Matt Cowper - The Clerk

“Do you understand why I’m telling you this?” Frank asked.

He’d asked Thomas this same question the previous five or so times they’d gone down this dark corridor of family history, and each time Thomas had made empathetic noises that, in theory at least, were supposed to let his father know that he did indeed understand. His father, however, had seemed to be disappointed in the answers. It was as if he believed that Thomas hadn’t suffered enough to truly comprehend what he was talking about, which made Thomas wonder just what suffering he must endure to pull even with his father. Was his father going to off himself too to show Thomas what he meant?

No, Thomas would speak truthfully now. He was already angry with his parents’ behavior during and after the Emily Crisis, and he was glad they were returning to Florida tomorrow. The other crises and dramas in his life had also built up inside him until he felt like beating some hapless bystander to a pulp just to release it all. He would speak truthfully, and if it upset his father, tough shit.

“No, I don’t really understand, Dad,” Thomas said, looking back at his father and frowning. A UPS truck sped past, shaking the Traverse, but Thomas was no longer concerned about their idiotic parking spot. He almost wished someone would ram into them just to prove how foolish his father was being.

“Well, uh — why not?” Frank hadn’t expected this answer. He’d expected Thomas to respond as he had before, so that Frank could shake his head and conclude that his son still didn’t get it. It seemed he would get a candid answer, and candor in other people made Frank Copeland uneasy.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with me,” Thomas said. “You keep telling the same story, but all this happened before I was born. This all happened to you , it affected you .”

“It’s meant to be an instructive story…”

“No, it’s more than that. You think there’s some Copeland Family Curse, and that unless we all confront it — and not just once, but over and over! — we’re going to, what, kill ourselves?”

“Don’t be so flippant, Thomas. I care about you and Emily. I don’t want you two to succumb to what took away my father. That’s why I insisted on coming down here with Dan…”

“I’m not succumbing to anything. Emily, yes, she’s been wild lately, so I can see why you’d be concerned. But now that’s all been resolved, apparently, and she sounds happy. But you keep bringing up doom and gloom, and now it sounds like I’m the focus again, instead of Emily. What do you want, Dad? Do you want me to be miserable so that, what, you can have something to fix? So that you can say the Copeland Family Curse really does exist, it’s not something that just affected you? I mean, Grandma didn’t go through all this, did she? She moved on with her life. She was happy. She never talked about what happened — at least, not to me.”

Frank Copeland put the Traverse in drive and jolted onto the highway. He’d pulled out right in front of someone, and the driver pressed on his horn angrily, and revved up to within inches of their back bumper.

“Dad?” Thomas said, gripping his seat. “What the hell? Are you trying to kill us?”

“No, I’m not,” Frank growled. “Not that it would matter, anyway.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Just shut up, son. Just shut up.”

“Shut up?” Thomas yelled. “Like I’m five years old? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Frank pulled onto a side street, then whipped back out onto Highway 101, heading south towards Beaufort. Again, the turning-off and turning-on were harrowing experiences for Thomas and other motorists, with horns blown and drivers mouthing infuriated words through their windshields.

“I’ll just say this, Thomas,” Frank began with the gravity of a 19th century orator, “and then I won’t say anything to you again. You don’t like me. I know that. You never have. You’ve never listened to me. You didn’t want to work at Copeland Furniture when you were young, and then when it came time for me to retire you still didn’t want any part of the business. We sent you off to that whatever-it-was, that leadership conference, and you were ungrateful. You didn’t want to go to college. All you want to do is piddle around in that goddamn grocery store, and let Vernon Oxendine take advantage of you.”

“Listen, Dad…”

“No, you listen. Let me finish. Now, I’m not throwing everything on you. Emily is the same way. Once she went off to Raleigh, that was it. She was done with us. We were lucky if we saw her twice a year. And now she’s going through a divorce, and fornicating all over the world with this new lover, and me and your mother still haven’t seen her since Christmas, and everyone acts like that’s OK, especially that idiot husband — ex-husband — of hers.”

Frank paused to let this sink again, and then was quickly back on his foaming charger. “Do you know what it’s like for your children to despise you? No, you don’t, because you don’t have any — which, I’ve always thought, is another repudiation of my lifestyle.”

“It’s not…”

“Let me finish. I drove out here, back home, because this place, what happened here, is important to me, and it matters to all of us. I know you’ve heard the story five times or ten times or fifty times, but it’s still important to me, and it still matters to all of us . But instead of talking to me about it like a civil human being, you call me a fool and accuse me of wishing suffering on my own son. Well, I’ve had it, and I’ll be glad to get back to Florida and away from the contempt of my children — because that’s what it is: pure, unadulterated contempt.”

They had reached the outskirts of Beaufort, and Frank reluctantly had to slow down. They merged onto Live Oak Street and drove past the small, quaint houses that lined the road.

“Are you done?” Thomas asked, after a minute or so of silence.

“Yes, I am,” Frank Copeland responded.

Thomas wondered whether he should reignite the argument. He was tired of his father instigating conflict, and then acting like he was the injured party when someone dared to fire back at him. He was tired of his father believing that everyone needed the Frank Copeland Seal of Approval, as Dan had sarcastically put it. He was tired of his father’s mood swings, when he’d act forthright and efficient in one moment, downtrodden and put-upon the next. Someone needed to knock some sense into him — and Thomas wouldn’t mind doing it right now, though at all other times he would’ve considered striking a parent to be a mortal sin.

In sum: why was the man so fucking difficult?

Frank Copeland was asking himself the same thing about his son, but neither of them revealed their parallel thoughts. Father and son were silent as they drove across Radio Island and over the high-rise bridge into Morehead City, and the only noise in the vehicle was the soft crackling of the radio.

“Morning, Thomas,” Vernon said as Thomas stepped through the back door.

“Morning, Vernon,” Thomas replied, smiling. It had been a rough few days, but his mood had improved slowly, and now he was feeling freer and happier than he had in a long time.

Amazing how things could change. Just three days ago, as his parents drove off to Florida, he’d felt an abyss-like emptiness within him. Nothing had been settled with his father, and Thomas could imagine a furious Frank Copeland at the wheel of the Traverse, plunging southward like a rampaging forest fire, destroying the I-95 corridor in a way that General William Tecumseh Sherman would’ve thought damn impressive. Thomas almost followed behind his parents, so that he could catch up to his father and have a roadside reconciliation, with hugs, tears glinting in the sunshine, and touching violin music playing in the background. But he steadied himself, and let them go.