Every morning I take care of the rabbits and every night Mom checks the answering service to see if Paul took any of the chimney sweeping jobs. Every now and then he takes one. He probably does it drunk which Mom says is dangerous since he’s up on rooftops but “at least he’s working” because otherwise the business will go under and they’ll lose all the money they spent on the equipment. Without Paul’s money from chimney sweeping, we’re back to “stretching our food dollar,” which means scraping the dried-out peanut butter from the bottom of the gallon tub and nothing but bologna and bread with mustard and milk in our lunch pails and defrosted rabbit for dinner every night.
When I get home from school, I see Paul chopping wood with the big orange maul on the block next to the dog pen. He’s wearing loose jeans and a dark blue velvet-collared shirt, his scraggly beard longer than usual. There is something off about the way he swings the maul, an unsteadiness that makes him stumble while he laughs to himself. He sees me and asks how school was. I stand a few feet back. He takes stock of his appearance, looking down at the maul swaying in his hands, the mess of his clothes, realizing the trouble he’ll be in when he sobers up, laughing to himself in the way of all great drunks.
He is soft and fuzzy and odd and all I can think about is how he must’ve slept in the cold last night.
To be a drunk is to be a hero in a sad story.
“Can I have a hug?” he blurts out. I give him one, smelling the beer on his clothes, his body sweat and puke. “Thanks. I needed that. Are you guys okay?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. Mom is sad.”
“I know,” he rubs the back of his head. “It’s getting cold, so I thought I’d chop some wood for you.”
“Thanks,” I say, getting my bike from the back porch.
He pauses. “You know I love you right? I know you’re not my kid but I love you.”
“I know that,” I say because it’s true. “I love you too. I don’t care if you’re drunk.”
He wipes his glasses with the front of his shirt, turns back toward the woodpile, places a knotty stump on it, lifts the maul above his head and brings it down with a thump. The wood goes flying, splintering in all directions. I get on my bike and take off for the afternoon.
He’s gone when I get home and in his place Mom is inspecting the woodpile. “Did you do this?”
“No, Paul was here.”
“I thought maybe he was. Was he drunk?”
“I think so. But he was nice. He can’t help it, you know. He’s sick.”
“I know.”
That night Paul is outside the house again, parked in his truck. The light from the streetlight falls on him and we can see him drinking from a brown paper bag. Mom goes outside and tells him he has to leave. We watch her stand next to the truck with her arms crossed in front of her. Paul gets out and hugs her and they stand there like that for a long time. His arms around her, her arms crossed. He says something then gets back in his truck. Exhaust smoke and steam fill the cold air as he starts the engine and drives away. Mom stands alone for a moment, staring at the ground, then comes back inside.
“It’s bedtime,” she says.
“It’s only seven thirty.”
“I mean for me.” She goes into her room and closes the door behind her. I go to bed at nine thirty, but Tony stays up late watching The A-Team. I hear her get up and think she’s about to yell at him for missing his bedtime but instead the footsteps go into the bathroom where the sink turns on. A few minutes later the footsteps retreat back to the bedroom. When I wake up, Tony is still in the living room, asleep on the couch with the TV on. The house is cold because there is no fire. The sun isn’t up yet. I go outside with a flashlight to tend to the rabbits and when I come in, I turn on the stove and fry some eggs to eat with toast. I make a sandwich out of bologna, yellow mustard and wheat bread and put milk in my thermos. I knock on the door to see if Mom is okay. I can hear her crying in her room. “I’m fine, sweetie,” she says through the door. “Just go to school.”
It’s silent outside from the frost and snow as I walk the three blocks to school. Everywhere are frozen windshields and slush-filled curbs, leafless trees shuddering in the wind. The quiet is broken by the crunch of my sneakers on the sidewalk and the swish of my arms against my brown ski jacket, the one with the corduroy shoulders and the tear in the side where the stuffing had fallen out which I’d patched up one morning with Elmer’s glue and two pieces of black electrical tape.
* * *
WHEN PAUL SOBERS up, he asks Mom to marry him. There’s no ring because he can’t afford one even though Mom always says she wishes a good man would just “buy her a ring like my dad did for my mom,” but there is a big wedding with a sugar-free lemon cheesecake. Mom buys us brand-new Lee jeans which we wear with matching white-collared shirts and brown-and-gray–striped clip-on ties. She has white ribbons and orange flowers in her hair as she walks down the aisle. Les McCarthy is there and so are Frank and Barb and Diane, all the people from the AA campouts. When he came back, Paul said, “I know I need to do better for this family and I will.” And this time Mom hardly scolded him, probably because he asked her to marry him, which made up for his leaving.
After the wedding, when we are a family with a capital F for “father,” legal and everything, Mom tells us that she loves Paul but if he leaves again, she’s going to divorce him. We are still in our clip-on ties, eating leftover sugar-free lemon wedding cheesecake. She says he’s a good man but he needs to be a better father to us. I know that Tony likes him too. We don’t ever think of him as a father. He’s more like another brother or maybe just someone who makes Mom easier to handle. When he’s home, we have more money and fewer chores and she isn’t locked in her room crying or lying on the floor next to the woodstove with that look that goes on forever.
At the wedding, Les McCarthy said to me, “Isn’t it great your mom’s getting married? She deserves happiness, don’t you think?” I nodded and wondered why everyone always wanted us to be worried about her. I didn’t tell him I was just glad that Paul was home so I didn’t have to get up at five to deal with the rabbits and Tony wasn’t as mean because Paul was bigger than he was and even though he never hit Tony, just being there made it less likely that Mom would fall into the depression or Tony would push me down the stairs when no one was looking.
CHAPTER 17
BROTHERS
Riding my bike on a crisp winter morning—the first sunny day in months after the endless rain ceased, the puddles steaming, the sun appearing like an embarrassed cousin from behind the gray-white clouds—weaving in and out of the cracks in the pavement under the canopy of trees on Eighteenth Street, inside left, outside right, bad luck to hit a crack, I suddenly hear a scream echo out through the neighborhood. There’s something desperate about it, something sad, like a dog caught in the axle of a truck. I stop and park my like-new-again yellow-and-blue Huffy Pro Thunder against the curb to listen. Another scream. There’s something familiar about it but I can’t place it. I pedal toward the school to investigate out of instinct, the way a cat will lurch at a bird trapped behind glass.