When my shift ended, I stopped at a liquor store. It was on my way home and I knew that I would need more than my last remaining beer that night. Even as I was stepping out of my car, standing in front of the liquor store, watching people go in, searching for a friendly face, I still wasn’t visualizing Bakersfield and Jenny’s arms, how they’d wrap around me when I pulled her from bed. I was just thinking about how impossible sleep would be that night, how long I would have to wait next to Billy before I could get up and go to Dad’s shed, open one of the beers I was hoping to have bought.
The first guy I asked looked at me and shook his head in disgust, the next said he would do it if I gave him a handie in his car, the third just walked right past me. Finally, a girl a little older than me walked up. Her hair was in a loose ponytail, not as long as Jenny’s old one, but she had that same kindness, warmth. She gave my stomach a long look, but agreed, took my cash, and went inside.
She came out a little while later with a thirty-rack of Miller and a small flask of Evan Williams.
“Thank you so much,” I said. “My dad is having a bad day and—”
“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to give me some bullshit story.” She handed me the beer and the whiskey. “I’m sure you’ve got your reasons.”
She walked away and I stood there for a moment watching her ponytail swing behind her, the beer heavy and cool against my hands.
I made it through the rest of the day. Mom, Billy, and I ate dinner together. While they did dishes, I snuck the beer and whiskey from my car into the shed. After, we watched TV. I even made them laugh, told them a story about a guy I delivered to once who shoved Hot Wheels up his ass, how he told me he did it because it just felt so damn good when they were taken out. It felt normal and comfortable, and when Billy grabbed my right hand, Mom grabbed my left, I didn’t even mind, squeezed both of their hands back.
In bed later, Billy and I were holding each other quietly. Sleep was tugging on my eyelids when Billy asked, “We’re going to be good parents, right?” Through the dark I could see the panic in his eyes—this wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Right?”
I closed my eyes tight. “Right.”
Even as I was getting out of bed, walking downstairs, pulling my shoes on and double-knotting them tight, I had no idea that in an hour I would be speeding down the highway blasting rock ballads, a gun rattling to the bass in the seat next to me. In the shed, I pulled out a beer, and the fullness of the fridge made me relax, the Evan Williams bottle on top of it a beacon of hope.
I was halfway through my second beer when I pulled out the piece of pizza-box cardboard that had Jenny’s new address written on it. She was already there, was just settling into bed in a new strange place that she’d now call “home,” the word tasting weird on her tongue. I traced my fingers over the cardboard, admired her handwriting, some of the letters loopy and carefree, the “a”s and the “o”s and the “c”s, others tight and cramped, those poor “t”s and “l”s, unable to stretch and loosen and exist how they were supposed to—this was not when I decided to go to Bakersfield.
This was:
I remembered one of the last conversations I had with Dad.
I’d been walking home from a party. My friend Alisha offered me a ride, but the booze was making me feel alive, and nothing felt more alive than walking home in that easy Los Angeles night, the only music my breathing and the neighborhood sounds.
I was five minutes away when I saw Dad walking from the opposite direction. There was no way to avoid him—we both needed to turn down the same street. He raised his hand. “Hey, there. Looks like we had the same idea.”
“No, I had an idea. You’re just too drunk to drive. I bet tomorrow we’ll find your car in the middle of the park again.”
He laughed and we walked next to each other.
“I think the Dodgers have a real good chance to get to the World Series this year,” he said.
“The Dodgers were eliminated from playoff contention two weeks ago,” I said.
“Ah, right. That sounds right. They just rip our fucking hearts out every year, don’t they?”
“Dad, why’re you so fucked up all the time?”
I tripped. An uneven stretch of sidewalk and I was on the ground, the knee of my jeans ripped open, dirt and blood. He knelt down next to me, pulled a flask out of his pocket, poured some whiskey over my cut, and blotted it dry with the sleeve of his jacket. “This is how they did it back in the Old West, before doctors and peroxide.”
I pushed his hand away. “Do you know how much you hurt Mom every day? Me? I don’t even know what you actually smell like, you always smell like booze and sweat.”
He plopped down on the sidewalk next to me. “You know, I try to quit every morning I get up. I lay in bed and I look up at the ceiling and I say, Hey, motherfucker, this is the day everything changes. Sometimes I make it days, weeks. I was sober the first year of your life, believe it or not.” He took a swig from his flask. “But some days, I don’t even make it an hour. I get out of bed, go downstairs, and I need to pour myself a drink. Because you know what I’ve learned, no matter how long I wait? That I will never be someone that is effortlessly good, it’ll always be hard work for me, and I’m not that strong.
“I think some people are just born broken. I think about life as one big Laundromat and some people just have one little bag to do—it’ll only take them a quick cycle to get through—but others, they have bags and bags of it, and it’s just so much that it’s overwhelming to even think about starting. Is there even enough laundry detergent to get everything clean?”
“People aren’t born broken,” I said.
“Well, if they’re not, that’s scarier. Because if I wasn’t born broken I don’t know when it happened. I can’t look at any point in my life and say, ‘Aha! This is the moment!’ ” He put the flask to his lips, paused. “Sometimes I think your mom and you would be happier if I just moved to an island in the middle of nowhere.”
I took the flask from him, had another drink. “That’s not true.”
We sat there quietly for a while, looking out at the street in front of us, wondering when we could get up and start walking home.
I hadn’t thought about that night in a while. I finished my beer and grabbed an armful more from the fridge, put the whiskey in my pants pocket, ran out of the shed. I had lied to Dad that night—Mom and I probably would’ve been better off if he’d just packed up all his shit one day and never come back—I thought that and I lied.
I put the beer in the Festiva and walked quietly back to my room, pulled Billy’s backpack out of the closet, and put his gun in my other pants pocket. Dad may have sat back and given up, but I wasn’t going to be like that. I wasn’t born broken. I wasn’t going to live alone on an island in the middle of nowhere.