A Toast to the Good Times

Chapter 7



The sound I awake to is familiar, but I still pause and try to place where I am for a minute. I blink until the fog clears from my eyes and my brain, though it doesn’t do much for the crick in my neck. The futon was never all that comfortable.

My brother, Henry, is in the corner of the room, tossing out swear words at the washing machine that’s thumping against the floor because the dumbass needs to redistribute the clothes.

“You need to open the lid and move the shit inside, douchebag,” I groan. “Yelling at an appliance will never fix the problem. Any problem.”

He flips the lid up to stop the lurching and cranes his neck around the corner to look at me with shock all over his face, and I realize I’ve missed this cocky little bastard.

I also feel the old-man jab of melancholy when I realize that he’s got scruff, isn’t the size of a toothpick, and looks more like someone I’d hang around and drink a beer with instead of the goofy baby brother I was always leaving behind.

It’s only been a year.

One year.

And with the realization that so little time has actually passed, and so damn much has already changed, I swear I start to wonder if Toni was the ghost of Christmas future or some shit.

“Landry?” Henry’s voice is low with shock.

Before I can respond, he runs at me, doing this weird shuffle-skip thing, nearly tripping over the frayed edge of the rug in his excitement, and then tackles me like we’re kids again.

“Holy shit! What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to teach you how to do laundry. Again,” I mumble. I try not to smile, because that’d be giving away how f*cking glad I am to see this kid right now.

I haul myself off of the futon and stumble toward the washing machine.

“What time is it, anyway?” I ask.

Henry reaches into the pocket of his running shorts and pulls out his iPhone.

“Quarter to ten.”

I open the washing machine, rearrange the pile of sopping wet, oversized towels, and groan. I may have slept for a few hours, which is more than I get some nights after closing up the bar, but it feels like I’ve been up for days.

The f*ck-up with Mila, the train ride, the run in with Dad, the pseudo date/rejection with Toni...there’s a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that aches for sustenance.

I let the lid of the washer slam harder than I need to. This is a routine Henry and I have done a thousand times. Not just with the washer — with everything. Changing the oil in his beater of a car, shoveling snow, cleaning gutters; anything that required a little work, Henry feigned ignorance or illness so he could hopefully get someone else to take over the majority of the job for him.

I’d normally be irritated by his old routine. But right now, I’m just glad to see him.

“You didn’t answer me, what are you doing home?” he repeats.

I collapse onto the black fabric of the futon and fight the urge to let the sound of the swishing water in the washing machine lull me back to sleep till New Year’s.

The answer to Henry’s question was simple a few hours ago but is getting more complicated by the second. I opt to dodge his question and move onto the simple family drama we’ll all be dealing with soon.

“Paisley says she has some major announcement. You got any idea what’s up?”

“Nope. But I hope she’s not knocked-up. That’s all I need right now, to live in this house after she drops that bomb.”

“She swore to me she’s not, but who knows? How you been, Henry?” I rub my hand across the rough stubble on my cheek that’s growing past busy-man five-o’clock-shadow, and drifting into pseudo-hippie who can’t afford shaving cream.

“I’m good. ‘Bout to start my last semester of school in the Spring, you know? Everyone else is good, too.” Henry throws in the last part a little more quietly.

I decide to let it go for right now.

“What’s the plan after school?”

Henry shrugs. “Dad wants me to use my degree to pick up contract work in Kuwait or some shit. Apparently, I can make like, two-hundred-fifty-grand working over there. Or, you know, get blown up. Mom wants me to stay close and teach.” He rubs his palms together and stares up at the popcorn ceiling. “Me? I’ve got no f*cking clue.”

I nod, because I know exactly how he feels. The insecurity about your own future, and trying to reconcile what you want with what everyone else wants from you, the feeling that nothing is going to be quite right, and that you have an equal chance of f*cking anything and everything up.

“Hey, Landry?”

I cringe, waiting for the tone of the conversation to turn way too serious for ten in the morning.

“If you hurry, you might catch the tail-end of breakfast. Mom made crepes and omelets.” Henry grins like an ass.

The son of a bitch knows I can’t pass up the official Murphy family Christmas Eve breakfast. It’s the same damn breakfast we’ve had every single Christmas Eve since the birth of the Christ child. My stomach grumbles, and my taste buds perk up at the mention of Mom’s crepes. I know they’ll be filled with Nutella and banana slices and covered in a mountain of powdered sugar. Still, my movements toward the kitchen are sluggish.

“Worried about seeing Dad?” Henry mocks with vicious glee.

“Already had the pleasure last night.” I grind my teeth at the memory.

“And you’re going back for seconds?” Henry chuckles.

“No, I’m going in for breakfast,” I say as I pause at the glass door that leads into the kitchen.

I’m trying to be nonchalant, but I’m scared as hell to see my parents sitting at the breakfast table.

But they are.

Mom is wearing her red flannel pajamas with the snowflakes embroidered on the collar. Dad is in running shorts and a t-shirt, despite the fact that it’s freezing. They clink their steaming mugs together and smile at each other. It’s warm and sappy, and I wonder what the hell I’m even doing here.

On zero sleep, hung-over, feeling like an a*shole that I’m here crashing this Norman Rockwell moment.

My hand twitches over the doorknob, and I contemplate bolting. Especially when it dawns on me that, from the looks of things, Dad hasn’t told Mom I’m here, so he really must think I bailed after seeing him last night.

He’s mid-sip of his coffee when he sees me over his mug. The lines in the corners of his eyes from smiling disappear, and his grin goes taut. My mom glances in the direction of his grimace.

My direction.

“Good luck,” Henry whispers, then leaves me standing in the doorway.

Alone.

“Landry!” Mom rushes toward me and pulls me into her arms.

Hugging my mom as an adult has felt strange since I grew two inches taller than her, back in eighth grade. This woman who picked me up countless times as a kid, now all but disappears in my arms. She’s still the same tiny thing, still wearing that same perfume Henry and I picked out for her one year for Christmas because it was on sale and the bottle was shaped like a seashell, which Henry thought was super fancy. I don’t know if she even likes the perfume, but it’s been the one she’s bought since.

The rawness of this whole scene, from smelling that familiar scent, to Mom hugging me so tightly her arms are shaking, and Dad staring at me with his eyes full of disappointment and anger, transports me right back to that night outside the law offices where the ancient family lawyer had drawn up my grandfather’s will, just a few days after I got out of jail.



“Landry, I don’t think you should go now. Not like this,” Mom had pleaded.

I couldn’t look at her. Instead, I stared down at the icy steps outside of the lawyer’s office. The last time I saw her was the night she bailed my ass out of jail, and I still had intense guilt over that.

I may have been a punk, but I never imagined I’d actually have to spend a night in the poky.

“I’ll pay you back for bail once the money clears.” I motioned toward the sad, grey building where Granddad’s old-as-dirt lawyer was slowly drawing up the paperwork.

“It’s not about the money, Landry. I don’t care about the money.”

Her words were sincere, but I couldn’t help scoffing. Because over her shoulder was my dad, sitting in the car, eyes boring into me, with the bruise on his face from my fist.

“Tell him that.” I jerked my thumb in the direction of the car. “Seems the only thing that’s mattered lately at all is money. It’s not my fault he couldn’t figure out how to keep a business running. Ever since Granddad died—”

“Landry.” My mom grabbed my cheeks between her palms and squeezed them together like I was five years old again and refusing to go into my kindergarten class because it wasn’t art day, and I didn’t wanna go if I couldn’t get my finger-paint on. “That man is your father. He kept that business running the best he could. It put food in front of you. It put this coat on your back.”

Mom flicked at my wool collar. “You’re right, money has been important lately. Because everything your dad and his dad put into that business was for you and Henry and Paisley. And it’s all going to go away. So you storm out of town with your pockets full of gold, but don’t you think for a second that just because your grandfather left you that money it meant that he didn’t love and respect your father—”

“Then why did he, Mom? Why’d he leave me ninety-percent of his dough if just he wanted me to end up stuck in this shit hole town, bailing my own dad out of a mess he created?”

My mom stepped back from me and shook her head. I knew I’d gone too far, that I was saying things I couldn’t ever take back, but I couldn’t stop.

The day my grandfather died, I felt like I lost the single most important thing in the world.

Granddad listened to me talk about opening up my own bar for years. I’d show him sketches of the layout I’d worked up. I had clippings of what types of glasses I wanted to have in the place. He always said that I made the best old fashioned he’d ever tasted, and he told me stories about the old-school gin joints he used to hang out at before opening his own.

I miss him every single day, and it still blows my mind to know I’ll never hear one of his crazy-ass stories or get to bounce ideas back and forth while he and I dry glasses behind the bar.

Some days it hurts like hell.

And even though I never expected him to leave me his money, I sure as shit wasn’t going to turn away from the opportunity he dropped in my lap.

Granddad had only been in the ground for a week when we found out that he had left me the majority of his money.

And it was only two days after that that Dad dropped the bomb that the business his dad had built was low on funds and needed a quick bailout.

And then everyone looked at me.

I was supposed to put my dreams aside and be the savior.

But Dad didn’t even ask.

He just expected my help. He demanded it. He wanted me to give up the funds to save the family bar and then run the thing, rather than starting up my own like I’d always planned. Earlier that night, I told him once and for all that it wasn’t happening.

“If your grandfather would have known how serious the situation was with the business, he never would have left you all of that money, Landry. You remember that,” Mom said. She talked tough, but the quiver in her voice gave away how torn between me and Dad she was.

“Then Dad should have spoken up, and not been such a proud, stubborn ass.”

“He did speak up, Landry. To you. Do you realize how humbling it was for your father, who’s supported an entire family his whole life, to have to go to his son for help?”

“Mom, I’m sorry. But it’s my money now.”

It’s exactly the thing I had repeated over and over again to Dad the night before. He decided he’d heard enough of it and told me that I was a selfish little shit, and a few other choice things and it worked up from there. That’s how we ended up with the cops called on us, and I wound up in jail, gritting my teeth while my mom paid my bail.

“He’s not pressing charges, you know,” Mom said.

I nodded.

“I know. And I’m going to do what he asked and never step foot in his house again. Which is why I’m leaving. Tonight.”



But I broke that promise.

Because here I stand, in the middle of my Dad’s kitchen. He tosses his newspaper down onto the table and stomps away.

“Tommy!” Mom calls after him, but he doesn’t acknowledge her. He just keeps on walking. Just like I did. “Landry, why didn’t you call first?”

“It was a last minute thing. Anyway, who has to call before they come to see their family on Christmas? That’s just f*cked up.” I shrug. “ Look, I see I’m still not welcome, though, so I’ll get my coat from downstairs.”

Mom waves her hand around like it’s nonsense, like she somehow missed my Dad throwing daggers at me with his eyes just now.

“Never mind all the dramatics, Landry. You’re always welcome in this house, always. No question. It would just be nice to know when you’re on the way back so you don’t give everyone a damn heart attack. Now, sit, there’s still some breakfast.”

I hesitate, but Mom gives me a shove towards the table. “Sit,” she repeats.

I slide into the yellow plastic-covered chair as she scoops what seems like an entire orchard of fruit onto my plate, slides a ham and cheese omelet next to it, and pushes the platter of crepes in my direction. It’s so much food, I don’t know where to start.

“What about Dad? Do you think I should try to talk to him?”

Mom’s dark hair swishes back and forth as she shakes her head.

“Let him come to you. And eat. You look like you just got sprung from a POW camp, Landry. Do they not have food in Boston?”

I shovel a heaping bite of eggs into my mouth and avoid Mom’s eyes. I can feel her watching me, taking me in; my unshaven face, my wrinkled undershirt, the heavy bags that I know must be under my eyes.

“I knew you’d come. I just knew it,” Mom says with a small smile, wrapping an arm around my shoulder and kissing me on the top of the head. “I couldn’t stand the thought of another holiday without you here.”

“I came because Paisley called—” I try to stop the words from falling out of my mouth, but it’s too late. Mom’s smile has morphed from something radiant to something sad and embarrassed.

Goddamnit.

“Oh, I see.” She wrings out a dishcloth that’s dry and puts the coffee mugs she just washed back into the sudsy water in the sink.

“No, Ma, listen, I didn’t mean it like that. You know I wanted to see you, too. It’s just, Paisley called. Said it was important that I haul ass-”

“Language,” Mom stops me with the stern look that only a former Catholic school teacher could give, but she moves away from the sink and sits across from me to listen more closely to what I have to say.

Shit. I feel nervous now. When my mom gets all serious like this, it’s almost never a good thing.

“Haul butt out here for some big announcement.”

Mom looks puzzled, and I realize I may have blown it for Paisley.

I reach across the table and cover Mom’s hand with mine. “I’m glad I’m here, though,” I lie.

I’m not.

I want to leave.

I’d rather be back in my bar, or even avoiding Mila in our apartment than here with Dad.

But I did miss seeing my mother. Of course. I’m not a completely heartless bastard. “I missed you, Ma.”

“Paisley!” Mom calls, apparently not distracted by my heartfelt declarations.

“Shit,” I mumble.

“Landry, language.”