Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“You got a game plan?” he asked. “How are we going to break this to her?”

“Who’s we? I said you could come to Pittsburgh with me. I didn’t say you could join me in Mackenzie’s office.”

He looked mortally wounded.

“James, don’t even argue. I’m not talking about this anymore.”

“Dude, be honest with yourself. Someone like me is far more likely to walk into a sex therapist’s office than you. Maybe you’re not remembering the glory days, my friend, but it was with me that things got messy. It was in my hotel room that someone got defiled or maybe drizzled with—”

“So, I’m going to say this again, more slowly this time. Our visit has nothing to do with sex therapy. If you think you should write that down, by all means do so. I’m not going in there for sex therapy. I’m not going to pretend to have a sexual problem. Sex is not going to come up at all. She could be a goddamn auto mechanic for all I care. Is what I’m saying beginning to make any sense at all to you?”

Suddenly a maelstrom of coughing and gagging erupted in the backseat. Elmer lurched forward in a fit of hacking so intense and relentless that his face instantaneously went from its resting shade of ashen gray to ketchup red, and I was sure that the old man was going to die right there in my car. Either that or some dark, gelatinous organ—a lung, a liver, a segment of small intestine—would be disgorged from his gullet and sail clear over the seat back.

As this violent whooping went on for a truly alarming length of time, I pulled over onto the shoulder and shot Jumbo a worried look.

“He just needs some air, is all,” my passenger said.

Jumbo got out, opened the rear door, and extracted his father, who was still convulsing in barks and gags. With the calm facility of a health care professional, which he claimed he was but could not possibly have been, Jumbo slowly guided his old man toward the edge of the trees lining the turnpike.

I watched them standing together beyond the shoulder of the road, the father hunched over, hands on his knees like a marathon runner at the finish line, struggling to regain the normal patterns of inhaling and exhaling, and the son hovering over him, patting his back and cool-headedly coaching him to relax and wait it out, telling him he was going to be fine. Sure enough, the seizure subsided and the horrendous noises coming from Elmer’s lungs gave way to the gentle wind of passing cars. For someone who could rightly claim to be the root cause of so many crises, Jumbo could responsibly quell this one, and it was fascinating to witness.

“Does he need medical attention?” I asked once Jumbo had deposited his father back into the car.

He waved dismissively—don’t be silly—and reached for his coffee. If it had been up to me, I would’ve driven straight to a hospital or at least a frickin’ Rite Aid. At a minimum, the guy needed a cough drop.

“Is he sick?” I whispered.

“No more so than the rest of us, Mingus. Don’t you have any older relatives with ailments?”

I had a grandmother who’d lost it—she sent me birthday checks four times a year—but I wasn’t exactly trotting her out on road trips.

“So, he doesn’t have, like, tuberculosis or anything?” I asked.

Jumbo shook his head. “I doubt it.”

Feeling somewhat like an ambulance driver now, I merged us back into traffic.

At some point, I needed to check in with Sara. She couldn’t have been terribly high on the idea of my coming out here, now that my recruitment efforts had shifted to Mackenzie, and I probably should have offered her some reassurance. I should have told her that whatever had gone on between Mack and me way back when, it was a dead issue. Mack didn’t like me anymore; she couldn’t have. I’d made her an accessory to adultery. Most people could shake off such a thing—me, for example, who didn’t give it a second thought—but not the honest and true soul that Mack was. In all likelihood, the years had allowed all those bad feelings to calcify into something stronger, a bitterness unlikely to taper off. I suppose Sara sensed how much I hoped Mack didn’t loathe me. I felt it in the way she looked at me, a world of unspoken words behind her eyes.

But other things were pulling Sara away too. This husband of hers had returned, compelling Sara to face her past, to look it in the eye, to speak to it, to bid it goodbye. Changes had come for Sara, changes that no one but Billy had the power to exact. But Sara couldn’t change without my life changing in either minor or possibly monstrously major ways. Things were happening for me—finally. I had plans. I wanted my changes, not hers.

As I gazed out through the windshield, I knew I had to live with wherever this galloping highway was leading me. Just as I had to live with wherever Sara’s highway was leading her.

Both of my passengers were now silent. Jumbo was squinting out at the scenery. Elmer was reclining in the backseat, his jacket zipper at half-mast, his head turned to the side. He looked small and tired.

“So what is all this about?” I said to Jumbo. “Is your old man trying to make up for lost time after he and your mother split?”

“Not at all. It was me who went missing, Mingus. Dad was always around. The band kept me away a lot. He missed the hell out of me.”

I wondered what that was like. My old man never missed me for a second. I’d come back from a tour and he wouldn’t even know I’d been gone. He’d occasionally ask about a trip, but only as a springboard for tales of his own travels. You played Hong Kong, did you, Ted? The last time I was there, I was taken to the most outstanding French restaurant. It was over on the Kowloon side . . . And never in a million years would Lou Tremble tag along on an excursion such as this just to spend time with me, what with all those clients to service and associates to terrorize. Perish the fucking thought. If he were in the car today, he’d be leaning over the seat, chinking the shit out of my armor with all the reasons why this whole trip was a joke. And he would’ve had zero patience for the likes of Elmer and his roadside display of infirmity. For him, all sickness was in your head, conquerable merely by attitude adjustment. Unless you had cancer the size of a Big Mac or something that required extended hospitalization , chances were it didn’t exist. That’s how I was raised. If you took the day off to lie around in bed and moan, you were either faking or not trying hard enough to ignore it. I heard the mantra countless times growing up: “You just say to yourself”—there was a lot of saying stuff to yourself in my father’s code of health maintenance—“You just say to yourself, ‘I’m not going to let this get me down.’ It’s usually just as simple as that, Ted. If you want to let it beat you, well, I guess that’s up to you.” In other words, the world could present no problem for which there wasn’t some overly simplistic and absurdly useless solution. Yeah, sure, I’ll get up and walk it off. Can I have my fucking antibiotic first?

I stabbed the stereo knob and twisted up the volume, the music giving me the fortitude to barrel through. Outside, the farms had given way to a steep barricade of mountains to the right.

A few songs in, Jumbo piped up. “I got news for you: When do you want to stop for lunch?”

“You need to work on your usage of that phrase. If you say you’ve got news for me, news should follow.”

Jumbo sat there, unruffled.

“Do you understand? Don’t tell me you have news for me and then ask a question.”

“Tomato, tomahto, my friend.”

“No. It isn’t like that at all. It’s like when you say irregardless . That’s not a word. It’s just regardless .”