David Gates - Jernigan

“Oh,” she said. “See I didn’t have any idea. I mean I don’t know what I have the right to say at this point. You know, if I say you kept me in the dark, all you have to do is turn around and say I kept you in the dark, and …” She stretched out her palm and blew at it, as if blowing away all her claims to be dealt with squarely.

I stood up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

“Speak to Danny,” I said. “If it’s all the same to you.”

“No, what I mean is, where are you going to go? When you leave. I mean that’s what this is , right?”

“That’s what this is,” I said. “We’ve been offered a place to stay. Up in New Hampshire.”

“Offered,” she said.

“A friend of mine,” I said.

“Oh, there’s always a friend, isn’t there?” she said. “New Hampshire, though. Very cold in the winter. But nothing lasts forever, right?”

“Spare me,” I said.

It was weird being on my feet. You know, after sitting. But I walked okay.

“I,” I said, very dignified, hand resting on the newel post as in It’s a Wonderful Life except the newel post didn’t come off in my hand, “am going to speak to my son. You might want to take the opportunity to do the same.” What I meant was, speak to her daughter. I must have thought I sounded Johnsonian or something.

She got up and followed. We were like a couple of parents going up to talk to the kids.

Star Trek or no Star Trek , I couldn’t do one more night of this.

I knocked. No answer. Just the tv going. Then Danny called, “What?”

“Hey Dan? I hope I’m not interrupting, but I badly need to talk to you.”

I heard the bolt snap, then the tv got louder as the door opened the width of a face. Danny’s face: his eyes level with mine. The stink of reefer. “Badly?” he said. “Super bad?”

“Are you in any shape to talk?” I said.

“Are you?” he said.

“If you’re together enough to be impertinent,” I said, “you’re together enough to talk. Would you get your things on, please, so we can take a walk?”

Impertinent , yet. Really increasing the old word power tonight, boy.

“A walk?” he said. “Dad, it’s snowing out there.”

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “You’re sixteen years old. It’s fun to walk in the snow. You know: trippy.”

Big teen-martyr sigh. “Okay,” he said. “Give me a minute, all right?”

I went down and had a couple more slugs of gin, and stuck the bottle in my overcoat pocket. Outside, it had gotten so cold that dry snow squeaked under our feet. Danny trudged along, the hood of his parka thrown back, ungloved hands in his pockets. Christ, it was winter: did he even own a pair of gloves? Sixteen years old, what was he going to do, buy them for himself out of his allowance? Snowflakes alighting on his hair.

“I’m sorry to drag you out here,” I said. “I just didn’t feel like we could talk about this in the house. I didn’t think it was”—it took me a second—“proper.”

“That what was?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I remember your saying that time we drove up to get the tree, that your situation, you know, vis-a-vis Clarissa, was getting weird.”

He said nothing.

“I mean, it’s not — if you remember — that I disagreed. It was just … I don’t know. But after this thing today — I mean, I just think you and I need to maybe, you know, step back. I think we rushed into this whole situation very very precipitously.”

“So?” he said. “We’re here now, right?”

“We’re not,” I said. “I mean, we are . But we do have options.”

“Yeah, like what?” he said. “You don’t even have a job anymore.”

“We just sold a whole house for a hundred thirty-seven thousand dollars,” I said. “We’re not exactly helpless.”

“So what happens when you go through that?”

“We’ll worry about that when it happens,” I said.

He stopped walking. The streetlights here were making the snow look pinkish. On the pink snow, black specks swam past us: the shadows of snowflakes.

“I knew you were going to just spend it all,” he said. “Bye-bye Berklee, right?” Where had he ever heard of Bye Bye Birdie? Maybe they’d had it on tv. Assuming the pun was intentional.

“Look,” I said. “We’ve been offered a place to live rent-free. I can easily get some little bullshit job and we’ll never even have to dip into the money.”

“What place?”

“Uncle Fred’s place up in the country.”

“You mean we’re supposed to live in a trailer in New Hampshire?” he said. “Da-ad . That’s crazy. Where would I even go to school?”

“They do have schools in New Hampshire,” I said. “It’s still the United States, you know?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, “schools for farmers. We don’t even know any people up there.”

“So you make new friends,” I said. “We didn’t know anybody here either, when we came from the city.”

“How am I supposed to make friends with farmers?”

“Sell drugs,” I said. “You’ll make friends.”

He bent down, formed a snowball with his bare hands and threw it at the stop sign. The snow was so dry it disintegrated in flight.

“Assuming you’re so totally lacking in social graces that you can’t make friends any other way,” I said, “you’ve got your music, right? Some band up there is probably going to fall all over themselves to get somebody like you for a guitar player.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Playing Willie Nelson farmer music.”

“Anyhow,” I said, “I’m not talking about moving up there forever. I just meant until we could get things figured out a little bit.” I was totally winging it on this part. “We go up there where it’s quiet, we cool out a little, and sort of go from there. I mean, basically we have the wherewithal to move pretty much anywhere we want. I mean, if you can think of a place you want to be, let’s do it. Or at least let’s talk about it.”

“I am where I want to be,” he said. He bent down and tried another snowball. “Stuff won’t hold together,” he said. He stuck his hands back in his pockets.

“Want to walk over to Oakdale?” I said.

“If you do,” he said.

“Dad?” he said, when we’d walked another block. “Was there someplace you wanted to be?”

You don’t tell your son Dead and in heaven .

“Trying to figure that out,” I said. “That was one of the reasons Uncle Fred’s place kind of appealed to me. You know, nature, quiet — all that Wordsworth kind of shit. Very nineteenth-century of me, I’m sure.” I can’t imagine who I thought I was talking to. He probably thought the nineteenth century was the 1900s. “You know,” I said, “Thoreau or something.” Silence. “Huck Finn,” I said.

“So why don’t j ust you go?” he said.

“Well, I’m certainly not going to leave you here.”

“Why not?” he said. “I’m okay.”

“You’re not,” I said. “I mean, even before all this shit today you were telling me how it was too weird around here. Today you have to run your girlfriend’s father out of the house with a gun . This is not the way I’m going to have you growing up.”

“He’s just crazy,” said Danny. “It’s not that big of a deal.” Up ahead, a branch crested with snow hung low over the sidewalk. Danny made a run at it — I took the opportunity to get the bottle out quick and have a good big gulp that made me cough and gag — and leaped, right arm high, as if going in for a lay-up. Snow showered his bare head. He waited for me to catch up, hand moving backward and forward across his hair, stirring up snowflakes that sparkled in the streetlight. Judith and I had made this beautiful boy.