Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

It’s close to zero every day and the ice mats in big chunks on the door so it’s a hassle prying it open every morning, and the wind howls and whips through the piles of snow that cover our car and our mailbox and the red-and-white barbershop pole downstairs.

The day they fired my father we stayed in all afternoon watching soap operas and game shows. He ordered a pizza and said this was an opportunity, but it wouldn’t last long and so we should enjoy this time together.

When my mom came home from work, he told her he’d been let go but it was all right, he loved us and that’s what was important. She hugged him, but she looked desolately out the window, like an Iraqi war widow I saw on CNN whose husband came home with no legs. And I knew things were about to change. We watched movies that night until I got tired and went to sleep, but when I woke up at two to get a glass of juice from the fridge, he was in the family room, the couch surrounding his body like an old coat.

Something happened the day they fired him. He seemed content in the way calm people get when their bus is delayed and they figure complaining will do no good. He entered this funk in which he stopped washing or changing his clothes or eating at the table or bothering to sleep anywhere but the couch. And he watched TV. My mom says now she could see it coming on even before he got fired because no one gets fired for no reason, though it never seems justified when it happens to you.

He grew fat in front of the tube and he called about jobs a few times, but his heart wasn’t in it. And when I tried to talk to him about it one night, he forgot my name for a full minute. He kept calling me Karl.

“I’m tired, Karl. Leave me alone for a bit,” he said, each word slow and planned out.

“What’s my name, Dad?” I asked.

He looked at me puzzled and then looked back at the TV.

“What’s my name?” I said again.

“I know your name, now hush up,” he said, calm, like we were in a library and he was reading a book.

“What is it then?” I asked. I wanted to hear him say it.

“It’s Dexter, okay, it’s Dexter,” he said. But he forgot for a moment, and anyhow his brother Karl had been dead for twelve years.

He pointed his plate, smeared with dried salsa, at Hawkeye Pierce on the screen.

“You like this show, Dex?” he asked. And I said, “You know I do.”

Russell’s Jeep is humming now and the snow is melting off his defrosting windshield, just like it melted in his hair. Snow doesn’t stick to Russell. He opens the passenger-side door and pulls the seat down so I can squeeze myself into the backseat. It’s not really a space for a person, more for a toolbox or Russell’s snowboard, but I sit lengthwise with my knees against my chest.

“You okay there, Dex?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer and moves his head back out of the Jeep. The wind is so loud outside I can barely hear the music that’s playing from Russell’s stereo. The Jeep smells like cold clean air, the kind you earn by not leaving food or sweaty things around in it. Russell jumps in his side and he drops down the emergency brake. He runs his fingers up my mother’s back and into her hair and gives her head a little scratch. Then he puts his hand on the gearshift and moves into drive.

The snow is falling and the road is sloshing around Russell’s tires. There are only a few cars out and they are crawling, their drivers fearing they’d spin out if they went more than fifteen miles an hour. Russell’s got a jazz CD in, the kind where everyone’s trying to figure out what song they’re playing, and he’s acting like he knows it, wagging his index finger like a conductor’s wand to the blasts from the sax.

Russell sells boats and rifles and fishing gear to sports stores so he’s on the road a lot, all over the East Coast. It was Russell who told me my father was in the hospital. He knew because he was with us for Christmas and answered the phone when the doctor from New York City called.

The doctor said my father is chock-full of chemicals from the landfill where he worked, which led to his slowness and forgetting all the time. He also had pneumonia and some complications from that, but they aren’t sure where the pneumonia came from. The doctor said my father is comfortable and is getting good treatment, which I know means he’s dying.

When my mom found out, she cried a lot and she wanted to drive down to New York. But Russell said that would be “jumping the gun.” I think the main reason I can’t stand Russell is the way he acted the night of the call. He kept saying my father would get better and that we were lucky we had each other, as if he knew us.

“He wants us down there,” I yelled at my mother. “You owe it to him. If he dies, it’s on your head!”

At that my mother walked into her bedroom and slammed the door. I would have followed her. I would have apologized, maybe talked her into driving to New York, but Russell blocked my path.

“Dexter,” he said. “Let’s you and I go for a soda.”

And so we did.

It was December 27 and all the lights were still up on First Street. The town was silent other than the hum of a thousand green and red bulbs laced over street signs and lanterns and dropped through the arms of short bare trees. Russell drove me in his Ford Taurus — his practical car — to the Ritz Diner, which stays open all night for the college kids and the all-night power plant workers and the winos who have no other place to go. It didn’t seem like the kind of place Russell would frequent, but every other place was closed.

He had on a tight red racing sweater and did not remove his ski hat when we slid into a booth. We sat not talking for a while within the rustle of the diner: newspapers folding, a jukebox fluting, a waitress lazily clearing plates.

“You miss him a lot, don’t you?” he said finally.

“Yes,” I said.

“What kind of kid wouldn’t want his pop around?”

He looked over my shoulder as he spoke. The owner of the Ritz, a red-faced man with a spruce white ring of hair around his otherwise bald head, approached carrying two menus.

“You fellows take your time,” he said, opening them in front of us.

I sensed Russell was building up to something; he was going to lay his cards on the table. He rubbed his left eye, then flashed it four or five times as if finding the right focus.

“A boy needs someone around. He needs someone to look up to. I know that.” He nodded his head. “But, mister, don’t go riding your poor mother about that man in New York. He’s put her through quite enough. She’s getting her life on track again. Don’t go throwing her off the rails.”

He leaned toward me, over the table as though he might at any moment grab my collar.

“Listen, she can’t remember a single happy memory about that man. All she remembers is him sitting around and driving her crazy. You want that again? Your father’s been sick before. He’ll be all right. It’s part of his makeup.”

He disappeared then behind his menu. All I could see was the top of his ski hat.

“What if he isn’t all right?”

“Look, if it’s serious, we’ll get the news. We’ll get you to New York. But it doesn’t do any good to start imagining how the world’s going to come apart.”

Two women in the next booth were listening to our conversation. One of them, blond and with a pierced eyebrow and bright red lipstick, turned around quickly when I looked up.

The Ritz owner glanced over at us from the counter, where he was reading the paper, and Russell motioned him over.

I told Russell to order for me and I went to the men’s room. I stayed there for fifteen minutes maybe, sitting on the pot, not doing anything but avoiding Russell. And when I walked out, he was eating a wet piece of apple pie and talking to the woman with the pierced eyebrow.