-nuts and gas stations, the town perfectly peaceful, I tooled freshly plowed streets, tapping out a beat on the dash and feeling pretty damn all right. I didn’t give my brother another thought. Which was how I’d managed to deal with him all these years. Out of sight, out of mind.

On weekends when I was a kid, my dad would go into town for his morning paper and bring us back a dozen donuts. A time-honored
tradition. It was time I started building memories like that for Aiden. I flipped a bitch and circled back to the Dunkin’ Donuts.

“You know I don’t want him eating sugar,” Jenny said, snatching the box from me.

“One donut won’t kill him.”

“No, it won’t. But refined sugar is not good for his development. It’s been linked to depression.”

“Depression? He’s not even two yet. Where’d you hear that?”

“In the baby books. You should try reading one sometime.”

“Enough shit hasn’t gone wrong for him to be depressed yet.”

“Fine. But I still don’t want to have to deal with a hyperactive child all day.”

“You don’t have to. I thought I could bundle him up, take him down to the Little People’s Playground, play in the snow a bit.”

“Fine,” she said again, “but I
still
don’t want him eating sugar.”

“Fine,” I said, mimicking her, prying the box from her hands and flipping open the top. “You eat them then.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Like I can eat a donut.”

I grabbed a plump, powdered jelly, moving toward her. “Open up. You’re looking pretty damn thin.”

Jenny flushed and started backing up, lips cracking a smile. She’d answered the door in an old Pink Floyd T-shirt of mine, sleep-tossed hair, those long legs showing underneath, so smooth and touchable, bare feet tiptoeing on linoleum. This was when she looked best in my opinion, first thing in the morning, all rumpled, no makeup, no fuss, just-rolled-out-of-bed, perfect.

“Come on, Jenny. One bite.” I cocked my arm.

She started batting at me. “Knock it off, Jay,” she said, trying to look stern, but giggling. “I mean it.”

I had her retreated in the corner, pretending I was going to force-feed a jelly donut like those obnoxious couples do with wedding cake. I was kidding, of course, but I got her laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. Which made me start to laugh too.

I dipped and darted like I planned to grab her waist and pull her in, but she jerked away and slapped my hand, then held a finger to her mouth and pointed at the bedroom door, which I took to mean that Brody was still asleep.

He’d walked in when we were on the phone last night when he should’ve been at work. Maybe he called in sick or was sleeping one off. Maybe he didn’t work second shift anymore. What the hell did I care?

Hearing us carrying on, Aiden came running out of the living room.

“Da da! Da da!”

With his shaggy brown hair and big brown eyes, he looked just like his mother. Jenny reprimanded him to be quiet. But I didn’t give a damn if we disrupted Brody’s sleep. I scooped him up and hoisted him high, gave him a big squeeze and then lifted his shirt for a belly fart. I didn’t need any baby book to tell me belly farts always made a kid laugh. It’s like Dad 101.

As soon as I set him down, Aiden grabbed my finger and dragged me into the living room, where his mother had him set up with breakfast—scrambled eggs and sausage cut into extra tiny pieces—which he’d slopped all over the carpet in front of the TV.

“Oh, sugar’s bad,” I teased her, “but TV’s okay?”

“You try watching him without a distraction once in a while.” She flashed a pained smirk. “Especially when Mommy drank too much last night.”

I slowly shook my head, feigning disappointment. “Since when do you drink so much you’re hungover?”

“When you don’t do it often, trust me, it doesn’t take much.”

Aiden yanked my hand to sit down and watch cartoons, which weren’t at all like the cartoons I remembered. I grew up with the classics. Tom and Jerry. Bugs Bunny. Popeye. Actual cartoons. These were done by a computer or something. Everything was computers these days. God, I hated the damn things. Not that my view on the subject mattered to Aiden; these were the only cartoons he’d ever known, and he was transfixed, fuzzy glow from the screen flickering over his tiny features, eyes entranced, lit up wide.

I turned back. Jenny hovered over us. She had a big smile on her face. I was lying there, cockeyed, unable to get up or even make myself more comfortable because my boy wanted me there like that, and anytime I tried to move, he’d start shouting, “Down down,” which made Jenny tell him to be quiet or he’d wake up Brody, which caused me to laugh, and Jenny said to stop because it was only encouraging him to be bratty, but she was laughing a little too.

“What the hell’s going on?” Brody asked, rubbing his eyes. He stood shirtless. Badly drawn tattoos adorned his shoulders and flanks. The long hair that he usually had tied off in a ponytail hung loose, framing his sharp, angular features, face coated in scruff. “I’m trying to sleep.” Then he saw me. “Oh, hey, Jay. Didn’t know you was here.” He said it nice as he could, considering we’d just woken him up.

Brody snagged his smokes off the table, but before he could light one, Jenny shot him a look. He dropped the pack and crept up behind her, throwing his arms around her neck, kissing her as she squirmed. We locked eyes momentarily. Then he slunk back into the kitchen.

I pried myself from Aiden with a hair tousle and another promise I knew I wouldn’t keep and followed them. Brody scratched himself under the old pair of blue jeans he had on. He flipped open the donuts, sifting through them like a fat secretary on hump day, selecting a chubby custard and clamping it in his teeth; a gob of cream squirted out the side. When he stretched over the stove for a box of cereal, I got a better look at some of those tattoos. The usual badass wannabe assortment of skulls and crosses, hula girls and she-devils. One in particular made me curious, though. A big black panther. Clearly a cover-up.

When Brody had hooked up with the mother of my kid, I’d felt compelled to dig around. I learned that he used to ride with a motorcycle club back in the day. I didn’t know a lot about motorcycle clubs, but from what I understood they weren’t something you could quit like a factory job. I would’ve been worried for Jenny and Aiden’s safety had I not met the guy and thought he was such a tool. Plus, it’s tough to base anything on small town rumors. The long hair and ink, the motorcycle and tough-guy posturing? I considered him to be more a cliché than the
genuine article. Brody had stopped riding altogether after he slipped on a patch of ice last winter and broke a few ribs. I had a hunch that the big panther on his biceps might’ve been concealing the club’s insignia, but I had no way of knowing for sure.

In the middle of the room, Jenny sat at the small, round kitchen table, hands cupped around a mug of coffee, which she kept blowing on even though no steam rose. She wouldn’t look at me. Brody kept shooting me glances. I could tell something was up.

“What’s going on?” I finally asked, after I’d had enough of the eyebrow twitching and panning back and forth.

“You tell him,” Brody said, splashing milk into a giant bowl of Cap’n Crunch, practically tittering with smarminess.

“Tell me what?”

Jenny still wasn’t looking at me. She wasn’t looking at him, either. Instead, she stared out the window at a blue jay perched on a power line dripping icicles, and continued to blow on coffee that wasn’t hot.

Brody shook his head with an overly familiar grin, as if suddenly we were part of the same fraternity of Man that women would never quite understand.

“Got me a foreman’s job down in Rutland,” he said. “Start in March.”

“You’re moving?”

I asked Jenny this, but Brody was the one who answered.

“Gonna look for a house down there,” he said. “As in, like,
buy
.” He leaned against the stove, slurping cereal like a twelve-year-old. “No more of this renting shit, Jay. Like pissing money down the drain, I’m tellin’ ya. Get a house, pay that shit off, and then you actually
own
something, y’know? Get some equality. Something to call your own.”

I didn’t bother correcting the dumb shit that he meant “equity.”

He pointed his spoon at me, milk dribbling down his chin. “That’s how you do it,” he said through a mumbled mouthful. “Ya hear me, bro?”

“When were you planning on telling me?” I asked her.

“I just found out,” she said, finally turning my way.

Brody let go a laugh. “Stop busting his balls! I told her, like, a month ago.”

“You said it was a
possibility
,” Jenny said over her shoulder, lips curled in a mean snarl, a look I knew all too well. “You didn’t tell me you actually
got
it till last night.” She spun to shoot me that same mean glare. “And
you
didn’t stop by until this morning, so you have no right.”

Aiden came running in, tugging at my hand to go play with him some more, and it made me feel like an even bigger asshole to have to shoo him away, but my heart was thumping deep in my chest. He didn’t need much encouragement; even little kids can tell when something isn’t right.

Rutland was easily three, four hours away, and if I couldn’t get over here now as often as I would’ve liked, with them just a couple miles down the road, when would I ever see my boy? Maybe it had been our own fault that Jenny and I couldn’t work things out, but this was going to affect Aiden forever. I was his father, and she hadn’t even told me. Instead, I’d had to suffer the indignity of hearing it from Brody.

Brody kept eyeing me, smirking as he slurped. It sounds weird, but despite the fact he was sleeping with my girl and helping to raise my kid, up until that point, I hadn’t even thought enough of Brody to hate him. He wasn’t a threat; he was just some dopey guy that Jenny was with because she didn’t want to be alone. A rebound fuck.

Jenny stared up at me. She was still trying to look angry, but it wasn’t working. The rims of her big brown eyes welled. I could see she wanted me to say something.

I pulled the envelope from my coat pocket and slapped it on the table. “That should catch me up,” I said.

The Little People’s Playground sat perched on a hill next to the old police station, which had once been Ashton’s elementary school back in the ’50s, a dilapidated, brown brick building that now served as the town’s Community Center, where they coordinated Easter egg hunts and sign-ups for youth sports. In the summer, we’d pedal our bicycles there and climb the hillside to a secret fort—an empty utility shed that had been gutted by a fire—where this squirrelly, cross-eyed kid, Arnie Perkins, stashed his father’s old
Playboy
magazines in a rusted coffee tin. The fort was less than a football field away from the police station, tucked in the dense cover of musky New England foliage. We used to think we were so cool, real outlaws sitting up there, puffing away on stolen cigarettes, staring at dirty magazines as the late afternoon thunderheads would roll in.

Over the years, local businesses like McDonald’s and Chester Mc-Gee’s had donated old playground equipment to the park. There wasn’t a lot for kids to do in Ashton. The nearest Chuck E. Cheese was three counties away. The LPP wasn’t too exciting. Merry-go-round and teeter-totter, swing set, slide, a maze constructed from discarded tractor-trailer tires. I always enjoyed bringing Aiden there. I remembered my dad taking me when I was small. Felt like the memories I had of him faded by the day.

When we pulled up, there were so many kids there I thought they must’ve cancelled school. Then I remembered it was Saturday.

Trying not to let my stress affect Aiden, I did my best to remain upbeat, acting silly. A toddler doesn’t need to see his dad falling apart. I’m the one who’s supposed to have this shit figured out. On the way
over we were singing nursery rhymes. I had him giggling, but honestly, that probably had more to do with the sugar from the lollipop I’d given him. His face was sticky with cherry. I kept a stash of candy in my glove compartment. His mother wouldn’t approve, but she wasn’t around, was she? And I wasn’t one of those fathers who bought into all that new-age parenting bullshit. No sugar. No TV. A forced regimen from the crib through college. My parents didn’t do that with us, and we turned out all right. Well, at least one of us did.

The snow that had fallen was the wet, heavy kind—perfect for snowballs and stacking—and several snowmen, in various states of construction, dotted the knoll. Two small boys, a few years older than Aiden, played on the merry-go-round, and he instantly gravitated to them. It’s funny watching how cliques form, even at age two. The boys were bigger and therefore cooler, and Aiden wanted in with the “in” crowd. Trying to fit in with the cool kids would never change.

They were good with him, helping him up, not being too rough. I figured they probably had a little brother at home. I scanned the grounds for a parent, but didn’t see one, which was hardly a surprise. Ashton, despite the squalor of the Turnpike and truck stop, was still the kind of town where you didn’t have to lock your doors. Where you could forget your wallet on top of a gas pump at the Mobil station, and it’d be there when you went back. Where you didn’t have to hover over your kids, and could let them be kids and play unsupervised in a park.