“You gave me a twenty.”
Your father looks like he’s gonna explode and he turns his attention to the shitty little kids, as if they need him right now, which they don’t.
You pout. “The candy apples were like five fucking dollars a pop.”
Now your dad gives a fuck and he chastises you. “Guinevere, honey, come on.”
“Fine,” you say, so brittle you might break. You pull both your hands out of your muff and the muff hits the pavement and you start fishing around in that giant Prada bag and your stepmother picks up one of her unimpressive children and lodges the kid on her hip.
“Prada,” she says. “Did you get that on eBay?”
“It was a gift,” you say, and sometimes you do tell the truth. You hand her two dollars and she takes it and you look up at your dad.
“Can we go?”
THE Dramamine I bought in the gift shop isn’t working and the ride back is worse than the ride out. I’ve spent the bulk of it in this tin can of a bathroom and the colonial Connecticunts are all banging down the door because they’re all sick from too much food and fun. And this beard itches and this boat rocks and this toilet won’t flush. I jiggle the handle. Some asshole fists the door.
“Some of us got colons too, buddy!”
I don’t dignify him with a response but the goddamned boat breaches—is the Captain drunk too?—and I get slammed against the wall and when I throw up I try to move my nonrefundable beard and it drops into the mess in the toilet.
Plop.
There’s no way out of this one and the faucet gives barely more than a trickle. If I don’t get out of here soon, I’m only going to draw more attention to myself. There is nothing for me to do but bow my head and pray like hell that you aren’t part of the lynch mob forming outside of the door to the latrine. If there is a God, you are holding it until you are back in the safe confines of the Silver Seahorse.
And there is a God. There are only four people waiting and it sounded like a dozen and I make a run for the stern. The wind bites back there and hopefully I will be alone and hopefully I can ride out the rest of this trip without ruining your day. I think you would be scared if you saw me and I think it would sound like bullshit if I told you that I went to meet family and there are tears streaked across my cheeks and I can’t tell if I’m crying or if it’s the wind. I miss my warm, scratchy beard and the pantaloons are made of paper and my legs are fucking freezing.
Finally, the boat slows as we ease into the harbor and then something unimaginably horrible happens to me, something so bad that I might jump off the boat. If it was summer, I would already be in the water because your little half brother and half sister are playing hide-and-seek (great game to let your kids play on a boat, Ronnie), and I hear Ronnie calling for the little tykes, who are hiding behind a box right in front of me.
Breathe, Joe. Breathe.
I hear Ronnie running and she gets here fast and grabs each kid by the hand and looks at me. “What a day, right?”
She’s flirting with me because she’s jealous of you and I’m on team Beck and I know how to get back at her. “Yes, ma’am.”
She didn’t like that and my ma’am had a two-fold purpose. It was supposed to make her feel old (done), and it was also supposed to make her go away. But then two deckhands come out of nowhere and the boat is turning ever so slightly and the deckhands are unraveling rope and the tired, drunk Connecticunts are coming this way because it’s just my fucking luck that this boat docks and offloads from the stern.
And if there is a God, then you are fighting with your father and you are lost in conversation. If there is a God, I will be the first one off this boat. If there is a God, this slow-moving steel beast will get there already so your stepmother can take her kids home and feed them the mac and cheese they’re screaming about. And if there is a God, then we are docking right now, we are, and there is a kid on land hoisting a ramp, there is. We are getting there and I will be third, maybe fourth off this boat and people are starting to get pushy.
And if there is a God, that is not you I hear behind me. And if there is a God, Ronnie will not ask me (me!) to move out of the way.
“My husband is trying to get through,” she says and she knows how to exact her revenge as well. Your father squeezes by me and apologizes for the close quarters. He turns his head and whistles for you, just as the boat finally settles and the deckhand releases the ramp that connects the boat to the land.
“Coming!” you say. “Jesus Christ, people this isn’t Ellis Fucking Island.”
And I love your sense of humor and disgust and I love you and that’s why, like a flower to the sun, I turn my head a millimeter, just enough to see your beautiful face and long enough for you to see mine, before the deckhand slaps the ramp down and locks it into place and I shove my way through that crowd and get off that fucking boat.
23
EVERY time I approach an exit, I want to pull off and find a gas station and change out of this musty costume. But I don’t. I am paralyzed behind the wheel. I am so panicked that I can only go forward. And the reason is horrifyingly simple: You have called me four times in the last hour since the ferry docked and this can only mean one thing: You saw me.
“No!” I shout and I feel like I’ve been driving forever and I punch the steering wheel and the Buick veers into the right lane and I cut off a truck and the trucker blows his horn and I open my window and I roar, “Go fuck your mother!”
If he responds, I don’t hear it and I roll the window up by hand (Mr. Mooney is a cheap old bastard), and I gotta slow down because it would suck to get pulled over right now. And it’s not like this is my fault, you know. You lied to me. Your father is not dead. I was on that boat because you lied to me.
Maybe I don’t know you as well as I think I do. But that’s ridiculous; we have a connection. It’s just that you messed up. You were supposed to tell me all about your dad, no matter how ashamed you were. And I was supposed to listen and love you and tell you that you were good. And then you would ask me about my life and I would tell you and you would listen to me the way I listened to you and then we would have been closer.
I ride up on a girl going too slow and she flips me off hard. She has a bumper sticker TAILGATERS FLUNKED PHYSICS, and a Boston College sticker and I hate driving and I would like to ram this car into her Volvo and watch her bleed out but no, Joe, no. She’s not the bad guy and she won’t pay for your mistakes.
This is on you, Beck. You messed up big time and you know I followed you and you know. You know. I lay on my horn and tailgate that bitch until she puts on her blinker. When I pass her I slow down so I ride right next to her with one hand on the wheel and one hand giving her the bird. The bitch laughs and I move on. Fuck her. Fuck you.
You will never forgive me and I need to never see you again and I need this family in the Land Rover to fuck off with their skis and their brand-new tires and I ride up on them too, hard, and my phone rings.