Alistair McIntyre - Shallow Creek

“You’ve been busy,” he said, losing count of how many pots and pans were lying around in various states of use.

“Take this.”

His mom handed him a casserole to hold while she flipped the oven open. The hot air blasting out of the open door felt nice compared to the refrigerated temperature in the house. Without any warning, his mom grabbed the dish out of his hands and slid it into one of the few available spaces on the oven racks. She slammed the door shut and started chopping carrots on a wooden board sitting on the counter.

“Wash those dishes, would you, hun?”

Brendan followed her eyes to the double sink. Both sides overflowed with dishes and bowls and trays and utensils. Fearing the worst, he popped the dishwasher open and saw it was full.

“Don’t turn the dishwasher on until you’re done in the sinks, otherwise you’ll never get any hot water,” his mom advised sagely. Hot water could only be used for one task at a time. Such was the beauty of old houses with ancient water heaters.

Brendan started the process of clearing out one side of the sink, stacking the dirty dishes wherever possible, playing a dangerous game of Jenga with the crockery. Eventually he could see the bottom of the basin, so he got the hot water running and squirted some soap into the warm stream. He watched the bubbles form white mountains in the sink and asked his mom why she was making so much food.

“Michelle called to say Grant’s back in town, so I thought it would be nice to invite the whole family over.”

Brendan froze, his mind reeling.

“You better turn off that water before you flood it onto the floor,” his mom warned.

Absently he shut the water off and started washing dishes. The menial distraction helped avoid the violent outburst he felt searching for an outlet. The nastier part of him sought to stir up some extra trouble for some reason.

“The whole family, huh?” he said. “That include Taryn and Serge?”

His mom shot him an uncharacteristic sideways glare. He tried not to smirk, but did so anyway. The two continued on in a vacuum for about thirty minutes, his mom piling up more dirty dishes faster than Brendan could clean them. Additionally aggravating, she kept grabbing the clean ones and reusing them. The oven timer dinged as Brendan found himself washing the same knife for the third time.

“Oh, shoot,” his mother exclaimed, pulling a huge dish from the oven and setting it onto a small rack on the counter. “Hun, can you take a break and set the table for six?”

“Six?”

“Yes, six,” his mother said as she darted around, exasperated. “Blain will sit in a booster seat at the table and Sadie will sit in her highchair next to her momma.”

Brendan perfectly aligned all the silverware and placemats, giving in to the over-the-top attention to detail the Marines had instilled in him for years. With each completed setting, he dreaded dinner more and more. His dad liked to make innocent little comments about heavy subjects from time to time, and with his low opinion of Brendan, tonight seemed like a great time to break out the big guns. All it would take would be one question about Michelle feeling safer with Brendan sleeping on the couch in Grant’s house last night. Then the old man would sit back and watch the fireworks begin.

Before he knew it, his brother’s family showed up and the charade commenced. Everything rolled around pretty smoothly as three-year-old Blain repeatedly assaulted his laughing grandpa, and Sadie lay still, cradled in her momma’s loving embrace. Grant was talking to Brendan about something, but seeing Michelle sitting on the couch with a one-year-old tugging down the front of her shirt, Brendan had a flashback to the brief, yet explicit dream he’d experienced while waking up next to her. Michelle looked up and caught his stare, and returned it with a harsh glare and a quick head shake. That brief snippet that kept playing over and over, was that actually a memory? Part of him wished it was, even if it just proved to incriminate him further.

“So we still on for a beer tonight?” Grant asked him, slapping his shoulder.

Brendan recovered from his daze. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

Dinner went off without a hitch. His father made no weird references to the previous night, and Grant happily yapped away about everything under the sun, playing the role of the good son and engaging their parents in all of their favorite subjects. The meal drew to a close and Brendan volunteered to pick up some of the plates. He gathered up a short stack of dirty dishes and made his way into the kitchen.

Michelle followed closely behind and dragged him forcefully just out of line of sight from the table next door.

“Get your shit together,” she whispered viciously. “You want to screw this all up?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You keep looking at me funny.” When he looked at her in disbelief she added, “Just quit staring at me; it’s weird.”

Contrary to everything he knew about his father, the old man rumbled into the kitchen with a huge stack of plates and precariously balanced silverware. Michelle smiled sweetly to him as she casually strode back into the dining room. Brendan watched her go, but then heeded her words and took to scraping the crud off each plate into the open trashcan.

“Son,” his dad said in hushed tones, standing right next to him. “Nothing had better’ve happened between y’all last night.”

Brendan didn’t answer.

“Just saying, we all know what happened last time you pissed your brother off.”

“She was scared because of the attack and wanted me to stay and sleep on the couch,” Brendan insisted quietly. “That’s it.”

With that, Darryl Rhodes patted his son on the shoulder and sauntered back out of the kitchen, scooping up an escapee toddler in the process. The old man really took to the role of grandpa with gusto, displaying all kinds of overt emotions that Brendan had never seen before.

Little Sadie burst into the angry song of tiny infants, drawing a concerned look from her mother. Michelle tried in vain to console Sadie, but in the end relented and announced that she hated to dine and dash, but the little one hadn’t been sleeping well recently and really should get home. She started to pack up all the kids’ stuff as Grant came into the kitchen to talk to Brendan.

“Okay, I’ll drop the missus and kids off at home, then I’ll meet you at Trish’s in an hour. Sound like a plan?”

“Sure,” Brendan said as he opened the dishwasher to find it still jammed full of dirty dishes.

“I’ll try to be on time, but I’ve been gone for a while and you know how it is.” Grant winked for effect. “I can only do so much to keep her paws off me; I’m just a weak man.”

Brendan detected nothing other than gross machismo in his brother’s expression, but the parting words haunted him while he scraped and scrubbed his shame away.

Chapter 24

Brendan walked into Trish’s Place five minutes early and immediately spotted the same bartender behind the counter as always. Did that woman ever take a night off? His mom had agreed to finish cleaning up the mess in the kitchen so that Brendan could get here before Grant, but to Brendan’s surprise, his brother was already sitting in a booth along the wall. He swung past the bar to order a pair of Shiners, opened a tab, and then transported the beers to the table. Grant had apparently polished off his first already, because he started on the next beer as soon as it hit the table.

“You struck out?” Brendan asked.

“Ha, yeah,” Grant said with a rueful smile. “Something about a screaming baby really kills the mood.”

“I bet, I bet.”

The two brothers focused on drinking their beers and paying more attention to patrons at other tables than to each other.