Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“She ruins everything,” he’d said. “Even from three thousand miles away, she ruins everything.”

“She really loves you,” Will had said, because his mother said that to Will, just as his father said the same thing during his own drunken complaints and confessions, and Will thought they loved each other more than they detested each other because it was the love that came out, in blubbering tears, in their very deepest drunks, and Will believed that people were most honest when they were most drunk.

His mother dialed his father again on the cordless phone, letting it ring and ring for the course of half a cigarette, while her eyes got heavier and heavier until she closed them and seemed to be sleeping, with the phone still chirping mutedly at her cheek and the cigarette ash lengthening at her mouth. “Asshole,” she said finally, opening her eyes and hanging up and putting out her cigarette. “Why does he have to be such an asshole?” she asked Will directly, setting her face in a way that made her look as sad as she was angry. Will tried to reproduce it sometimes, staring in the mirror and raising his eyebrows while he frowned. When Sean caught him doing it once he told Will his face was going to get stuck that way if he wasn’t careful.

“I don’t know,” Will said, though in fact he knew that the answer was the same to the question his father asked him, on equivalent nights, in the equivalent situation, “Why does she have to be such a horrible bitch?”

“Then what good are you?” she asked, which wasn’t really an insult because it was what she always said when he answered that impossible question. “There was something I was going to tell you,” she said. She strained visibly, then relaxed back into her grimace. “Nope,” she said. “Now it’s gone.”

“That’s all right,” Will said. “Tell me later.”

“It’ll come,” she said. She wobbled when she stood, so he helped her into bed and stayed downstairs only long enough to make sure she didn’t light another cigarette and fall asleep with it. He took the Cookie Galore up to his room and lay in bed eating it with a big spoon and staring at his television, which was turned off, but he liked sometimes to imagine that he was watching his whole day again on the gray screen. He skipped right to the interesting part, and watched the lady hand him the hundred-dollar bill, and then watched her walk back to her Jaguar and drive it to her million-dollar home on the lake. She stood on the step to finish her ice cream, and wiped her mouth carefully before she went inside, and then he was too tired to imagine what it was like on the other side of the door. The Cookie Galore was all gone and he was too sleepy even to put the empty carton on his nightstand. He fell asleep with it tipped by his pillow.

He woke up a few hours later, not realizing a noise had startled him out of sleep until he heard it again: someone was moving around downstairs. His mother almost never woke until morning, and he wondered if he had locked the front door. There wasn’t a lot of crime in the neighborhood, but his mother lived in terror of a home invasion whenever Will’s father was away; she had a handgun in her dresser, and she made Will keep a baseball bat underneath his bed. He fished the bat out and crept downstairs with it, thinking he would see his mother gazing confusedly into the fridge, but it wasn’t his mother sitting and smoking in her customary chair at the kitchen table. It was his brother, who was supposed to be far away, living a life that had nothing to do with any of them. “I’ve come to take you away,” he blurted out, when he saw Will looking at him.

“Did you buy yourself something nice?” the lady asked when she came back again the next night. She mocked a few more flavors and then ordered another strawberry cone.

“It went into the college fund,” Will said, which wasn’t true. When Sean heard about his tip he insisted on taking him shopping, so that day, before their mother woke up and before their father got home, before any of the evening’s arguments about what Sean was doing or not doing with his life had begun, the two of them took a walk up Park Avenue and went browsing in the fancy shops for something that cost seventy-five dollars. Just taking him shopping wasn’t what Sean had meant when he said he was going to take Will away, but he wouldn’t say anything more about it just yet. “I’ve got a plan,” he said, “but I’m still thinking of the right way to sell it to you.” He nodded his head slowly in the way that he had, moving it very slowly at first but then faster, as if he were convincing himself as he spoke. “Yeah, I shouldn’t even have mentioned it yet, but I was so excited to see you.” He gave Will a hug. That was uncharacteristic, so Will asked what was wrong with him. “Nothing!” he said. “Everything.” He led Will along by the wrist. Will pulled away and put his hands in his pockets, but followed his brother out of the house and down the street.

Most of the town’s pretension was concentrated in five blocks that ran alongside a park full of magnolias and azaleas and monuments to William Flagler: the stores that clothed and jeweled the rich ladies, the fancy restaurants where lunch was served to them on artfully arranged plates, and the boutique hotel where they had the occasional assignation. Sean hated it all, and made fun of every store they entered, and everyone who worked in those stores, and yet he insisted that Will should get something nice for himself. “They never get you anything nice,” he said, meaning their parents. “What’s wrong with them?”

“They got me a car,” Will said, though technically they had only gotten him half a car — he had gotten the other half for himself out of years of savings.

“That thing’s a piece of shit. Try this on.” They were in a fancy men’s store, a place where all the shirts had distinguished logos at the left breast. Will’s ice-cream-loving classmate shopped there, and came to school every day in a different pastel-colored shirt, which Will now saw cost sixty dollars, whether they were tent-sized or normal-sized. He pulled the shirt on over his T-shirt. Sean folded his arms and stared at him. “That’s gorgeous on you,” said a salesgirl hovering nearby.

“It’s not quite right,” Sean said. “If you’re going to spend sixty bucks, it really needs to be perfect.” He said the same thing about six more shirts, about a pair of shoes three stores down, about a series of wallets, and five different colognes, and finally a pair of golf pants.

“We’ve run out of nice stores,” Will said, because they’d come to the end of Park Avenue. Across the street there was a gas station and a muffler shop and then the Rollins College campus. “Mission not accomplished,” Will said. “Oh, well.” He hadn’t really wanted to spend the money anyway.

“One more store,” Sean said, and crossed the street to the college campus. Will thought they might be going to the bookstore for a sweatshirt, which he was going to say was not a very luxurious item, but Sean kept going past the bookstore to a dorm on the lake. “They might be closed,” he said, but the door he was looking for was wide open. There was an exchange that Will didn’t totally follow — it involved some hugging and a complicated handshake and the two of them saying Dude! a few times, and then Sean was asking Will for his seventy-five dollars and exchanging it for a large bag of pot. The kid shook Will’s hand, like he had won something, and then Sean took him down to the college boathouse, where they sat under the dock near the edge of the water and got stoned. “I swear I wasn’t planning that,” Sean said. “I just thought of it all of a sudden. And I knew it wasn’t something you’d ever do for yourself.”