Chapter XI
An ear-piercing scream echoed in Floyd’s ears and he realized as he sat up in bed that the sound had come from his own lips. He leaned back against the headboard and ran a hand through his sweaty hair. His blankets were knotted up around him from his violent thrashing, his sheets drenched with sweat, and his pillows scattered about the room. Another night, another nightmare. As his rapid breathing came under control, he slipped back under his covers and stared at the ceiling, too scared to close his eyes.
Over the last month, the nightmares had not subsided; they had grown ever more violent and gory. In the latest dream, the gunman not only raped Abby, he decapitated and disemboweled her as well. And as happened every night, Floyd had been forced to watch the wicked black blade slice through Abby’s tender flesh as though it was butter. He’d lain in a pool of her blood, screaming without sound until he awoke.
In his dream, his screams made no noise, but in real life they shook his entire building. In two years he’d caught little more than passing glances of his neighbors; in the past month they’d all dropped by in varying states of agitation to see if someone was actually committing murder and to ask him to keep the noise down. He’d tried to sleep with a gag over his mouth, but it only reminded him of the tape over his lips that night in the storeroom.
Unable to control the nightmares, he knew it wouldn’t be much longer before his neighbors asked him to leave. Where would he go? The last thing his ailing father needed was to get woken up in the middle of the night by his son’s screaming. He could sleep in the store, but the racket he made would keep Angela and little Dale from getting any rest. They have a place for people like me, he told himself. It’s called a sanitarium. No doubt he would fit in nicely in a mental hospital with the other raving lunatics.
Floyd sighed and listened for any sign that his latest bout of hysteria had disturbed his neighbors. He turned his head towards the bathroom, where he’d flushed down the pills and booze that would have taken him to Abby. When he’d rejected suicide he thought he could live with the pain, but each day it grew worse. He didn’t know how much longer he could go on without losing his mind, if he hadn’t already.
He spent the rest of the night staring into the darkness and listening to the sound of his pounding heart. When the alarm sounded, he rolled out of bed and gathered up his clothes—the same black T-shirt and jeans he wore every day. In the last week he’d been forced to carve a new notch in his belt to cinch the jeans around his bone-thin waist. He trudged out the door without breakfast—he hadn’t eaten breakfast since the gunman put a bullet in his midsection.
As he pounded down the stairs to his car, he saw one of his neighbors shepherding her two small children into her car. When she spotted him, she furiously shoved the kids into the vehicle and slammed her door shut. That’s right, stay away from the crazy man, Floyd thought as he climbed into his car. The Shadow limped out of the parking lot and plodded towards Andromeda Collectibles.
Floyd parked next to the store and turned off the engine, but his hands remained on the steering wheel. Each day it became harder to find the impetus to get him to leave his car. “Time to roll the boulder uphill,” he mumbled as he swung the Shadow’s door open.
He no longer needed a cane to walk, but he began to limp as he neared the front door of the store. The limp was born of mental rather than physical fatigue; the sense of dread that weighed on him every time he unlocked the door put the stress on his legs. He threw open the door and flipped the sign to OPEN. Weariness washed over him like a wave as he staggered to his post behind the counter.
Despair pressed him to the bottom of a dark sea; he watched the world drift by from the ocean floor, the faces blurred and sound muffled. He witnessed everything with a passive detachment, too far removed by the icy waters of hopelessness to interact with the world above him. When someone asked him for help he would just continue to stare—too tired physically and battered emotionally to speak. Most customers understood that he was capable of only ringing up purchases set down on the counter; anything else required too much effort. The less sensitive customers would ask him if he was retarded or on drugs, to which he would make a noncommittal grunt and resume staring into space.
Since he’d reopened the store, Gary and Max had become his silent partners. Given their long acquaintance with Andromeda Collectibles, they were more than capable of assisting customers with questions or concerns. Whether they performed this service out of pity for him or loyalty to Todd he didn’t know, nor did he care. When he unlocked the front door of the store, his mind emptied of all emotion save for the lingering dread weighing down his soul.
“Hey Floyd!” a familiar voice chirped sometime during the day, penetrating the murky gray waters of his mind.
A disturbing constant of the last month was the presence of Michelle Kapanen five or even six days a week. She would browse the almost unchanging selection of used books, grab one from the shelf, and stand with it just to the side of the counter, from where she poured out the story of her life to him, oblivious to his lack of interest.
A few tidbits managed to drift down through his watery indifference. She was a freshman at
Once he’d snapped out of his catatonic state long enough to look at her. She was tall and lean—almost as pale and thin as he was—with long chestnut hair and freckles. In another time he would have taken an interest in her, but the only woman he cared about now lay in a coffin in
Michelle was gone by the time the clock struck eight and Floyd’s mind resurfaced. When they saw him rise from his chair, Gary and Max were quick to shut down their computers and scurry away with a muttered farewell. They, like his neighbors, were scared of him. When he saw his ghostly reflection in the glass of the front door, he couldn’t blame them. With his pale skin stretched tight across his bony frame, he looked like the Grim Reaper.
He drove home, unconscious to anything around him, and trudged up the steps to his apartment. A note on his door from the post office informed him that his mail was being held because he had not cleaned out his mailbox despite their repeated warnings to do so. Floyd left the note on the door and splashed down onto the couch. He flipped on the television, where the Red Wings played the Toronto Maple Leafs. While his eyes watched the red and blue shapes speed around the ice, his mind could not follow the action.
His stomach rumbled and he forced himself to go into the kitchen, where he threw a TV dinner into the microwave without bothering to even poke holes in the plastic wrap. He watched the digital numbers tick down with the same weary emotional distance that overcame him when he worked at the store. When the numbers reached zero, he pulled the meal from the microwave and didn’t flinch when he pulled the plastic off and a jet of steam stung his face. He ate a few bites of a gelatinous red glob that passed for lasagna before setting the cardboard tray aside and turning off the television.
“Are you sure he’s still alive?” someone had asked once. As he staggered back to the bedroom and prepared for another night of violent dreams, he no longer knew the answer.
#
The door slammed shut behind Michelle Kapanen, the sound of it jolting Floyd from his usual stupor. He blinked in surprise and took a look around him—the store was empty. He checked his watch and saw that it was almost time to close the store for the night. With a groan, he swung off his chair and stretched his seldom-used muscles.
Then he saw the package on the counter.
It was a blue and white Federal Express envelope;
He took a deep breath, yanked the tab, and turned the envelope upside-down. A stack of papers fell out and fanned across the counter. Floyd picked one up at random and scanned the dense legal text; none of it made any sense to him. He was about to toss the sheet of paper aside when his eyes caught the signature at the bottom.
The paper bore Todd’s sloppy John Hancock. Floyd gaped and then noticed the seal of a notary public—the contract had been notarized three days ago. He frantically pawed through the rest of the papers to garner some idea of what was going on. At last he found a typed memorandum also bearing Todd’s signature. As he read the message from his brother, Floyd’s fists clenched and his teeth gnashed together.
“Greetings from
“I don’t know when I’ll be home—I’m having too much fun. Last week, I was working on a lobster boat in
“The reason I’m writing you is to transfer ownership of the store to you until I get back. This way everything will be nice and legal. The lawyer who drew it up says that as long as you sign it and get it notarized by your own guy everything should be fine. I guess I’ll have to trust him on this.”
“I know this isn’t fair to you, but I just need some time to figure things out. I couldn’t get married knowing that there was so much out there I’d never seen and done. I didn’t want to feel trapped. I hope someday everyone can forgive me.”
Floyd crumpled the memo and stared at the assembled papers as though trying to immolate them with his mind. So now the store really was all his—nice and legal as Todd had said. After four months it was a useless, futile gesture. Floyd threw the memo across the store, where it skittered to a stop at the base of the comic book rack.
“You have to be responsible for your actions, and their consequences,” he’d been told. He’d lived his whole life by that simple philosophy. He tried to be responsible, to do the right thing, and where had it gotten him? Responsibility had led him to take care of Abby, and look where that had gotten both of them. He’d taken over the store to atone for his failure as a best man, and since then he’d lost everything in life that mattered to him. Meanwhile, the one time responsibility had threatened to imprison Todd, he’d run off and was now having the time of his life.
Todd was exploring the country while his former fiancée raised his child alone and his brother kept his stool warm until he decided to return—if he ever did. He allowed others to carry his burdens because he was too afraid to do it himself. As he always had, he’d fled as soon as the going got too tough for him. His irresponsibility had driven him to change majors every year in college and then to drop out altogether to flee to the safety of Andromeda Comics, where his father had borne the brunt of the financial risk for him. Someone was always there to bail Todd out—his parents, his brother, or his fiancée.
And where was Todd when others needed his help? When his fiancée needed him to help raise their son, when his mother needed someone to aid her in caring for their ailing father, or when Floyd needed a brother to help him through his grief, where was Todd? Catching lobsters in
Over the four months Todd had been gone, Floyd had experienced a range of emotions about his brother—pity, disappointment, and anger—but as he glowered at the legal papers on the counter a raw, powerful hatred crept into his mind. Todd had abandoned them all. He’d used them when it was convenient and then fled at the time they needed him most. Floyd took the papers in his hands and tore them into confetti-sized shreds; they drifted to the floor like multi-colored snowflakes.
He wanted to find Todd and make him experience some of the pain he’d caused by his cowardly exit. He wanted Todd to face the challenges of raising a child alone. He wanted him to try and keep his sanity while his spouse withered away and the rest of his family fell to pieces. He wanted his brother to wake screaming in the middle of the night after another gory nightmare. But as much as he wanted it, Floyd knew it wouldn’t happen. Todd was too much of a coward to face up to his responsibilities.
Floyd’s hands flexed and his eyes narrowed as he looked around the store. Todd had left all this to him. “I don’t want it,” Floyd growled. “Any of it!” He hefted the old metal cash register and heaved it like a shot-put through the front window of the store. Broken glass and coins spread out on the sidewalk; the cash register had rung up its final sale.
For a moment, Floyd stared at the shattered window, his chest heaving and fingers twitching. In all his life, he’d never felt such a surge of power—the raw, primal glee that came from the obliteration of a hated enemy. The moment he’d hurled the cash register, his soul had been set free from the bonds of responsibility. He didn’t have to roll the boulder uphill for eternity; he could smash it into dust. He could take the store from his brother forever.
He pulled down the bookshelves; the used books Michelle Kapanen had yet to thumb through scattered across the floor. Then he reached behind the counter to heft his chair over his head. He brought it down on the surface of the glass display case; the chair smashed through the shelves and vibrated in his hands as it hit the floor. Floyd reached in among the scattered coins, cards, and vintage comics to grab one of his more expensive items—a baseball bat autographed by former Tigers great Al Kaline. He used Kaline’s bat on the computer terminals; he pounded the computers long after they and the bat had shattered. He tossed the splintered handle of the bat away and fixed his gaze on the comic book rack. With a grunt, he hefted it and ran it through the front door like a battering ram. The long cylindrical rack flew from his hands and into the street, a trail of slick comics left in its wake.
Floyd stood in the center of the store and looked around at the devastation. A smile spread across his lips. The ocean of despair had drained away; he was back on dry land. One more thing left. A chill as always came over him as he entered the place where Abby had died. Resting against one wall he saw his target—Todd’s stool. The symbol of his brother mocked Floyd. “You bastard!” Floyd screamed and bashed the stool against the floor until only splinters remained.
Then Floyd sank to his knees in the center of the storeroom, his anger spent. His heart pounded in his chest, his breath came out in ragged gasps, and his muscles burned. Sweat stung his eyes and when he reached up to brush it away, he noticed the blood from a long, jagged gash on the palm of his left hand. He watched with grim fascination as the blood trickled down the flesh of his hand and formed a puddle on the floor in almost the exact spot where Abby had died. The sight of it brought his every nightmare to life.
The gunman had taken the same pleasure in raping and killing Abby that Floyd had felt demolishing the store. His hatred of Todd had unleashed a dark, raging monster; the same monster that had taken Abby from him. The blood he saw was no longer his, it was hers pooling on the floor. He put his hands to his face, let out a final incoherent scream, and passed out.
#
Floyd awoke to someone’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. He groaned and opened his eyes to find himself sprawled on the storeroom floor of Andromeda Collectibles and Angela on her knees next to him. Her hand had shook him awake. “Floyd?” she asked. “What happened? Did someone ransack the place?”
“I did this?” his shock turned it into a question. He said it again with more certainty, “I did this.”
“Why?” He sat up and told her about Todd’s package. When he finished, she hissed, “That prick. That selfish prick.”
“Yeah,” Floyd mumbled. He held up his hand and saw dried blood caked around the gash on his palm. He winced when he tried to flex his hand; it hurt like hell.
“We should go upstairs and clean that up,” Angela suggested.
“I’m fine,” he said and got to his feet. He stepped in the tiny puddle of his blood and tracked it across the floor into the store. He took in the overturned shelves, smashed display case, and shattered computers. The utter devastation he’d wreaked boggled his mind; he let out a low whistle. “I can’t believe I did this.”
“I think it looks better this way,” Angela said from behind him.
“I should clean up the mess in the street before the cops find out,” Floyd mumbled. He went back into the storeroom to find a broom and dustpan to sweep up the glass. Angela followed him and grabbed a box of garbage bags. “You don’t have to help me. This is my mess,” he said.
“It’ll go quicker with two of us,” she replied. He shrugged and followed her outside. That no one had come along to take the cash register or any of the comics splayed across the road was a testament to how deserted this part of the old city had become. He sighed and retrieved the dented comic book rack from the middle of the street while Angela began to sweep up the glass around the dented cash register. “You know, you should file a claim with the insurance company. Tell them some vandals ransacked the store.”
“The insurance lapsed last week,” he said.
She stopped sweeping and glared at him. “Why didn’t you renew it?”
He shrugged. “Why bother?”
She motioned to the carnage around them. “So how are you going to pay to fix all this?”
“You think I should?”
“Well, what else would you do?” she asked.
He shrugged again. “Close the place down. Say the hell with it all.” He tracked down the last of the comics in the road and threw them in a trash bag. “This isn’t my store. It never was. Besides, I thought you liked it this way.”
“I was joking,” she snapped. “Cutting your losses and running, that’s something he would do.” The heat in her voice gave Floyd no illusions about whom she meant. He took another look at the damage and sighed. She was right. To leave the place in this condition because he didn’t want to make the effort to fix it was something Todd would do. Quitting was a natural gift of his.
“I guess you’re right.” He examined the broken window and door. “I’ll have to buy some plastic to cover those up. Then haul that display case to the dump. And look for some new computers.” He counted off each item on his fingers.
“Let me call my brothers tomorrow and see if they can help,” Angela suggested.
“Sure,” he mumbled. They worked in silence for a few minutes until he could bear it no longer. He had to ask the question preying on his mind. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Well, we are almost family,” she replied.
“Yeah, but we were never,” he searched for the right word, “close.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s because of everything you’ve done for Todd. I know it hasn’t been easy for you.”
He looked down at his feet and asked, “Were you the one to…find Abby and I?” She nodded. “Was she still…alive when you found her?”
Angela shook her head. “She was already gone.” Tears threatened to pour from Floyd’s eyes and Angela put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m really sorry about what happened.”
“It’s not your fault,” he replied. They both looked down at the ground for a while. “Is it true, what Todd said about your brothers? What they did to you?”
She nodded. “They used to, until I got big enough to fight back. I don’t really blame them; they weren’t old enough to understand what was going on.” A strange smile came to her face. “Todd didn’t tell you what happened to my mom’s boyfriend, did he?” Floyd shook his head. “One night, after he was done with me and was laying there passed out, I cut off his dick with a butcher knife.”
Floyd stared at her in shock. “Really?” he stammered.
She nodded. “They were able to reattach it, but he didn’t come by anymore.” She laughed and said, “My brothers thought they were next, so they gave me a wide berth after that night.”
“Oh my God,” Floyd breathed. “That’s terrible.”
Her smile faded and a tear came to her eye. “When I saw you two lying there, it was almost like being back in that trailer.” He tried to put a hand on her, but she shook it away.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Let’s just finish cleaning this up,” she growled. The moment of tenderness they’d shared was over; the defenses were back up. They finished sweeping up the sidewalk and she helped him tape garbage bags over the door and window. “That won’t keep much out,” she observed.
He shrugged. “Anyone who wants to come in here isn’t going to find very much.” He turned out the lights and they stood in the darkness, unsure of what to say. “I should go home,” he said.
“You want to come up and see Dale?” she asked.
“No, I don’t want to wake him up.” She turned to go, but he reached out with one hand to stop her. “By the way, my offer is still good. If you need any help looking after him, I’m always here.”
She looked him up and down. “Are you sure about that?” she asked and disappeared up the stairs to her apartment. He stood rooted in place for a long time, thinking about that last comment. He held up his pale, bony hand and examined his wound. No, he hadn’t been here, not for a long time.
#
Floyd posted a sign on the remains of the door the next day to explain that the store was closed for ‘extensive remodeling’ and would reopen in a week. He stood at the door to greet Gary and Max, to prevent them from getting a good look at the devastation he’d wrought upon Andromeda Collectibles. They gave him skeptical glares when he professed ignorance of what happened; Floyd knew they would return later to find out why they couldn’t get their daily dose of online pornography. In the meantime, Floyd worked to sort the viable inventory from what had been ruined.
He went about the task with the same mindlessness that had overtaken him since returning to work at the store. The violent passion and later the guilt that had seized him all fell away as he focused on the simple process of cleaning up. There were moments when he could convince himself that someone else had run amok in the store, but then one look at his bandaged hand brought back the memory of the chair shattering the display case, the cash register breaking the window, the bat smashing the computers, and the comic book rack flying through the front door. He would stop working for a moment and look around as though waking from a dream before delving back into the dark depths of despair.
The interior of the store was cleaned up by the time Angela’s brothers arrived at noon. They’d brought their own beer with them; they were each drinking one as they walked through the broken door. “What the hell happened here?” the older brother asked.
“I don’t know,” Floyd replied.
Not even Angela’s greasy brothers would swallow his non-explanation. They shook their heads and finished their beers in unison. “So you need our help fixing the place up?” the younger brother asked.
Floyd nodded. “I just need some help replacing the broken glass,” he began and motioned to the display case, “and hauling that away to the dump.”
“Yeah, no problem,” the older one said. They sized up the situation and began taking measurements of the window and door. Floyd took one of their beers and drank it slowly while he watched them work. The alcohol did little to ease his gloominess; he threw it away after drinking half.
He heard footsteps pounding down the stairs and Angela emerged from the storeroom behind him. Floyd took note of the way her brothers cringed and hung their heads when they saw her; they looked to him like dogs fearful of getting smacked on the nose with a newspaper. She held Dale in one hand and two bags—one for diapers and one for accessories—in the other.
He assumed she would brush past him and go out the door, but she stopped and turned to him. “Floyd, I need to take you up on your offer,” she whispered. She shot a glance at her brothers, who feigned intense interest in their measurements. “I’ve got a job interview and I need someone to watch Dale.”
“Yeah, sure,” Floyd mumbled without enthusiasm.
“I wouldn’t ask, but my mom is working and your parents have to go to the doctor,” she added. Another glance at her brothers told him that they were not an option for babysitting.
“It’s fine,” Floyd said. She pressed the baby into his arms and set the bags down on the floor next to him.
He held Dale awkwardly while Angela leaned down to kiss her son on the forehead. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said more to Dale than to Floyd. Then Angela hurried away and for the first time in his life, Floyd had to care for a child. He rocked Dale in his arms and slid the bags along with him as he walked over to one of the wingback chairs.
“Hey little guy,” he whispered, not sure what he should say. “I’m your Uncle Floyd. Your mom is going to be back real soon, I promise.” The baby gurgled in response.
The brothers kept their distance from Floyd and their nephew while they loaded the frame of the display case into the back of their truck. They took off for the dump without a word and Floyd guessed that Angela must have issued instructions—verbally or perhaps through some kind of sibling telepathy—that they were not get near her son. The door slammed shut behind the brothers and Floyd was left alone.
The advantage of not having a sense of smell became apparent when he felt the sudden heaviness of Dale’s diaper. The mess woke up the baby, whose screams and tears were like a miniature version of Floyd when he awoke every night from his violent nightmares. “Bad dream?” he asked his nephew. Dale wailed in reply and Floyd held him tightly to his chest and kicked the bags over to the counter. “I know how that is.”
He’d never changed a diaper and as he spread out the various supplies on the counter where the cash register had once stood, it was clear that the process was harder than he thought. Dale continued screaming, his brown eyes watery and face red while Floyd tried to figure out how to change the diaper. He decided that it made the most sense to dispose of the dirty diaper and then clean up the area. He threw the soiled diaper in the trash and used one of the baby wipes to clean up the brown mess left on Dale’s tiny rear end. “There we go,” Floyd announced, proud of himself for not bungling the first phase of the operation.
“Now for the fun part,” he mumbled while the child’s wailing pierced his eardrums. Floyd read the instructions on the bottle of baby powder and spread a liberal amount across Dale’s bottom. Then he reached for a fresh diaper and fumbled with the tabs to secure the diaper in place. After the third attempt, he pounded the counter and shouted, “Damn it!”
“What happened here?” Michelle Kapanen asked from behind him.
“I don’t know,” Floyd snapped and pulled out his fourth diaper.
“What a cute baby!” Michelle gushed and tickled Dale’s soft belly. The child giggled and cooed. “Is this your son?”
“No, my nephew,” Floyd replied. He attempted to seal the diaper and groaned in frustration as it slid off Dale when he tried to lift the child.
“Here, let me,” Michelle offered. She took another diaper from the basket and expertly fastened the tabs so that the diaper was snug to Dale’s body. “I used to do a lot of babysitting,” she explained. He thought she might have mentioned that before, but he didn’t know for sure.
“Thanks,” Floyd said. Michelle picked up Dale, who fell asleep almost immediately in her arms. Michelle continued to rock and hum to him while Floyd watched in amazement. “I guess he likes you,” he mumbled.
“You just need practice,” Michelle said. She passed Dale to Floyd and instructed him in the proper way to hold the child. He rocked the baby in his arms and a smile came to his face. A joy he’d thought long-extinguished flooded through him as he watched the way the child slept so peacefully. “Babies are so adorable,” Michelle whispered.
Floyd had never thought so; he’d always thought of them as helpless, screaming, messy things whose only purpose was to annoy him whenever he had to wait in line at a store. Now, as Dale slept in his arms, Floyd understood why people loved babies so much. They were beautiful, so full of innocence and hope for the future. A tear came to Floyd’s eye and he wiped it away with the back of one hand as he wished he could have given Abby a child.
Michelle put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “You’re doing great.” He nodded and refocused his attention on the child he held.
“Everything is fine,” he whispered to his nephew. “Everything is fine,” he repeated and believed it for the first time since Abby’s death.
The door opened and Michelle jumped as though she’d been caught in bed with another woman’s husband. Angela scooped up her son and rubbed the tip of his tiny nose. “How was he?” she asked.
“Great,” Floyd answered. He cleared his throat and asked, “How’d the interview go?”
“I got the job,” Angela replied. “I start as soon as they find a uniform for me.” She must have sensed his questioning look, because she added, “It’s just working the counter at McDonald’s, but at least it’s something.”
“Right,” Floyd said and watched Angela take Dale away from him. “I’ll take the bags for you,” he offered and bolted out of his chair. He followed her upstairs and waited for her to unlock the door to the apartment.
”He really didn’t give you a hard time?” she asked.
“No, he was great,” Floyd replied. He hauled the bags inside and left them on the couch. He stood there with a blank expression, twitching while Angela set Dale into the chipped white crib where Floyd and Todd had once lain. “He’s a good kid.”
“Not like his father, I hope,” Angela hissed.
Floyd nodded, suddenly uncomfortable. “I guess I’d better go.” He jerked forward and descended the stairs with a weary, defeated gait. When he returned to the store, he found Michelle still standing there.
“I was thinking, if you weren’t busy later…” she began but was cut off as the door banged open and Angela’s brothers came in hauling a pair of doors they’d salvaged from the dump.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” Floyd snapped to her. Pain flashed across her face and she trudged out of Andromeda Collectibles on the verge of tears. In another time and place he would have cared; he would have chased after her to apologize for hurting her. But the ray of light from his time with Dale had been dispersed by the dark waters that now crashed over him again.
#
Floyd threw his keys on the end table and collapsed onto the couch for another drab evening before another terrifying night. He knew what other people did. Other people watched movies in the theater, danced in nightclubs, or cheered on their hometown teams in stadiums. Other people had hobbies, interests, and causes they cared about. Other people had homes, friends, and families.
Family. The word echoed in Floyd’s mind and brought an image of his tiny nephew to his eyes. He recalled the way it had felt to hold little Dale in his arms, to have someone else to care about. He hadn’t felt such an emotion since Abby had died. And he liked the way it felt; he wanted to experience it again.
With a groan, he got to his feet and propelled himself towards the telephone across the living room. The memory of that brief glimpse of happiness drove him to pick up the receiver and punch in Angela’s number. As her voice came on the line, his mind went blank. He didn’t know how to ask her without sounding desperate, and if he did that, she wouldn’t want to entrust him with her son. “Hi, it’s Floyd,” he mumbled into the phone.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“Um, no,” Floyd answered and rubbed the back of his neck as he thought of how to proceed. “Have you, you know, found anyone to watch, uh, Dale yet?”
“I was about to call your mom to ask her,” Angela replied.
“Well, you could just leave him with me,” Floyd said too eagerly. “Then you wouldn’t need to drive out of your way,” he added to cover his tracks.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, I’ve got the diaper thing all figured out now,” he said and chuckled mindlessly.
There was silence on the line for a long time. “I don’t know, I’m not sure I like the idea of leaving him in that store all day.”
He saw Gary and Max downloading pornography on the computer terminals, Abby lying dead on the storeroom floor, and himself smashing the display case in a violent rage. No, Andromeda Collectibles was not the best place to raise a child. He couldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to leave Dale there. Floyd saw his last chance for happiness slipping away. “I won’t let anything happen to him. I promise,” he said with such conviction and force that he surprised himself.
Angela blew a sigh into the line and said, “What the hell, we’ll give it a try. I have to work from eleven to seven tomorrow.”
“No problem,” Floyd replied, relief tangible in his voice. “I’ll see you then.”
The phone went dead in his hand and he slammed it back on the cradle with force born from his happiness. He let out a contented sigh and settled back on the couch, where he found himself back where he’d started the evening. He counted the seconds in his head, each one bringing him closer to reuniting with his nephew. Full of nervous energy, Floyd paced back in forth between the living room and bedroom.
He stopped when he saw the picture of his happy family, the same one that had driven him to dump the painkillers down the toilet. Family. When was the last time he’d seen his? After he’d recovered enough to drive himself to the store, he hadn’t gone back to visit his parents. He’d lacked the energy, the will to drag himself over there. And if he had, what would he have said? He’d convinced himself it was better his parents didn’t see him in such a sorry state, so he’d stayed away.
Thinking of it now, his selfishness rivaled Todd’s. He hadn’t been there for his parents any more than his brother had. Only Floyd didn’t have the excuse of being thousands of miles away. His only excuse was that the tide of his despair had been too strong to fight against, so he hadn’t. He’d given into it and shut himself off from the only people left who cared about him.
With the same purpose that had driven him to call Angela, he snatched his keys and pounded down the stairs to his car. As he drove, he had no idea what he would say or do when he got to Ridgewood Manors. He only knew that he had to go there.
The setting sun cast shadows around
His mother threw open the door and stared at him for a long time. “Floyd, what are you doing here?” she asked.
“I was, uh, just in the neighborhood,” he mumbled.
She motioned for him to come inside and he followed—a stranger in the house where he’d grown up. “You’re just in time,” his mother said. “I was about to take dinner out of the oven.”
Floyd forced a smile to his face. “Great,” he replied.
“Go check on your father while I get dinner,”
“Nice night,” Floyd called from the steps.
“Hey kiddo, how are you doing?” his father asked, his voice more frail than usual.
“Good,” Floyd said and sat down next to Ernie. He couldn’t think of anything else to say; he decided to bask in the warm feeling that came from such close proximity to his family. They watched the pink-tinged industrial clouds float through the sky until his mother called them to dinner.
Floyd wheeled his father inside and they sat down to a simple meal—meatloaf, green beans, and mashed potatoes. He’d never enjoyed meatloaf, but on that night he ate it ravenously, drawing the attention of his parents. “You must be getting your appetite back,” his mother said.
“Yeah, I guess I am,” Floyd replied. He noted that while he’d emptied his plate in record time, his father’s remained almost untouched. “Dad, you better eat something,” he said.
Ernie nodded and continued to pick at his food. After Floyd and Lynn finished, his father’s plate was still loaded down. Floyd exchanged a worried glance with his mother and then pushed Ernie into the living room to watch television while
It was, Floyd thought, how it had always been between them. They didn’t say more than they had to. Most of the time they didn’t say anything at all. Without a word, a hug, or even a handshake their love was understood. Yet as he sat on the couch and looked at his frail, disappearing father, there were so many things he wanted to say. I love you. I’m proud of you for sacrificing your happiness to provide for Todd and I. I hope you’re proud of the man I am. So much he wanted to say, but he couldn’t find the strength to say anything. By the time his mother came into the room, his father had fallen asleep and Floyd knew he would never get the chance to voice what had always gone unsaid.
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