In the morning, his father kissed the top of his head and asked, “Scrambled or fried?”
The sun was a false beam of light in the kitchen; his father, as usual, was not the man he’d been the night before. Gordon hated this daily confusion, but allowed himself for those brief morning moments to love his father just a bit, even though it was a weakness, even though it was a waste. He couldn’t help himself; he would die if there were no one at all he could love. By evening, though, the man would be an asshole all over again. Sleep washed his mind clean, but the day’s patients, the fuck-up son, the runaway wife and deserting girlfriend, would dirty it once more.
“Fried, please,” Gordon said. Every morning he made the tentative decision to be his father’s son once more.
They talked about Gordon’s day ahead, conversation as seemingly benign as a baked potato. His father slid the eggs out of the pan onto Gordon’s plate and then brought last night’s untouched chicken to the table. He surgically sliced the meat from the breast without ever nicking the bone, peeled off the skin and draped it on his plate. The wishbone was a mysterious bracket waiting to be filled. Runny yolk clogged Gordon’s throat and he couldn’t swallow.
His father looked over at him, grease winking on his upper lip. “Everything okay?” There was something different about the man this morning, his knife poised in the air stilled with fierce intent. “Something you want to talk about?”
Gordon shook his head.
“You do know Ellen doesn’t live in Providence anymore, right?”
Gordon’s voice was strangled. He nodded. He thought he might be sick, the food beginning to rise. It was likely last night’s scotch revisiting.
“Good. Because last night you mentioned looking for her on the river, so I wanted to make sure.”
His father’s words hung over the table, a caution to not confuse desire with reality, because where would that lead you except straight to the loony bin? Gordon knew his father was examining him, but he couldn’t look back. He made a show about not being late for school, and as he left the room he had the chilling sense that his father knew everything about where Ellen had gone, and that he, Gordon, should know nothing, ask nothing, think nothing. Forget everything. But there it all was—the woman gone, his father still there, the unexplained. And the femur he couldn’t stop thinking about. It knocked against his head, his chest. Yes, he was sure his father knew all about the bone. But what about it?
*
After school, he rode across the highway, through downtown, and over to the boulevard. A bike lane had been put in the previous spring, but he still rode provocatively down the center of the street, comforted by the train of irritated drivers stacking up behind him. Let them wait, be late, be pissed. When he went to the maintenance building for his work assignment, a few of the regular guys were standing outside—not by choice, it appeared, given their glares and how they slapped the cold off their biceps. Fat John was waiting for him, his soccer-ball face pulsing with rage.
“You got me into a shitload of trouble with your father last night,” Fat John said, slamming a clipboard against Gordon’s chest. “He ripped me a new one. Called me late and I was asleep. Do I need this? No, I do not need your father on my case.”
“What the hell did I do?” Gordon asked. His chest stung from where it had been whapped, but he’d grown a skin so thick he wondered if anything could ever really penetrate him anymore.
“Didn’t I tell you to keep your mouth shut about that goddamn bone?” Fat John said.
“I just asked him—”
“I was looking out for you before, but I’m done now. I have one piece of advice for you: don’t ask questions and do what you’re told.” When the man’s weight plummeted to the chair, he seemed, for a moment, defeated.
“That’s two pieces of advice,” Gordon mumbled.
He was sure that for once, just once, he hadn’t done anything wrong—or not very much wrong, in any case—but the indictment was simpler and bigger than that: he was wrong. And clearly everyone knew it. He imagined his unattached heart out bobbing on the Seekonk River’s surface, tepidly hopeful air keeping it afloat for a minute before it sank, the people in the loony bin watching the drowning without emotion. Fuck them. He looked at the clipboard. His assignment for the day was to pick up the goose shit on the side of the main entry road. There were always geese hanging out there, convincing the people arriving that they were entering serenity. Convincing people leaving that life was a scene out of a children’s book.