My Kind of Crazy - Robin Reul Page 0,25
investigating noises?” He chuckles and reaches for his half-empty beer on the coffee table and takes a swig. “You gonna clean up this mud you tracked in? You think I’m your maid or something? Get down here.”
“Yes, sir.” I slink my way to the kitchen for a rag. I wet it, put a little dishwashing soap and water in a small bowl, and head back to the living room, where he stands over me as I get on all fours and start to scrub at the stains.
After a minute of supervising, Dad plops himself on the couch, throws back the rest of the beer, and then says, “You think I don’t know what you’re up to? Sneaking around in the middle of the night? Probably up to some trouble, and I won’t have it. I got enough crap to deal with without having to mop up your messes.” He says the last part with a scowl.
“I wasn’t sneaking around, Dad. I told you, I heard a noise.” I keep my head down and concentrate on making concentric circles. I know better than to make eye contact with him when he gets like this. It’s the liquor talking. I won’t let him bait me.
“Don’t you mouth off to me. I’ll knock you into next Sunday.”
I can feel his eyes boring into me, daring me to look up. He’s never actually hit me, though he’s come close a few times. I’ve learned to stay out of his way when he’s like this.
“We both know you’re as chickenshit as they come. Scared of your own goddamn shadow. You expect me to buy that excuse? What were you gonna do, fight off an intruder? You don’t even know how to throw a goddamn punch.”
I really want to tell him that’s because he’s never taken the time to show me anything worthwhile, but I opt to keep my mouth shut instead. It’s not worth it. Not when he’s like this.
“What happens when you graduate this year? If you graduate. What are you gonna do with your life? You want to end up like me? Do ya?”
This is what’s known as a trick question, and Dad is loaded with them. If I answer no, then he’ll go on a tirade about how I look down on him, how I think I’m better than him. If I say yes, we’ll both know it’s a lie because his life is shit, a wretched existence shadowed by a series of unfortunate events and bad choices, made tolerable by an abundant supply of cheap beer. I can tell you, whatever I do with my life, it won’t be working some crap-ass factory job, getting drunk every night, and talking down to everyone around me to compensate for the fact that I’m a miserable son of a bitch.
I may not be an AP Scholar or the quarterback of the football team, but it wouldn’t matter if I were. At the end of the day, I’m the one who’s still here and my mother and brother are the ones who are six feet under. And that pisses him off. They were the only bright spots in his life, and he’ll never let me forget it. What he doesn’t realize is that Mom and Mickey were the only good things I had too. We’re in the same damn boat, he and I, and he can’t even see it.
Dad pounds the empty beer bottle on the table and it falls over, but he doesn’t pick it up. It rolls in a semicircle, then falls to the floor. He stands up, stepping over it, and heads toward the stairs, bumping into me as he passes. “You better watch yourself, kid.”
I don’t answer. I just keep scrubbing.
It takes another fifteen minutes to get every trace of the mud out of the carpet. I pick up the abandoned beer bottle, throw the empty food containers in the trash, shut off the television, and head back to my room. I can hear him snoring through his closed door, like someone is drilling into the sidewalk. In the morning, he’ll act like nothing ever happened.
By the time I get to bed, it’s past 1:00 a.m. I close my eyes, but I can’t sleep because my brain is going a hundred miles an hour. What happened with Dad is bad enough, but this thing with Peyton is eating away at me like a cancer.
The girl burned a Barbie with my name on it. She only does that when people genuinely