My Kind of Crazy - Robin Reul Page 0,46
them to court for violating my personal privacy.” He spits as he says the letter p.
This sounds serious. “What happened?”
“They set up these little cameras all over, see? Like government spies. My supervisor claimed he saw me sneaking a drink by my locker. I called him a liar. Then he shows me the goddamned video, so I called him a pervert with nothing better to do than sit around jerking off and watching his employees all day. Then he pulled out my flask that he stole from my locker without my permission, and he tells me I’m gonna have to leave. Twenty-one years of service and they let me go without blinking an eye.”
I can feel the blood drain from my face. Folks won’t exactly be lining up to hire Dad. I’m guessing there’s not a huge demand for alcoholic factory workers in their midforties with a high school degree.
“You should go talk to him,” I suggest. “Ask him to give you a second chance. Like you said, you’ve been there a long time. Maybe he’ll reconsider.”
He laughs, and he doesn’t let up, so finally I join in because I’m not sure what else to do. “You think life is like one of those comic books of yours, don’t you? Where justice prevails. Where the good guy friggin’ wins.” He erupts with laughter again, and then he starts coughing so hard that he drops his beer. As he reaches for it, he clips his temple on the edge of the coffee table and it draws blood. Now he’s cussing and throws the beer can across the room. Then he starts crying.
Like, really bawling.
It all happens so fast that I still have to wipe the smile off my face and shift gears. I run to the kitchen, throw some ice in a plastic grocery bag I find under the sink, and wrap it in a dish towel. I give it to him to put on his head and then grab another dish towel to clean up his mess. I know better than to talk to him, so I just keep working, keep trying to make it all be okay.
I sneak a glance at him. He looks like hell, his face all red with a smudged line of blood down the side and snot bubbling out his nose. The last time I saw my dad cry was when Mom and Mickey died. He did it mostly in private, not wanting to share his grief with me. Even now, I’ll hear him late at night when Monica’s working and he thinks I am sleeping. He’ll go into Mickey’s room and sit there in the dark and talk to my dead mother and brother. He tells them all the things he should have told them when they were alive and what’s going on now. Ironically, I am in the next room but he won’t say a word of it to me.
“Just leave it,” he says.
The knees of my jeans are now wet and beer-stained. I keep dabbing at the soaked carpet, but the dish towel is already saturated.
“I said, ‘Leave it!’” he booms, and I stand up, still trying to avoid looking him in the eye.
“Okay.”
He examines the bloody dish towel in his hand and then shifts his focus to the TV, flipping through the channels again like nothing’s happened. “You’re blocking the TV.”
I move aside as he settles his focus on some game show. I leave him be, picking up the beer can he threw and setting it on the hallway table. As I do, I catch sight of the stack of mail sitting there. I thumb through to see if there’s anything for me, not that I get much mail, but it’s envelope after envelope of unopened bills, some of them with ominous red stamps that say “Final Notice” in big caps.
It’s amazing, really, what with Dad’s anti-sobriety stance and his hair-trigger temper, that he’s been able to keep this ship afloat until now. I’m wondering how long Dad’s unemployment and my part-time, minimum-wage job bagging groceries are going to carry us. I try to tamp down the panic rising from my gut. I have a vision of living under an overpass, pushing a shopping cart of our belongings, holding signs at highway off-ramps, and talking to people who aren’t there. I can’t let that happen to us.
I can probably convince Mr. O’Callaghan to let me pick up a few extra shifts on the weekends, at least until Dad lands on his