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Christopher lives up to his good entrance. He’s nice and interesting and not at all a douchebag. And he’s clearly out of his head crazy about Ginger, which is a big plus. Rex has turned a little shy and isn’t saying much. Ginger and Christopher are doing most of the talking, and Patty Griffin is playing in the background.
I had a drink before I ate half of my sandwich and another afterward. I’m finishing my third now and I can feel the tingling in my fingers and the looseness in my joints that says the Bulleit has hit its mark. I hand Rex the other half of my sandwich and head off what I’m sure would have been his protests that I need to eat with a head shake.
“I can’t,” I say, and settle in with my drink. Ginger and Christopher are on the couch and Rex is sitting in the armchair. I’m sitting on the floor, elbows on the coffee table (read: hand near the bottle), but if I lean back a little, I can rest against Rex’s shins.
Patty sings “When It Don’t Come Easy,” and I pour another drink and lean back against Rex’s legs, closing my eyes. This song kills me. Rex spreads his knees, so I’m leaning against the chair, and I rest my head against his knee. I have one arm around his calf before I even realize it, like his leg is a stuffed animal or something that I’m trying to cuddle with. Patty sings “Florida,” and all I can hear is her voice, like sand tied up in honey and light.
Against my closed eyes, the funeral plays over and over, the coffin lowering into the grave somehow morphing into Colin hitting the dirt when I bore him to the ground.
Suddenly, my stomach lurches as a memory hits me, shaken loose by who knows what combination of grief and booze. I’m ten and Colin is sixteen, a junior in high school. It’s the winter after Sam moved out and Colin is in a perpetually bad mood. He lifts weights in the back of the shop every spare minute and if you interrupt him, god help you.
One afternoon, there’s a snowstorm and the elementary schools close early, though the rest stay open. My dad’s garage isn’t open full-time yet, so he’s at a shift at one a few miles from our house, so I can’t call and have him get me. I trudge home around noon, the snow turning to ice, and go in through the garage so I can leave my iced-over snow things there to dry. When I go into the kitchen, I hear the radio on in what was Sam and Colin’s room, which Colin now has to himself, so I go push open the door, thinking Colin left the radio on, since he should be in school.
Colin’s lying on the bed, his pillow over his face. He’s still wearing his shoes and one is untied. Thinking he’d fallen asleep, I walk over and pull the pillow off so he doesn’t get too hot. When I do, his eyes open to slits and I can smell the stink of my father’s rum. I force myself to look at the memory closer, because the part I remember clearly—Colin slapping me, telling me never to come into his room, and then going back to sleep—isn’t, I don’t think, the point. The point is the bottle of pain pills my dad was prescribed after he slipped a disc in his back. The point is that it’s half empty and Colin is drooling drunk and buried in his bed.
My eyes fly open. The record is over and Ginger is putting on another.
Did Colin try and kill himself? I want to talk to him. I want to ask him a hundred questions, but I can’t imagine reaching across the chasm and trying to actually communicate with him. How can I hate someone this much and suddenly feel so sorry for them? How can the person who made me so miserable suddenly be the only person who might understand what it was like to grow up in my family?
I gulp down the rest of the bourbon.
It feels like everything is moving very slowly. The room seems fragmented: squares with pictures in them and corners and the soft square that’s the bed. Then it all blurs.
“Daniel,” Rex says softly. I realize I’ve got a death grip on his leg.
“Daniel,” Rex says again, his voice near my ear.
“Huh?” I tilt my head up to look toward him. It’s like I don’t even recognize him, it’s so shocking to see him in the context of Ginger’s chair.
“Come here, love,” he says, and he lifts me into his lap effortlessly.
But why? Then I realize Ginger didn’t put the record on and Christopher is looking at me with a sad expression. Why are they all staring at me? Aside from the fact that I’m a grown-ass man who just got hauled into someone’s lap. Rex looks strange. Smeary.
