“What are you doing?”
He glanced up and saw his dad looking right at him. He was sitting there in the living room, one shoe in his hand, his face red.
Paul was so startled his hand shook and the milk spilled over the side of the bowl and spread across the table, falling off the wood, making a pond on the linoleum.
“I said, what are you doing?”
He looked up. It was the usual scene. His mom was reading on the sofa, his little brother arranging his baseball cards on the floor in front of the TV set, his dad watching the news from his chair—only he wasn’t looking at the news. He was still looking at him.
It was like being in the dark and someone turns on the lights too bright. He watched the milk puddle grow on the floor.
“Cleaning up,” he said.
He got a kitchen cloth and mopped it all up. He hoped his dad would leave him alone again. Paul licked his lips. His dad was still staring at him.
“You’re drinking milk from a bowl now?”
“No.”
“So why are you doing that?”
He looked at his dad’s bare feet, resting on the ottoman. The ugliest feet he’d ever seen, the toes were all swollen from arthritis and having to stand every day in his good shoes. In the old days he used to make coffee for his mom and then leave in the morning whistling while they were eating breakfast, and he’d sleep in on the weekends and maybe watch a game on TV, but these days on Saturdays he was up before the rest of them with his feet up on the ottoman, shining his shoes. Now his dad’s eyes were squinting out at him, two red slits in his heavy gray face, as if it was Paul’s fault that his life had worked out this way and he had to stand there all day trying to sell stereos to people who only wanted speakers for their iPods.
“For the cat.”
“We don’t have a cat,” his dad said.
“There’s a cat out there.”
His dad sat up now in the chair.
“You think it’s your cat? That cat’s got nothing to do with you. That’s not your cat. You think I’m gonna feed you and a cat, too? You can go get a job and pay for the milk yourself. Then you can get a goddamn cat.”
“He’s in school,” his mom said from behind her book on the couch. “That’s his job.”
“Well, he ought to do better then.”
“He’s doing fine.”
He could feel his dad starting up again. He looked at the wall. Lately it didn’t take much to start him up. “How is a C in gym fine? How do you even get a C, if you show up, unless you’re a total wuss?”
His mom glanced up, as if she was annoyed at having to interrupt her reading. She was always reading these true-crime books with terrible photos in the inserts. “It’s only freshman year. Give him a break, Terrance. He’s not like you.”
His dad had been a wrestling champion when he was in high school. They had kept the trophies on a shelf in the old house. He didn’t know where they were now, though. His mom had thrown most of that stuff out.
His father swiped at his shoe with the polish. “I’ll say. He’s a fucking disappointment.”
Paul didn’t say anything. At first he had thought his dad was talking about the guy on the TV, some senator talking to the newscaster, but then he realized his dad was talking about him.
“Terrance…,” his mother said, but she said it really weakly. It was like that one word used up all her energy. She didn’t have much to begin with. When she was home from working nights at Denny’s she liked to do a lot of nothing.
His dad snorted. “Like we have money for a cat.” He looked back over at the news.
Paul finished cleaning up the kitchen and went into his room and shut the door. He turned on his PlayStation and hunted down the peasants one by one, obliterated them with his tongues of fire.
After a while he reached the next level and still felt that jumpy feeling inside him. When he went outside his room they were all gone. His dad had gone to work and his mother must have taken Aaron out to a playground or something. He stood still for a moment, breathing in the empty house. He turned the TV on, looking for a baseball game or something to focus his mind, but there was nothing. He opened the fridge, but there were none of the yogurts he liked in there. He kept telling her to get them and she kept buying the other kind. There was no soda either.
“We’ve got to tighten our belts now,” she’d said.