A Toast to the Good Times

Chapter 5



“Jesus, Paisley, slow down.”

I push on the dash with my boot and death-grip the door handle as Paisley takes the turn on the icy road going about twenty miles faster than she really should.

“Landry, it’s fine. I drive down this road every single day,” my little sister says.

She lets out a light laugh and casually grips the steering wheel at the bottom with one hand while she twirls her hair around the other. I know she’s just stating a fact, letting me know she’s long memorized every curve and bump in this road, but it still feels like a dig about me never being around anymore.

And if Paisley’s off-the-cuff remark feels like a dig, I can only imagine how bad it’s going to be when I talk to Dad.

“How’d Mom and Dad take it? You know, when you told them I’d be coming home?”

Paisley drops the long strand of hair she’s been playing with and places both hands on the wheel at two and ten. She stares out the window like she’s suddenly the world’s most cautious driver.

“Paisley?” I push.

She forces out a heavy sigh.

“So, maybe I didn’t tell them. Yet.”

“Paisley! What the hell?”

She slouches into the seat like she’s trying to disappear into the leather. “I know! I’m sorry, I just really wanted you to come, and when you said that you would, I got so excited I sorta forgot and—”

“You didn’t forget. You’re a coward.” I’m half-joking. This night has already dragged on for what feels like days, and I’m too worn out to fight.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry, Landry. It’ll be fine. Mom misses you so much.”

The fact that she doesn’t mention our dad at all isn’t lost on me.

“And how do you think Dad will react?”

Paisley sighs again. “Dad is Dad... He’s stubborn. And hurt. But it’s just a bar. You’re still his son. It’ll be okay...I think.”

She mumbles the last two words low enough that I wonder if she knows she even spoke them out loud.

The thing is, she’s so wrong.

It wasn’t just a bar.

I know that now, even though I’ve only been putting my heart into mine for the last year. I can’t imagine what it felt like to almost lose this thing that you’d put your entire life into, that your father put his heart and soul into and passed down to you.

But I was a stupid, selfish kid who only wanted out of our shithole town, and if I spent my money to save Dad’s bar, I’d still be stuck here.

Besides, if Granddad didn’t want me to get out of New Jersey, he wouldn’t have left nearly his entire fortune to me.

I don’t know if I’m convincing myself or just rationalizing.

“We’ll see,” I say. “And if it’s not, it’s on you.” I smile at Paisley so she knows I’m not pissed. Not too pissed, at least.

“It will! It’s Christmas! The time for all joyous things and miraculous family healing!”

“That’s a load of bullshit, you know that, right?” I grin, but regret it as I watch Paisley’s mouth fall into a disappointed frown. I forget how sensitive she can be sometimes. I jump topics, hoping to erase some of the awkwardness. “Anyway, what’s all this big announcement stuff?”

Paisley rolls her eyes. “I told you, I’m telling everyone all at once. Tomorrow.”

“Ah, Squirrelly, you made me catch a train. In the middle of the night. And you’re not even going to give me a hint?”

“No. Dealing with you all at one time will be more than enough. So, stop asking. And for the love of fruitcake, stop calling me Squirrelly.”

I can’t. I’ve done it since she was born, when Mom and Pop brought her home from the hospital and she was all tiny and squirmy with that fuzzy red hair. She looked like the squirrels in our yard. So that’s what she’s been.

“Fine. As long as you’re not pregnant with that religious zealot, Cal’s kid, we’re golden. Squirrelly.”

Paisley purses her lips and sighs.

“Please don’t call Calvin that. He is a devoted Christian. There’s nothing wrong with that, Landry. Just because you never see the inside of a church these days—”

I think I know where this is going, so I cut her off.

“You’re not about to become Mrs. Bible-Beater, are you? Don’t tell me you’re marrying that creep, Paisley. Do you remember that time he got caught—”

“Landry, I’m not marrying him. Just stop. Seriously.”

She shakes her head, and looks like my mom when she does. It’s a simple gesture, but still so heavy on the disappointment. The same shake of the head Mom gave me as she signed the papers to bail me out of jail.



“This is how you want to end up? Here?” My mother was glaring at me as she signed the paperwork that would officially release me from the county lockup and let me back into the world. Her dark hair was pulled back in a crazy bun and she was wearing her old granny glasses with the croakies, so I knew my call must have interrupted her during a knitting marathon.

I decided not to answer. The old officer behind the desk looked over and his downturned mouth communicated a little disapproval, but mostly complete and utter pity.

You know your mother is pretty badass when your arresting officer feels a little guilty letting you out of your drafty ten by ten cell and into the clutches of your screaming gorgon of a mom.

“Thank you, Officer. I promise you won’t be seeing this maniac in here again,” my mother assured him, the same way she used to tell the dentist I’d never have another cavity and my principal I’d never get caught making out with Becca Cowart in the back stairwell during band practice again.

“Mom, lay off. I’m not a kid anymore and—”

“Oh, you’re not?”

She grabbed under my elbow with a biting claw of a hand and marched me outside, her flip-flops skidding on the salt that had half-melted the ice on the stairs. Her feet must have been cold as hell, and a new level of shame helped me bottom-out even further. If my dad and I hadn’t been the two biggest raging a*sholes in the world, my mother would be home knitting some kind of atrocious Christmas sweater vest for one of us instead of braving the icy winter in the first shoes she found lying around when she got my panicked call.

“Because I honestly can’t think of the last time you acted any older than about fourteen, Landry,” she continued, her lecture losing some of its edge when her teeth chattered. I rushed to get her car door, but she was gripping the keys, her eyes spearing daggers in my direction. “Get the hell in the passenger side, you idiot. You’re probably still legally drunk.” She shook her head. “Your father owned that bar for how many years, and that man never, ever came back to our home with so much as a drop of alcohol in his system. You turn twenty-one and can’t stop funneling it in?”

“I’m not an alcoholic—”

“Shut up. Did I ask you for your opinion?” She kicked up gravel peeling out of the police station parking lot. “The answer is ‘no, I did not.’” She was driving hunched against the wheel, trying to peer over the glasses perched on her nose. She looked ridiculous, but now wasn’t the time or place to laugh at my mother. Unless I had a sincere death wish. “Here’s what I have to say to you, son. Grow the hell up. Grow up. And do it fast. Because your father is running a business, I am running a family, your sister and brother are trying to keep things together at school and with their jobs, and all of my attention is going to my adult child. How does that make any sense?”

“Mom, I know I’ve had a couple rough patches—”

“Rough patches? You haven’t had a steady girl since Annie, which is fine. The last thing you need is a girlfriend messing with your head. But a dozen girls in and out every week, Landry? You keep putting off finishing your business degree, you spend every second you’re not at the bar with that loser friend of yours, Tyler...what’s going on with you, Landry? When are you going to wake up?”

“I am awake!” I groaned miserably. “I’m wide awake, Mom, and shit just sucks right now.”

“Shit just sucks right now?” She mimicked my voice with such accuracy, it made me slump into the passenger seat. “You have a roof over your head, a full belly every night, your family loves you, and you have employment during one of the worst recessions in history, but ‘shit just sucks right now’?”

“I don’t know if this is what I want to do with my life.” I regretted the words before they left my mouth.

“You don’t know if this is what you want to do with your life?” She echoes the question back like it was the rock-bottom most entirely idiotic single thought ever pondered in the history of humanity.

I had no idea the simple act of repetition could be used as such specific, dramatic torture.

“Hear me out—”

“Enough!” She crunched on the brakes and we pitched forward a few yards from our driveway. “I have a husband with a black eye in my house because our idiot son lost his temper. I have a business falling apart under my nose because that same idiot son wants more time to figure things out. I have to keep this family together, Landry! We have all made sacrifices while you tried to figure out exactly what it is you need, and I feel like the more time and energy we put towards that, the more selfish and stupid your actions get.”

I shook my head, regret and rage and total humiliation all sucker-punching each other for the chance to get to beat the shit out of my already mutilated ego.

“I feel like no one listens to a thing I have to say.” I tried to start things neutrally, to say what I needed to without making things worse, but my mother was in rare form.

“No one listens to you? No one listens to poor Landry? I feel like all I ever do is listen to you whine and cry about how hard things are! And I’m done with it! I’m done! Done, done, done, done. You want out? Leave. Please, be my guest and leave. If you think you can do better on your own, please, go ahead and try.”

My mother’s hands death-gripped the steering wheel. Her words knifed at my already beaten-to-a-pulp conscience.

“Fine.” I knew, in that moment, that I was doing something insanely, totally stupid. I knew I’d regret it. I knew I was being completely childish and was letting the whole stupid, crazy night take me by the throat and shake me around, but I didn’t care. “Fine. I will. I know I’ve been a huge pain in the ass. Now you won’t have to worry about it anymore. Or me. Or whatever. I’m f*cking done.”

Before my mother could yell at me for swearing or tell me what a lousy ass I was being or talk me out of my latest temper tantrum, I slid out of the car, slammed the door shut, and jogged to my friend Tyler’s house and crashed semi-permanently.

A few weeks later my inheritance was released.

I left New Jersey and hadn’t looked back until Paisley’s call.



The snow crunches under the tires of Paisley’s Accord as she pulls into the driveway of my parents’ house, a few yards from where Mom and I sat that night she bailed me out of jail and I bailed out of my family’s life for months on end.

It looks the same. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this is the longest I’ve gone without seeing it, and I just sort of thought it’d look a little different. The Snoopy Christmas scene is lit up in the front yard, the snowflakes made out of white lights are staked into the walkway, and the creepy-ass Santa face is staring at me through the octagon shaped window in the second story. It’s the same as it always was.

But the feel is different.

Because I’m not welcome.

There aren’t any lights on inside the house from what I can tell. That’s not really odd, because it’s late as hell. Paisley turns to look at me as she tosses the car keys into her purse and senses what I’m thinking: this was a bad idea.

The entire night was a bad f*cking idea.

I’d like a do-over.

I’d like to rewind and go home with the cute girl from the bar, instead of having gone to my apartment where I f*cked things up with Mila. I’d like to have ignored Paisley’s call and not gotten on that damn train and kissed Toni.

I want to be passed out in my messy apartment after a satisfying but unemotional lay and not staring up at that freakish St. Nick in the window of my parents’ house with thoughts of Mila and Toni and the stupid mess I made of everything past and present bludgeoning my brain.

“Don’t worry, if they’re awake, I’ll tell them that I begged you to come.” Paisley’s big green eyes are pleading with me not to run away like the scumbag I am.

I rub the back of my neck and close my eyes. I’m that that kind of tired that, once my eyelids are closed, I feel everything start to spin in the blackness. If I weren’t so exhausted, I’d probably high-tail it back to the train station right now.

“Could we, like, go inside?” Paisley rubs her hands together and blows into them.

The temperature in the car has gone from toasty warm to nearly-freezing-my-nuts off in the two minutes since she turned the engine off.

“You go ahead. I’m going to take a walk.”

“Landry, it’s freezing out.”

“I’ll be fine.” I zip my jacket up to my neck and pull the hood on.

“Are you kidding? That’s not even a real coat.” She flicks one of the strings of my hood with her finger and purses her lips like she used to just before she threw a huge temper tantrum when we were kids. She’s outgrown the tantrums. Too bad I never outgrew dodging every problem that ever darted in my way. “Jesus Mary and Joseph, Landry, you’re going to freeze to death. On Christmas Eve. ” Her eyes are wide and worried.

“We’re still a few hours away from Christmas Eve, so don’t get all the violins out for me just yet, okay? I’ll see you in the morning, kid.”

I lean over and kiss her on the cheek, then stumble out of the car and into the snow. My parents’ property line goes all the way back into the woods, the same ones I grew up playing in with Paisley and my brother Henry. I follow the line back to the thick trees, then veer off to the left side of the property. There’s a shed out here I used to sleep in when I was torn up over a girl and didn’t want to hear shit from Henry, or too drunk to face Mom, or too sick of dealing with my family’s drama to go into the crowded, suffocating house.

I push on the rough wooden door and it creaks open.

My dad’s voice breaks through the frigid night air and scares the shit out of me. I jump back and almost fall over the crooked threshold.

“Landry?”

He says it like a question, like he maybe doesn’t believe I’m really here.

Or just wishes I weren’t.

I clear my throat, trying to make room for the words around what feels like a lump of coal in my throat.

“Paisley asked me to come...” I let my voice drift off.

The way he’s working his jaw back and forth and rubbing the back of his neck without meeting my eyes, tells me he doesn’t care why I’m here. I open my mouth and start to say something else, what I don’t know, but I let it clamp shut again.

All of the words we could say hang in the air.

The sharp ones that cut like shards of broken beer bottles.

The ones that are sticky and polluted as old fly paper.

And the meaner, nastier, snaring ones that drag in all our regrets and leave them in a tangled, diseased net we can’t break out of.

But neither one of us say any of them.

My dad looks me up and down, taking me in with eyes identical to the ones that stare back at me in the mirror every morning while I shave, and then he walks out on me without one more word.