Things Remembered

    Robert stabbed a far-too-mushy potato with his fork and peered over at the young man with the crooked grin who sat across the table from him.  That grin was really beginning to eat away at Robert.   

    "You a sports fan, Jason," he asked, stuffing a mound of potato mush into his mouth.

    "A little bit."

    "Three things about sports.  One, hockey is the most underrated sport in North America."

    "I hate hockey."

    "Two, anyone who follows football and feels the NFL got its start in January of 1967 deserves to be banned from ever watching the games."

    "The NFL wasn't the NFL until they came up with the Super Bowl."

    "Three, the New York Yankees embody everything that's wrong with professional sports."

    "The Yankees have a great tradition.  They're probably the model of what every sports franchise should be."

    Robert grunted, bowed his head and shoved a slice of too-salty-for-words roast beef into his mouth.  He did not look up, but he could feel that Jason's damned grin was still in place.

    "You must like to argue?"

    "I just like to think I have a mind of my own."

    Robert was trying his level best to make Jason feel uncomfortable, but it was obvious that it was not working.  The young man was confident and more than a little cocky.  Robert hated that it any of his daughter's boyfriends.  He thought that it showed a lack of respect.

    Robert's daughter finally returned from the bathroom and took her place beside Jason.  "Sorry," she said, placing her napkin back on her lap, "something got in my eye.  Mom got it out for me."

    Robert knew that Lydia was lying.  At these dinners, she loved to come up with sly excuses to leave him alone with her boyfriend so that the men could indulge in man talk.  Robert liked to use this time to intimidate the hell out of the young man.  It was a game that he and his daughter had played since the day she began dating, and in his way, Robert enjoyed it.

    This was the fourth time in her lifetime that one of Lydia's boyfriends had made it to the "dinner date with the parents" stage of their relationship.  Robert always took the young men to Darby's Family Restaurant, a great place to eat if one could afford the stomach pump.  The first time Lydia was still in high school, and she and that boy did not make it more than two weeks past their dinner date.  Robert actually liked her second beau, Nick, and he graduated past the concrete slab that was Darby's to a second dinner date at the Mediterranean-flavored Monticello's, two blocks to the west and around the corner.  Thus, and Robert always felt it was because he liked the boy, Lydia dumped Nick just before her sophomore year in college.  A year later, Robert met Thomas, a skinny, quiet boy whom Robert could never see as husband material for his daughter.  Nevertheless, they dated through Lydia's final two years as an undergraduate, but they seemed to grow apart the closer they got to graduation.  The summer after they graduated, Thomas told Lydia that he was leaving for New York to seek work as a playwright and that he would call her when he got there.  That call never came, and for her part, Lydia never seemed to care.

    Finally, just as Lydia was about to enter her first semester of graduate school, there came Jason, six feet and two inches of shaggy red-haired lankiness with a flip attitude and that damned ever-present grin, as if he was a forever-scheming class clown.  They had met during a summer internship at a local business and had started dating soon after.  They did not seem to be truly serious with one another at this point, though Robert wondered if Jason could ever appear to be serious.

    "Shouldn't you watch your salt, hon," Robert's wife asked as he poured salt over his potato mush.

    "I'll watch my salt tomorrow, Rose," he growled.  "Right now, these potatoes need it."

    "So, mom," Lydia broke in quickly, fearful that one of her parents' infamous spats-over-nothing was about to break out, "how's grandma doing in Arizona?"

    "Well, you know grandma.  She complained about the cold here in Ohio, she complains about the heat in Arizona. . ."

    Robert's mind drifted away from the conversation and he began to stare out the window at nothing in particular.  He scratched the back of his grey crew cut, then brought his hand down over his smooth, plump jowls.  He was beginning to feel a great deal of resentment over spending an evening at an inedible dinner with a boy that he was genuinely starting to dislike.  There was preseason football on tonight, damn it.

    ". . .aren't you, dad?"

    "Hmmm. . .?"

    "Your dad's daydreaming again," Rose said with a hint of irritation in her voice.

    "I'm sorry.  You were saying," Robert said with more than a hint of sarcastic pleasantness in his voice.

    "I was just telling Jason how you're the boss of your own lumber yard.  His dad is in lumber, too."

    "Really?  Which yard?"

    "I really don't know," Jason replied.  "I've never really met my dad.  He and my mom split up when I was a baby."

    "Oh, yeah?  That's too bad.  Not uncommon anymore, though."

    "So, your mother raised you alone," Rose asked.

    "My mom kind of got busy with her job, she was moving around a lot, so when I was five or six she left me with my Aunt Penny, and she raised me."

    "By herself?  She didn't have a husband?"

    "Never married.  We think she's a lesbian, but she won't admit to it."

    "So," Robert said, holding up a limp slice of roast beef and studying it, "is your aunt rich or something?  How'd you get your way through college paid?"

    "I'm smart," Jason said with a shrug, his grin growing a tad more broad.

    "Jason got a full scholarship to Ohio State," Lydia said, placing a hand on Jason's shoulder, her green eyes glowing a bit more radiantly.  "He made straight A's all through high school, and he's been on the dean's list every semester in college."

    "So, what graduate school are you attending this year," Rose asked.

    "I don't know yet.  I'm thinking of staying at Ohio State, but I don't graduate for another year.  I'm afraid your daughter's into younger men."

    "Jason. . .," Lydia squealed softly, giving him a playful tap on the arm.

    Now Robert wished he could zone out again.  "So," he said, clearing his throat and frowning, "you grew up near here?"

    "I grew up in Hillsboro, though my mom was originally from New Vienna before she began to move around."

    "Robert used to do business in New Vienna," Rose said, "what was it, fifteen years ago?  When you were still in sales, right?"

    "Something like that," Robert said, rubbing his chin and looking uncomfortable, as if he were trying to recall something important.

    "I don't know much about the town.  I haven't had much of a reason to go there since mom dumped me with Aunt Penny."

    "I don't mean to pry," Rose said, "but what did your mom do that she had to move around so much?"

    "Mom. . .," Lydia said in a discouraging tone.

    "It's alright, Lydia.  Mom was a seamstress when I was born, but she wasn't getting a lot of money for it.  So, she had a friend who worked for a travelling rodeo outfit out of Indiana and she started working there, but I don't think it was for the money.  Anyhow, I don't think she's had a home since."

    Robert's pallor had become ashen and a thin film of perspiration began to materialize on his brow.  His hand shook as he lifted a glass of water to his lips, and as he drank a trickle of water slid down his windpipe, causing him to cough violently.

    "Dad, are you okay?"

    "Careful, hon. . ."

    Robert swallowed hard a couple of times and attempted to regain his voice.  "I'm fine," he croaked, "I just need to use the bathroom."

    With that, he clumsily slid his way past his wife and made his way to the small one-urinal-and-toilet men's room at the back of the restaurant.

    He shut the door hard and turned the latch that locked the door.  His face, his whole head felt hot, and he cranked open the cold water faucet and began to splash water about his head.  Rubbing a gritty palm down his face, he looked up to see his reflection in the bathroom's diminutive mirror.  The forty-seven-year-old plump-faced lumber man with the developing crags in his face and the stern green eyes that he had seen in his bedroom mirror that morning was gone.  Instead, he stared at a bloated, red-faced being with eyes that bulged slightly and a vein protruding from the right side of its skull.  He grabbed a cone-shaped cup from a dispenser to his left and, filling it, gulped down a swallow of bitter tasting bathroom water.  He could feel something trembling at his core, and his extremeties had grown clammy.

    A soft rapping at the door caused an adrenaline shock to shoot through him, then he heard the muted voice of his wife.

    "Robert?"

    "I - - I'm coming."

    His trembling hand grabbed the cool doorknob and turned it, opening the door.  When he did so, his wife witnessed a somewhat dazed caricature of her husband on the other side.

    "Rose," he said, his eyes never meeting hers, "sh-she can't date that-that boy."

    "What?  Robert, what's gotten into you?"

    "I - - oh, god, Rose, I don't know what to say.  I'm so sorry, I was so stupid. . ."

    Lydia came up behind Rose, and half-whispering, said, "Dad, what's wrong?"

    "Lydia, my god!  Please, please tell me you haven't slept with him."

    "Dad!"

    "Robert, what - -," Rose started, her mouth moving wordlessly for a few seconds, unable to put voice to her words.  "That is completely inappropriate."

    "I'm twenty-two years old, dad.  I think I'm past the point where you have anything to say about this."

    "No. . .no, you don't get it. . ."

    "What," Rose said, attempting to whisper and hearing her voice raise in spite of it.  "What don't we get?"

    Suddenly, Robert became aware of his surroundings.  The alcove which contained the entrances to the bathrooms was visible from the dining room, and while the dinner crowd was small today, he noticed that several of the diners were casting the occasional glance at the agitated group standing by the bathrooms.  For his part, Jason was still seated, nervously sipping his tea and sometimes glimpsing at the three of them.

    "Outside," Robert blurted out.

    "Outside?"

    "Yeah.  Outside.  C'mon."

    He led the two women past several rows of empty tables and out through the glass exit.  The air was warm and moist outside, and Robert could feel perspiration begin to trickle down his face and neck.

    "Okay, Robert, you have us out here," Rose said.  "Now, what's wrong with you."

    "God, I don't know how to say this.  Okay, okay, I've just got to say it.  I - - I think that - - that boy is - is  mine."

    "Is yours?  Is your what?"

    "Listen, remember after Lydia was born, the old man had me on sales calls all the time?"

    "What's that. . .?"

    "I was constantly gone, Rose.  All the time.  I had no time with you, no time with Lydia, it was just me and the truck and those damned sales calls. . ."

    "Yes, I remember.  What's that got to do with any of this?"

    Robert stopped and looked at his wife for a moment.  At forty-three, she still had the same soft hair, still had the same compassionate eyes, still had the same slim figure that had drawn him to her nearly a quarter of a century earlier.  It was at this point that he realized how lucky he had been.

    "Remember Todd Brester," he finally continued, "the guy from New Vienna.  No, probably not.  There's been a million of those guys.  Anyway, after we were done we'd always go for drinks at Shilo Scott's, a bar there.  Anyway. . .anyway, one time, about a year after Lydia was born, I met this girl while I was there, her name was Mandi, and - and, we hit it off.  Real good, I guess.  We had some drinks, and. . . and some laughs,. . .and. . ."

    "You fucked her."

    Both Robert and Lydia started at the bluntness of Rose's statement.  There was no emotion in her voice, no inflection at all, just the statement of a fact.

    "Suh - -something like that," Robert said, visibly cowering.

    "How many times?"

    "I don't know.  For awhile.  Anyway, she was a seamstress, . . . and red-haired, and. . .and there's just too much of a coincidence. . ."

    "You got her pregnant?"

    "Yeah.  God, I didn't mean to, but we were always half-lit, and who figured anything was going to happen?  Anyway, I go out there one time, and me and Brester go to Shilo Scott's, and I see her there and she's acting really pissed at me.  I finally got her alone, and she tells me she was, you know, pregnant.  And I'm thinking here she was going to start hitting me up for child support or maybe money for an abortion, but. . .but she didn't.  She said she was going to have her baby.  But. . . she didn't want to see me again.  Ever.  And after that I never went to New Vienna again, I always had somebody take those calls for me.  And that was the end of it."

    "That was the end of it," Rose repeated with a note of finality.

    For the first time since stepping outside, Robert looked at his daughter, her luminescent green eyes now moist, her lower lip trembling.

    "Look. . .," Robert began, but she quickly opened the door and went back inside.  Through the window blinds he could see her briefly speak with Jason, then the two of them left through the other entrance.

    He turned his attention back to his wife.  Her gaze was on the nearby street, a stoic expression on her gentle features.

    "I'm sorry," he whispered pleadingly.

    "I know.  It's a nice, warm night.  I think I'll walk home, maybe give myself a chance to think for a bit.  Why don't you go back inside and pay the check?"

    Without looking at her husband, Rose strolled through the parking lot and out to the sidewalk, turning west towards their house.  For a moment Robert thought he should go after her, but then, thinking there was nothing more he could say, he turned back inside. 

    He took his seat at the recently vacated booth and stared absently at the four meals around him, each having been eaten in varying degrees.  When the waitress inquired as to how everything had been, Robert quietly asked for the check.  Then he took a sip of tea and stared out the window at nothing in particular.