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Clay is twelve, and the house feels very, very empty. There’s a silence weighing down on the furniture, the floors, his shoulders; his father only breaks it if he has to, so naturally Clay takes a hammer to it as often as he can. He’ll start with the little things: jabs, quips, something, something, something to snatch back those fragments of contact—palm to cheek, fast and hard—he had earned between the incident and the funeral. He’ll usually just get more silence. So after that he’ll move on to yelling, slamming doors, stomping on the stairs—and get a snapped “quiet down,” maybe. He’ll break something, stand there with a grin on his face—and get a glance as his father hands him the broom and dustpan. Maybe.
Today, though, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at his father (who is staring at his plate), the quiet is too heavy on his spine, the empty spaces his mother left behind too yawning, and Clay drops all pretenses. He pushes himself away from the table and screams and cries, wordless, jumbled, until he realizes he’s opened something up that he can’t figure out how to close again, until his father isn’t yelling at him to stop acting like an infant and is suddenly there, gripping his shoulders and telling him to breathe slow, for God’s sake, and oh, oh, there is worry in his tone. There is worry in his tone and a warmth in his palms and Clay, through the roar of breath and heartbeat in his ears, wants to devour it whole.
“Clay,” says his father, almost a question, and then there’s a pause, like he doesn’t know what else to say. Clay’s breathing slows in tiny increments.
“I—” says his father, but now something’s started shifting around in his expression, and Clay gets the awful, sick feeling that the longer his father looks him full in the face the more he remembers why he stopped looking in the first place.
His father breathes out sharply through his nose, breaks eye contact and takes his hands off Clay’s shoulders. Clay feels dizzy, and when his father gets to his feet he scrounges wildly inside himself for more of whatever had warranted that worry, that real acknowledgement, but he’s been drained. He flounders.
“Children, uh—children are a gift from the Lord, you know!” he says, voice rough from the yelling and halting in his desperation, and he sees his father’s hands curl into fists. For a moment his heart soars anew, and there’s a beat, the potential for something more hanging in the air. And then his father walks out of the room.
And then there’s just Clay, sitting on the kitchen floor with snot on his face and the ghosts of palms in the fabric of his sweater, feeling very, very empty.
Clay and Bloberta’s shiny new house is still full of boxes, but Clay had managed to hook up all the phones over the course of the past few days, and sitting there in his shiny new armchair in his shiny new study, stinking drunk, he makes what’s sure to be a terrible decision.
The dial spins, and in a few moments he hears, “Arthur Puppington. May I ask who’s calling?”
“Well, hello, Arthur Puppington,” Clay slurs, and there’s a long pause on the other end of the line.
“Clay?” says his father, disbelieving.
“Yeah-huh,” says Clay, and starts fumbling for the tumbler he’d set down somewhere.
“Jesus, I—why are you calling?”
“Oh, excuse me, I forget—forgot sons weren’t allowed to call their fathers.”
There’s a grumbling sort of sigh. “Clay,” says Arthur. “We haven’t spoken in years. Forgive my curiosity.”
Clay feels abruptly childish.
“You stopped talking to me first!” he says, except his mouth gets lazy on a few syllables and he’s not sure it came out intelligibly. There’s another long pause.
“Are you drunk?” says Arthur, and now there’s a little disgust mixed in with the disbelief.
“That’s beside the point,” says Clay, who has found his tumbler resting against one of the legs of his chair.
“When did you—No, you know what? Never mind. I’m hanging up.”
And through the haze of alcohol those bad, desperate feelings start dredging themselves up, and before he can regulate his tone into something less pleading Clay says, “Wait!”
He can still hear his father breathing on the other end, so he continues, voice small. “I-I got married. We’re going to try to—to have a kid.”
Another pause.
“Congratulations,” says Arthur, and if there are traces of genuine good tidings Clay doesn’t hear them. The old spite bubbles up in him, quick and hot and mixed with drunken abandon.
“And I,” spits Clay, “will be a better fucking dad than you.”
The line goes dead.
It’s a Saturday; Clay is at home and Orel isn’t. He said he was going out with his little friends for the day, but Clay knows it’s just another excuse to stay away from him. God, the nerve of that kid to still be blaming him! And of course now that Arthur is living with them Orel has latched onto his precious grandpa again—yet another subject he doesn’t listen to his father’s advice on anymore. Clay doesn’t know what he was thinking, putting the two of them in the same room.
And of course he has to walk past that room to get downstairs. The door is open today, as it has been an awful lot lately; Clay’s gotten very good at not glancing towards the bed his father is dying on. He’s just reached the edge of the doorframe when he hears—of course, of course—Arthur’s voice.
“Clay,” he says, with that little twang that’s gotten heavier and heavier over the years. Clay sighs loudly and sticks his head into the room.
“What?” he says, making his impatience as clear as possible. He tries not to notice how small his father seems now, in his age and illness. Arthur takes a breath and lets it out, short and sharp and a little shaky.
“Son,” says Arthur, his tone gentle, and then he says something else, but Clay can’t hear it for the sudden rush of blood in his ears.
“What?” says Clay, quieter now, barely noticing himself move to stand fully inside the room.
“I said I’m sorry, son,” says his father. “Sorry I wasn’t there. For you.”
Clay blinks rapidly, arms hanging loose at his sides.
“Sorry I—” Arthur stops, breathes out hard through his nose. “Sorry I treated you the way I did.”
Clay’s head feels hot and heavy and there’s a horrible pressure behind his eyes, and oh, wasn’t this what he wanted? Wasn’t this the moment he’d dreamt of deep in the night with venom in his heart—Arthur begging, begging for forgiveness and Clay showing him who wasn’t worth it?
Arthur looks Clay straight in the eyes now and Clay looks him straight in his and they are all at once reflecting ceiling fluorescents and ambulance lights and that dim little lamp in the den.
“And I’m sorry,” Arthur says, “to have let you turn into the kind of man who’d do what you’ve done to Orel.”
It’s like being slapped. And that’s what he’d been pleading for all that time, wasn’t it? It’s what had felt so clean and so close to affection, wasn’t it? He searches for the satisfaction, for the closure, even, but the twelve-year-old locked in his chest has grown into something terrible and alien.
It’s only when Arthur shifts in the bed, wincing slightly, that Clay realizes he’s just been standing there staring. He wants to say “at least I talk to him,” but even that’s a lie like the countless other lies he’s been spewing about his parenting to anyone who will still listen, and it’s crashing into him now that he’s been spinning around and around on the same circuit as his father since the day Orel was born. And that’s what he’d said, wasn’t it—that he’d keep the tradition going?
But if he doesn’t act fast he’s going to spiral into a place he doesn’t want to go, so he draws himself up and molds the guilt and horror into rage like he’s done a thousand times before.
“You think you can judge me?” he shouts. “You think you can come into my home with your phony apologies and just—get back on your pedestal?”
“Clay—” says Arthur, but the poison is filling Clay’s mouth now, and he clenches his fists and lowers his voice to a hiss.
“You don’t deserve to be buried next to her,” he says, and his father’s face settles into something like disappointment. Clay could scream.
“I think I ought to get a little rest,” says Arthur, clipped. Clay takes two steps back into the hallway, reaches for the knob and slams the door shut as hard as he can.
And then, as it was, as it always will be, there’s a heavy, heavy silence.