AllFreeNovel
Share Us
nine
Hobbs had never wanted to leave a motel less in his life. He had a room with a double bed, flat pillows that hurt his neck, a sandpaper comforter, an old television stuck on three local channels and a view of the parking lot. But he’d stay here all day if it meant not having to go visit his father. He woke early and did twenty minutes of squats, push-ups and sit-ups—giving up the idea of pull-ups on the bar in the closet at the last second, certain it would snap in half—and was sweaty from head to toe by the time he realized there was no coffeepot in his room.
When Victor knocked on the door, Hobbs was a grumpy mess. He was also shirtless, in nothing but gym shorts.
“You going like that?”
Victor had on jeans and cowboy boots, so wasn’t in much of a position to judge, but Hobbs bit back a sarcastic retort when he saw the two coffee cups in his brother’s hands. “Just give me ten minutes.”
Victor handed over one of the cups, then sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the news running on the television.
Hobbs took a quick shower, then faced himself in the steamy mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, because he’d spent half the night thinking about what it was going to be like seeing his father after twenty years and the other half tossing and turning in sheets rougher than canvas. He suddenly had a vision of Tabitha at the gym, revealing her birthday wish and vowing to make a Badass List. Hobbs decided he might actually need a list of his own to get this done.
“You can do this,” he told himself. “You have to do this.” He’d come all this way. He’d promised Hannah, though not in words. His coming out here, and her knowing about it, counted as a promise, even though he’d rejected her offer to stay at the house like he usually did on the holidays. He didn’t want to stay with Mom and listen to her make excuses for his father, as she’d been making excuses for Pops’s behavior her entire marriage. Hobbs wasn’t down for one single excuse this visit. Not one.
Maybe Victor wasn’t, either. By the time Hobbs made it out of the bathroom, Victor had set his coffee down on the end table and leaned back on the bed, eyes closed. He looked huge sprawled there, as big as Pops used to look, in Hobbs’s memory. Victor didn’t look much like Pops, feature-wise. He had Mom’s high cheekbones and thick lips, something Hobbs might not even think about if it weren’t for the fact that Pops’s thin mouth, pressed into a hard line, was always a clear signal Hobbs better run if he didn’t want to feel the business end of a belt, a fist or whatever might be within reach. Victor had Pops’s curly blond hair, same as Hobbs, but that didn’t register much because Pops had kept his in a buzz cut most of his life.
The size, though. Hobbs remembered Pops being big. So much bigger than he was, anyway. Bigger than everything. Bigger than life. Bigger than hope.
Victor opened up one eye and sighed. “Ready, princess?”
“I guess.”
They drove in silence. Victor, sick of his Triumph after more than two thousand miles in less than a week, had showed up at the motel in his pickup so he and Hobbs could ride together to the hospital. It smelled like mulch and fertilizer. Country music hummed on the radio.
“Is there any chance he died overnight and this will be a quick visit?”
Victor’s eyes didn’t shift from the road. “That the attitude you’re going in with?”
“Seems so.”
Victor’s jaw flexed but he went quiet. Hobbs settled into his seat and tuned out the music. He suddenly became aware of everything that was the same now as it was in his childhood, even though he never noticed those things when he visited over the holidays. The flatness of the landscape, covered in golden terraces of cornfields. A sky that seemed to go on forever, like the ocean. The smell of manure over the same stretches of highway his school buses used to roll down. Hobbs got so wrapped up in this odd time travel that he barely noticed when they pulled into the driveway of the house he grew up in. The place Victor had left long before he’d actually moved out, often living with friends for weeks or months at a time. The house Mom and Hannah had shared ever since.
“What are we doing here?”
“I lied about the hospital.” Victor’s voice was flat as he put the truck in Park at the curb. “Well, hewasat the hospital. When he first got out. But that got too expensive and he’s come here to die. I figured you wouldn’t come if you knew.”
Hobbs took a moment to process that. Pops was right there, inside their childhood home. Right there, somewhere, inside the prairie-style home, with its geometric, straight lines and big picture windows. Hobbs had got to the point where he could come home for holidays and stay in the house because he’d reclassified it in his brain into an entirely new dwelling, one that Mom and Hannah had made their own over the years, finishing the projects Pops had never finished and eradicating the house of everything that was his. They’d put up the flower boxes that he hated and seeded the lawn he’d never mow. They shared an old Chevy four-door to carpool to the hair salon where Hannah worked and the Stop ’n Shop where Mom had become manager.
The house suddenly looked different, now that Hobbs knew Pops was inside. It looked different because it suddenly looked the same, much like the cornfields and the highways that smelled of manure. All the mental changes Hobbs had managed to make over the years had come unraveled. Seeing Pops in a hospital was one thing—that would be neutral ground. Seeing Pops inside this house was giving the old man home-field advantage. Hobbs was fifteen years old again, his gut was churning, and he did not want to see that man, alive or dead. He broke into a fresh sweat.
“Coming?” Victor had stepped out, slammed the door and was now leaning inside the lowered driver’s-side window. The Nebraska air was much colder and drier than Virginia, and Hobbs could feel it in his bones. He was now sweating profusely overtop of cold bones, which gave the illusion of being sick.
Despite that, Hobbs got out of the truck. His feet felt like lead as he followed Victor up the driveway. The water in the birdbaths that flanked either side of the stairs had a thin sheen of ice on top and the welcome mat was muddy and smashed. They stepped inside the living room, which had the same worn beige carpet that had been shampooed over and over for years but never changed. Hobbs had a fleeting thought on how much dirt and blood and dust must be ground into the fibers from all the years. Right this second, Hobbs was walking on dirt from his shoes from twenty years ago. Worse, he was probably walking on top of his own blood, shed at the hands of the man who was now dying inside.
Hobbs stopped short, the door barely shut behind him. He’d expected to have more time to brace himself, but apparently, Pops’s sickbed had been set up on the pull-out sofa, because that was where the old man lay, right there in the living room, facing the picture window that overlooked the front yard. Hobbs’s first thought was that he was glad Mom hadn’t let the old man back into her bedroom, for any reason, after all this time.
His second thought wasWho is that guy?
If he squinted, Hobbs could see it. The thin, mean lips and the swollen nose with broken capillaries. He had the same buzz cut, but his hair was now snow-white. But Pops was small. A much smaller man than Hobbs remembered. His chest was sunken beneath the open neck of a hospital gown, a patch of wild white hair growing there like a bird’s nest. The one exposed hand, at rest near the patch, was lumpy and arthritic.
Hobbs walked right over and stood over his dying father, without even looking for Mom and Hannah, whom he hadn’t seen in almost a year. Pops’s eyes were closed, his breathing coming in short, ragged gasps. “You look like hell. You sound like hell,” Hobbs said, the sweat beneath his armpits drying and his throat loosening as he spoke. “You aren’t so big now, are you?” He hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He wondered now if Pops had ever been as big as he seemed. Had he ever been as big as Victor, or was that just the illusion of a scared, small fifteen-year-old’s mind? “I’d like to see you try to hit me now. But you can’t even raise a hand, can you?” It was like he couldn’t stop himself.
Pops’s eyelids, shot with broken capillaries, fluttered open. Hobbs kept himself from flinching, from moving. Hell, he even kept himself from breathing. He waited. Would Pops recognize his youngest son? Victor had said he was suffering severe dementia, though people with memory loss typically retained many of their oldest memories. Victor had also said that Pops’s dementia was so severe he was forgetting how to swallow, so maybe he didn’t remember anyone at all. In a hospital, he’d probably be hooked up to all sorts of crap to keep him going, but here in the living room, in the very spot he used to sit and stare at TV, his feet surrounded by a shameless array of empty beer and liquor bottles, there was nothing to help him. He was alive on sheer will at this point.
“Do you feel helpless and scared?” Hobbs said, once Pops’s eyes were clearly locked in his. “Lying there like that? Sick and dying?” At sixty-five years old, Pops looked ancient, an object of his own self-destruction. Hobbs leaned in a little closer, searching the old man’s eyes. He smelled like rot, but Hobbs stayed put. He wanted to see it, if it was still there. That glimmer in Pops’s eye. The one he’d get just before he struck: a glimmer of sentience.
Hobbs probably couldn’t describe it well if someone asked, but it was a moment when, based on gut instinct alone, Hobbsknewthat Pops knew what he was doing. He might be drunk, as people liked to say, because it made them feel better to give Pops an excuse. People liked excuses for cruelty because then they felt better, safer, more in control. Cruelty was more explainable if liquor was involved, if liquor was thereason.
