“Oh, I can’t,” I sputter quickly. I want to eat whatever it is Ingrid is whipping up—something that doesn’t come from a box or a can—and yet I can’t. I shouldn’t. “My father. He’s at home.” And I leave it at that, too ashamed to say the rest, that he is likely shit-faced or passed out on the sofa from drinking all day, that he probably hasn’t eaten a thing since I left for work this morning. That I have to hurry home before he decides to make himself dinner, warming up an oven he’ll forget to use. It’s not the first time it’s happened.
“There’s plenty here for your father, too,” Ingrid tells me as she reaches into her white kitchen cabinets and begins withdrawing dishes in sets of two. “We’ll save him some. I’ll send you home with a Tupperware that he can warm,” and it’s then that Ingrid assures me I can stay. I should stay. And before I know what’s happening, she’s ladling a serving of some kind of pasta—complete with tomato sauce and mushrooms and angel hair—into a bowl for me; she’s pouring me a glass of milk, too. Just like a mother should do. Not my mother, but a mother. I don’t ever remember my mother cooking for me. But she must have, right? She must have.
There was a time after my mother left that I clung to mothers—other people’s mothers—unremittingly. Years later, I’m sure that Freud would have had a thing or two to say about it, but at the time I didn’t know any better and I didn’t care.
When I was just six years old, I left home alone and wandered down to a playground a few blocks away. Pops was home, but Pops was drunk. He had no idea I’d gone. There at the playground I tagged along with a little boy about my own age, one whose mother sat on a nearby park bench and watched us play, but when the time came for the little boy to go, I tried to go home with him. When he ran after his mother and grabbed her extended hand, I ran, too, and grabbed the other hand. She didn’t push me away; she didn’t say, Don’t touch me.
It was then that the woman realized for the first time that I was all alone. Where do you live? she’d asked, and I asked instead if I could go home with them. She told me no, but her eyes were kind and attentive, and yet hoping like some little lost puppy that I’d just go home.
It wasn’t the only time something like this happened.
“Eat,” Ingrid says to me, staring down at the table of food set before us, and, “Please. There’s too much for me. I can’t let it go to waste. You will stay, won’t you, Alex?” she asks with a bit of humble supplication as I stand before the kitchen table, eyes on the food she’s set out before me, quite certain I drool like a hungry dog. Looking into her eyes, I’m reminded again how sad they are. Ingrid has sad eyes, lonely eyes. She blames the wasted food for the reason I should stay, and yet the real reason is this: she’s alone. She has no one to talk to, no one other than the celebs on TV to share this meal with her, and a one-way conversation with the television set is more than just sad and lonely; it’s pathetic.
And so I sit and I eat. I eat the pasta first, followed by peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream on the side. I’m cajoled into a game of gin rummy. It’s so hard to say no to Ingrid, and as time goes on, I find that I don’t want to. I don’t want to go. Before I know it, Ingrid and I are watching the TV from where we sit—at the kitchen table, with our dinner dishes cast aside to the edge—old Jeopardy! reruns, and we’re calling out the answers in tandem. Who is Burt Reynolds? she exclaims, and me to the next question: What is Provence? And then she reaches for a deck of cards and starts to deal. Ten for me, ten for her.
This is what it feels like to be part of a family.
Most of my evenings I spend alone. Well, not really alone but rather with Pops, which is essentially the equivalent to being alone. We sit in the same room sometimes, but we never talk, and sometimes we don’t even sit in the same room. Friends are gone; girlfriends are nil. I, like Ingrid, spend my evenings in the company of the TV when I’m not following the town shrink home from work or sneaking my way into an abandoned home.
I offer to stay and help with the dishes after Jeopardy! and gin rummy are through. Ingrid tries hard to refuse. “You’re my guest,” she says, but I insist, standing before the stainless-steel sink, watching as it fills with opalescent dish soap bubbles, which I pop one by one with an index finger. And then I submerge the dishes and start to wash. In the drying rack, the dishes quickly accumulate and clatter, a tower of saturated dishes amassing quickly so that when I set another on top, they slip, threatening to fall.
“Where are the dish towels,” I ask Ingrid, rummaging through the kitchen drawers to find something to dry the dishes with.
But Ingrid says no. “Let them be,” she says, telling me they’ll air-dry overnight. “You work too hard,” she says, adding then, “You’re a good boy, Alex. You do know that, don’t you?” I see it then, the gradient of the skin around her eyes, the thinning, puckering skin. The dullness of her irises, the redness of the sclera. Conjunctivitis, I think. Pinkeye. Allergies.
Or maybe just someone who is sad.
I nod my head and say yes, I know that, though sometimes I’m not so sure if it’s true. Good or not good, I still feel like a deadbeat. It’s that thought that haunts me in the middle of the night: the fact that this is the be-all and end-all of life for me. This is it, life as I know it. That there will never be anything other than this. This town, this existence, Priddy’s café. A lifetime of cleaning up someone else’s dirty dishes. I hear the girl from my dreams calling to me, Let’s go...
Will I ever get the chance to go?
“Your mother,” she says, allowing her voice to drift off before finding the guts to finish the thought, to say what she’s thinking out loud. “She should have known better than to leave.” And then she pats me on the arm as I turn to go, carrying with me a container of leftover pasta.
As I walk, off in the distance a coyote howls as the train rattles through town, a freight train this time, too late for the commuter train to be coming through. But it did pass through, hours ago, that commuter train. I wonder if Pearl climbed on board or whether she is still here, patrolling the streets of town.
It’s well after nine o’clock and the town is in a deep sleep, hibernating as we do until spring.
When I get home Pops is sound asleep on the sofa, facedown. Beside his overturned beer is another Final Notice, moist with the fermenting scent of alcohol. It clings to the table, threatening to tear as I lift it up and curse out loud. “Damn it, Pops.” The electricity this time. Soon we will be without lights. My eyes skim past the TV, past the lamp, past an ugly, old flush-mount light on the living room ceiling, and to the open refrigerator door—all on, all being used. He’s managed to leave them all on, amassing more charges on the bill. I’m going to have to work overtime to pay the bill, more time busting my ass for Priddy while Pops sits at home getting trashed. And the money he gets for the beer. Now there’s the real kicker. Pops doesn’t have his own money for beer. He smashed my piggy bank once upon a time, long ago, when I was just a boy. He’s been known to find and forge my paychecks from Priddy, and has asked at the bank for them to be cashed. Then he started sneaking into my bedroom and stealing my things—old baseball trophies, my high school class ring—stuff he could sell at the thrift store in town. Now I keep him on a small allowance so that he’ll leave my things be. But still, he doesn’t leave them be. Just last week I discovered my telescope missing, another treasure sold for booze.