I grit my teeth as I take a deep breath and then shake my head. Fuck it. “Do you even hear yourself?”
“Yes. I’m telling my son if he applied himself, he could be great.”
“Why can’t I just be great? Every other parent looks at their kid like they’re the greatest creation in the world, and mine looks at me like a disturbance. A visitor who came in and ruined his afternoon plans because he came for fucking Christmas.”
His eyes narrow. “What has gotten into you?”
“Nothing. I should be used to coming here and getting the cold shoulder.”
“Well, maybe I’d be more receptive if you were choosing a better profession. A degree in social work is a waste of a Berkeley education.”
“I want to help people.”
“Then, help them as an attorney. A doctor. What will you make? Forty thousand a year? That’s not a way to sustain a lifestyle.”
“Not yours, but I’ll do just fine.”
He exits his house and steps closer to me. “That’s the problem with you, Wesley. You don’t think anyone has anything important to say but yourself.”
“Is that all?”
“No. Before you go, there are boxes in the guest room. They were your grandmother’s. Your mother said you should take them since you’re the only one who liked the old woman.”
Dad leaves, and I’m here, standing in a home I despise. Turns out, it’s not just my childhood home I can’t stand. It’s any home my parents occupy.
I don’t even know where the guest room is, so I walk around this vault of a home in search of it. I figure out which is my father’s bedroom and then my mother’s bedroom before I uncover the guest room with a box sitting on the bed. I sit down and take it in. It’s pretty big, and it seems to have been manhandled a bit.
Propping open the top, I look inside to see it’s filled with photo albums.
I’m surprised when I see how many of them are of me. I never knew what I looked like as a baby until my grandma showed me because my parents had zero pictures of me in their home.
Graduations and milestones, all of it is captured in pages of the albums, tucked inside plastic before printed photo books were a thing. She even saved the holiday cards I’d sent her over the years. My handwriting was chicken scratch over the construction-paper cards. My drawings were kinda cute though.
Grandma loved me. That’s probably the only thing that got me through. If there was one person who told me I was good, that I was perfect the way I was … it was her. That’s why I couldn’t let them toss her away when Alzheimer’s started to set in. I needed to see her, to remind her that she still had many good days left as well as a boy who loved her.
She told me hundreds of stories, making sure they were all passed down to someone since her own daughter didn’t have a care in the world about her or anyone else besides herself. I have them all though. Sometimes, I share them with my friends. I change the names and pretend they just happened, but they’re hers. Tales from a day where she ran wild in Los Angeles.
I open another box and see photos of her. A film actress in her youth, she was gorgeous. She could have been famous, but she met my grandfather and fell madly in love. They had my mother, and she chose to stay home to be a wife and a mother. How Mom ended up as selfish as she is, is beyond me. It’s why I lost hope in everything at all.
Another album has pictures of her wedding day. I never met my grandfather. He passed in a car accident when he was only thirty-seven, leaving my grandmother as a widow at a young age. Grandma talked about him like he was magnanimous. She was so in love.
We didn’t have any other family here, so she surrounded herself with friends. It was something she valued greatly in life. Friendships.
It’s funny; the day Chad and I became friends is probably the best and worst day of my life.
I was ten years old and riding my bike in town. I stopped at a store when I saw my father walking out of a restaurant. It wasn’t a usual occurrence for me to see my dad out and about, so I shouted his name.
He saw me, and instead of a smile that a father would have at seeing his son, he had a scowl. He was angry. Angry to see me.
He shooed me away, but I didn’t move. I didn’t understand why he wanted me to go. Like I was someone he didn’t know and he was embarrassed I was bothering him.
Confused. I was so damn confused.
And then the woman appeared. She walked out of the restaurant, saw my father, and smiled. He kissed her, acting as if he were leisurely waiting for her to come outside. He placed his hand on the small of her back as the valet brought the car around. When they got in and drove away, it was without a second glance in my direction.
That was the day I learned two things: My father was having an affair, the first of many. And he didn’t love me.
I was devastated. My shirtsleeve was a tissue as I walked my bike home. I didn’t even have the energy to ride on it.
Then, I saw Chad. I didn’t know where he had come from, but he was just standing there, watching me. If he had seen what my dad did, Chad never said.
All he did was say, “Hey. You go to my school.”
I nodded. “So?”
“I dunno. I just thought I’d say so.”
“Well, you said it, so move on.”
Yeah, I was a jerk back then too.
“All right. You wanna come over to my house?”
“Why would I do that?”
He shrugged as he brushed back his shaggy hair. “Because I have a trampoline in the backyard, and my mom says I can’t be too rough on it because my sister cries when I bounce too hard, but if I had a friend over, she’d let me bounce as high as I wanted.”
The kid had a trampoline? I was sold.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Cool! You play baseball? I just got a new glove. If you don’t have one, you can have my old one. I need someone to throw to. My dad kinda sucks, and I wanna be a Major League Baseball player when I grow up.”
The kid never stopped talking. I never stopped doing whatever kind of crazy thing he wanted to do next either.
That day, I made my one and only best friend. My brother.
I reach in the box and pull out a picture of Chad and me at a Little League game. I remember the first time Grandma met Chad. He rode his bike with me to visit her. She told me he was the forever kind. A true friend.
“Cherish someone like that,” she said one day when I was reliving stories of Chad and me.
“Everyone else teaches you family is the most important thing in life,” I said.
“Meh.” She brushed the notion away. “Blood is thicker than water, but water tastes better.”
I wish she were still alive. I need her guidance. I need her to tell me it’s okay that I want to be my own man. Congratulate me on my GPA or tell me how good my swing was. Not because I need the acceptance, which I do, but because hearing it from her made me feel like I was human. Like I mattered. The Brightmores made me feel that way too.
Now, that’s a family. Not just in the nuclear sense. They get their children and love them unconditionally.
I know that’s why I was so drawn to Chad all those years ago. I bet he doesn’t even understand why. As close as we were—and we were close—there were certain aspects of my life I kept inside.