When a non-lesbian woman reaches out and touches a non-homo man on the arm more than once in a sixty-second interval, that means she is considering doing the nasty with the man. Any half-wit with a working pecker knows that. And so I smiled. I could hear them talking—mostly about me, their only common interest.
Hank was doing bad impressions of me, exaggerating my mannerisms, voice, and conservative political opinions, making me out to be some crazy right-wing buffoon. Always easy to pick on veterans when no one is invading your country. But when the Taliban infiltrates Philadelphia, Hank will be the first to come crying to his military-trained father for help.
Normally I would have gone down there and kicked his ass for displaying his ignorance in such a cavalier manner, but I had a little girl in need upstairs. That was the mission now. And Sue was smiling, which at the time seemed to indicate that I was winning, no matter what the fuck Hank thought.
I was just about to go to bed when my son asked Sue why she hung out with me. He asked the question in a way that implied he couldn’t believe anyone would willingly spend time with his old man.
Sue laughed and said she enjoyed my company.
Then Hank asked why, saying the word why like Sue had claimed she liked having her toenails pulled out with pliers.
“Don’t you ever feel like everyone is bullshitting you?” Sue said. “Just saying what they think you want to hear? Like everyone is constantly lying, and we never really know a single person at all? I don’t feel like that when I’m around your father. I might not always agree with his point of view, but I’m always certain I at least know it.”
Sue gave Hank a chance to respond here, but he didn’t take it. “You’ll miss him when he’s gone,” she said.
“Didn’t he tell you?” Hank said. “He’s not buying the bullet. He’s going to live forever!”
Sue said again that Hank would miss me when I was gone.
For some reason, Hank got nostalgic here and started talking about this great day we had all spent together as a family in the Poconos—Hank, Jessica, my parents, and me. I’ll tell you about that day later on. I don’t want to talk about it right now. But as Hank described it to Sue in vivid detail, I knew there was a part of him deep down that still loved his father, and that made the girly-man tears want to start leaking from my eyes.
So I went back upstairs and lay myself down in the guest room. The brain meds had me feeling like someone had squirted crazy glue on my eyelids. I was snoring in no time at all.
When I woke up the next morning, I checked Hank’s bedroom, hoping to find a little yellow woman in bed with him, but no such luck. Honestly, I would have been a smidge disappointed if Sue had played hide-the-egg-roll with my son on the first date, because that would make her a little slutty, giving it up so easily, especially considering the fact that he didn’t really have much game when it came to women. Sue wasn’t the type of broad who would be easily impressed by Hank’s money or his art-dealer lifestyle or his fucking hybrid car that he plugs in every night like a pussy.
Women are highly influenced by their fathers, who become their default standards for a decent man. Sue’s father, Alan, was a top-tier man—battle-tested by the nastiest little yellow bastards on the planet. My son would have his work cut out for him if he wanted to impress Sue.
I met Femke’s father once. Now that man’s mother cut off his nuts at birth and then handed them over to Femke’s mother when they got married. Probably kept them in a velvet pouch with silver tassels. I don’t think he was allowed to open his mouth once during the few dinners I was forced to sit through with those foreigners. I felt bad for Mr. Turk and even worse for my son, who was too dumb to read the blueprint for his wife, seated across the table from him in the form of one incredibly crusty old Dutch cunt, aka Femke’s mother.
I should have felt bad for myself who was gaining a bitch daughter-in-law preprogrammed to explode like a suicide vest, only she took off the metaphorical vest and put it on my son right before she escaped back into the crumbling economies of Europe. I saw it coming a decade away, but back then I didn’t know how much I was going to love my granddaughter, who would make it impossible for me to steer clear of Femke forever.
I walked over to my sleeping son and poked him in the ribs.
“Stop!” he yelled as he tried to swat my hand away as if it were a mosquito.
It was almost six o’clock. Real men are up at five. I poked him again.
He asked what I wanted, and so I asked if he had fucked my genetically Vietnamese friend.
“What?” he said, stalling for time, so I repeated the question, saying, “After I went to bed. Did you nail Sue?”
“What time is it?” Hank asked, playing dumb.
So I said, “I don’t mind if you sleep with her just as long as (a) she wants to sleep with you and (b) you don’t break her heart. She’s a good woman, Hank. Trust me.”
Hank sat up and rubbed his eyes.
Then he said, “Are you insane, Dad? Because sometimes I seriously think you are absolutely fucking bonkers. People might think it’s the brain surgery, but only the ones who never met you before they cut out part of your conservative brain, which just might have made you a little less racist, actually—which is also insane, because you are still the most offensive and the absolute most politically incorrect person I have ever met.”
Hank’s saying I was a little less racist was a good sign. It meant that he was hot for Sue, or at least that’s what I thought.
So I said, “What happened last night? Tell me you didn’t fuck it up. She’d make a great mother for Ella.”
Like a dumb thirsty horse that can’t find the giant freshwater lake whose edge sits less than a yard behind his own ass, Hank asked if I had seriously tried to set him up.
So I told him that I may have set up the pins, but he would have to knock ’em down, and then I asked if he had rolled another gutter ball or what.
Hank shook his head and laughed. “We had a good chat over wine, Dad. She’s a lot of fun. I really liked her. I can see why you thought the two of us would get along.”
I asked again what had happened, and he said nothing. “Something always happens,” I said. “Don’t bullshit me.”
Then Hank went on about how they had only finished the wine and talked about all sorts of things, but mainly yours truly. Hank said that Sue really cares about me and that he was glad she was there for me when he and I weren’t speaking. She had filled him in on a bunch of stuff that happened when he was ignoring his father. Then around ten she said she had to leave. She wanted to say good-bye to me, according to Hank, but he’d told her I was surely sleeping, which was accurate.
“There was one other extremely interesting thing Sue told me,” Hank said, making eye contact, evaluating me. “Clayton Fire Bear. The name you kept repeating after your surgery—you knew him during the war?”
I didn’t remember telling Sue that, which scared me. What the fuck else had I admitted while my brain was healing? Hank wasn’t ready to hear the story, so I looked away.