Untaken Read online

  Mom worked at Tufts University, and during the summer vacation she often had free time to spend with us. She’d take my little brothers to row on the Charles, or even into town to play on the Common, or see Myrtle the turtle at the aquarium. Mikey was crazy about sea animals, and I bet he would have lived by that turtle tank if he could have, but I stayed home when she’d let me.

  I knew Mom felt bad that I was spending so much time by myself lately, and that’s why she kept asking me out on little kid trips. “I used to have the best summers when I was your age,” she’d told me yesterday, while Mikey smeared up the glass on the jellyfish tanks at the aquarium. “The whole gang would go out to the beach and the movies and parties all summer long.” She’d said it with a puzzled look on her face, not understanding why any daughter of hers was a teenage loser, I guessed. “Maybe you’ll make friends next year. There might be some new kids starting school. You’re a bright, perfectly nice, young girl. You’ve no cause to be anti-social.”

  Well, that made me feel real great. Sometimes mom would say things like that—things that were meant to be comforting, but actually made me feel worse. She’d get upset if I pointed out that maybe telling a person that the only hope of making new friends was to glom onto some new kid who didn’t realize what a nerd you were yet might not be the nicest thing to say, so I just smiled and agreed with her.

  Today she was at the Arboretum with my brothers, and I was free to be anti-social as long as I liked. The landscapers packed up their truck and left in a billow of cut grass and motor oil smells.

  The afternoon would have been perfect, if my tablet had been behaving itself; it kept dropping the Wi-Fi connection, and when it did finally connect, the pages took forever to load. I blew into the vents on the back, although I knew it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. My leg was slippery with sweat where the laptop had been resting.

  Cars droned along the highway off in the distance, but other than that, the street was silent. Even Gilda had finished thumping things around in the house. With nothing to distract me, my gaze kept sliding away from my laggy tablet, back to the sky.

  Dad had said he’d call at lunchtime to check in, but the phone had yet to ring. Then again, phones were buggy, too, these days.

  When the Wi-Fi finally held up for more than a split second, there were twelve more freaky stories to read on my favorite forum, all of them with screaming caps and links to grainy YouTube videos. I watched a couple of them, but I couldn’t make any sense of what I saw—a bunch of people in uniform, running about, and a man in a white coat shouting at someone just out of shot.

  I shifted the tablet from leg to leg until both knees had reached the level of hot and uncomfortable where the feeble puffs of breeze I kicked up flapping my shirt open did nothing to cool me.

  The air was warm and wet, like being trapped inside of someone else’s mouth.

  My own mouth was tacky and parched. Had I fallen asleep with my mouth open yesterday? Can your insides get sunburned the same way as your outside?

  It seemed unlikely, but it sure felt that way.

  Inside, there was a pitcher of iced tea in the fridge and no mom to scold me about the caffeine stunting my growth, but when I climbed out of my chair, a crumpled five dollar bill fluttered from my pocket and landed at my feet.

  Iced tea was good, but ice-cream was better. If I got mocha chip, it would be caffeinated and fattening.

  And, tucked away inside that busy store, I wouldn’t have to look at the sky at all.

  Brandon

  he blankets were tangled up in a big knot around my legs and the sun was over the other side of the house by the time I woke up.

  I groaned. No point calling Stevie now—I could never tell when Dad would come back from his hunting trips, and if he came back while Stevie was here, he’d be pissed. Dad never liked any of my friends too much, but Stevie really rubbed Dad the wrong way. Stevie did good in school, so in a way, he was kind of a nerd, but he was a cool kid, too, with his long hair and old-school leather jacket. Some people were surprised we were friends, me amongst them, to be truthful. He could have been friends with anyone; he had a talent for getting along with people. People who weren’t my Dad, at least. I don’t know whether it was the big words Stevie used, or the big ideas he had that Dad hated more.

  Stevie played a mean bass guitar. He was always trying to get me to start bands with him.

  “We’ll wipe the dust of this pissy little town off our feet!” Stevie would yell when he was fooling around with one of his band ideas. He only said it to goof around. He loved all that cheesy guitar hero shit, but Dad didn’t like people to speak bad of our town or to get uppity ideas, and although I told him Stevie meant it as a joke, Dad never did warm to him.

  Today, Dad’s return would be a toss-up between him screeching into the yard at noon, steaming from a fight he’d had with Bob on the way up, or rolling in tomorrow morning, stinking of beer and cigarettes. Him finding Stevie here would be bad in either scenario.

  When I was a little kid, Dad used to leave me with Grammy when Bob and he went up to Maine, but now that I was fifteen, he left me on my own to mind the house.

  It wasn’t so bad when he was gone—kind of peaceful, in fact—and God’s honest truth, Uncle Bob was kind of an asshole. Still, the twist of sadness I’d felt in my gut hearing his truck pull away before dawn this morning was the same one I’d felt as a baby, watching him leave from behind Grammy’s net curtains, with tears and snot hanging off my chin. It would’ve been good to be one of the guys for a change, instead of the kid who gets left behind.

  I dragged on a T-shirt that smelled fresher than the rest and stumbled through to the kitchen to splash some water on my face. I had to let the tap run a good few minutes before the water was even remotely cool.

  Outside the kitchen window was the cracked patch of dirt where the truck usually stood. I wondered where Dad and Uncle Bob were. Sitting lakeside with their fishing poles? I sure hoped so.

  Dad had been in a good mood these past few weeks, but I knew from experience that the trouble he could cause when he was crackling with energy and purpose was a hundred times worse than when he was in those low, black, mean-drunk spells.

  I hoped that today’s trip with Bob would wear him out some. Maybe he’d come back so tired he’d actually sleep, instead of pacing the floor half the night.

  Or maybe him and Bob would get up to mischief and he’d come back lit up and crazy like a rabid raccoon.

  I stuck my whole head under the tap and shook off the water. It still wasn’t properly cold, and the little rivulets that snuck in down the collar of my t-shirt were more annoying than refreshing. If they’d have taken me with them, I could have swam in that nice cold lake. If they’d gone to the lake at all.

  There was one good way of finding out.

  The heat hit me like a fist when I opened the back door, and I had to hop across the bare earth between the house and dad’s shed like a magician or some shit, walking a hot coal pit.

  I pushed open the door, breathing in the familiar stink of oil and dust and wood, and the sickly sweet iron of old blood.

  Dad’s fishing rod leaned against the corner. I turned my head. His guns were gone.

  I groaned. Shooting out of season is all kinds of illegal, and manic as he was right now, there was no way he was gonna be careful not to get fingered.

  I’d have to trust that Bob would keep him in check instead of winding him up tighter still.

  Yeah, right.

  If he’d taken me to Maine, things would have been fine.

  I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want me along. Some of the best times we had were when we’d drive out to shoot at rabbits, just me and him in his old Dodge, as dusty brown on the inside as it was on the outside. Shooting at night, like shooting out of season, is bad news, but Dad knew the guy that owned the land, and what’s more, got drunk every Saturday with his cop buddies down at the Oak, so who was going to bother us about taking out a f
ew bunnies, which are pests anyway?

  It would be different if he got caught up in Maine. No buddies to pull his ass out of the slammer this time.

  I grabbed a stack of magazines from my room and made my way out to the yard. It was too dark to read in the house with the electricity still cut off—if I’d told Dad about that bill once, I’d told him a hundred times—and the blinds down against the sun. It didn’t smell too fresh in there, neither.

  My fingers left damp marks on the cheap paper, and the sun got in my eyes and made sunspots swim in front of the words. I’d read these old guitar magazines more times than I could count, and my mind kept going back to Dad. I pictured him driving drunk down the wrong side of the road and mowing down a family of tourists. Or shooting some game warden and ending up in prison for life.

  Maybe he really was fishing. There were a bunch of outdoors stores up that way. Maybe he was borrowing Bob’s gear and had only taken the guns along to be cleaned? I couldn’t really see it though. Dad could clean a gun in his sleep. It was one of the things he had a genius for. That and hunting, and coaxing a little more life out of the beat up Dodge.

  When we’d go out for the bunnies, he’d drive with a beer held tight between his legs, one hand on the wheel and the other one fiddling with the dial on the radio, trying to keep it spitting out music instead of static. He liked the good stuff, my old man, classic rock, that sort of thing.

  I’d started playing guitar myself the summer before, sure that he’d be into it, but he’d bitch whenever I tried to practice. Made me play in my room with my amp unplugged, and then one day, the guitar was gone. Sold to pay the oil bill.

  “It’s for your own good,” he’d said. He said that a lot, my Dad. “You were wasting your time. This year we’ll go up to them woods and I’ll teach you something worth learning. When I was your age, I’d bagged me a buck already. You can feed yourself with a skill like that. What good ever came from fooling with a guitar anyway?”

  Sometimes, when we drove out to shoot bunnies, Dad would let me sip from his beer bottle. He’d even let me drive us home if he was too far in the bag to drive himself. Not for nothing, but I liked that better than the shooting. Guiding that big old Dodge down the rutted trail, the high grass making a noise like “husssh” on the sides of the car. Nothing but stars above, showing in a strip between the blackness of the trees, and the dirt road ahead, lit up by the moon. I could have driven like that with my old man—dribbling and farting in his sleep, but still essentially there—all night.

  As for the shooting, well, I wasn’t too great at hitting rabbits, and didn’t truthfully care a whole lot for the way they scream if you wing them instead of hitting true. I knew though, that if Dad would take me to Maine for deer, or maybe even a bear, I’d be able to prove myself. Hitting a big deer was easier than hitting a little bunny rabbit, right?

  Every year, he’d been on the verge of taking me, but then something would “come up” and Bob and him would go alone, or with one of Bob’s buddies from work.

  Still, this year I knew it was going to happen. I was going to bag a buck. I’d been practicing real hard, reading Dad’s magazines about stalking and marksmanship and everything. He’d be proud of me. Not being able to hit a rabbit doesn’t mean anything if you’ve shot yourself a buck.

  The phone rang, its shrill sound carrying out to me in the yard.

  I clambered to my feet, letting the magazines slide into the grass next to the rusted tire that served as my lounge chair.

  Mr. Biedermann was out in his yard, and he gave me a look like he had something to say as I walked by. Probably about our lawn, which was knee high weeds again, anywhere it wasn’t bald, cracked dirt. I’d run the mower over a bunch of engine parts that had somehow ended up in the middle of the yard back at the start of Summer, and it seemed to be busted for good. If Biedermann came around to complain, Dad would find out about the mower and be mad as hell.

  I slammed the back door behind me and swiped an arm across my forehead.

  The phone quit ringing, then started up again, almost right away.

  Had to be Grammy. The only one ever called us was Grammy.

  Or the Cops.

  Picking up for either of ‘em would be a bad idea, although it’d be good to speak to Grammy again. Thinking of her made me see the house through her eyes. The linoleum peeling up off the grime-scabbed floor. The heaps of clothes and boots and abandoned coffee mugs spilling out of doorways…

  Ring-ring.

  Ring-ring.

  Stevie’s folks had a regular phone where you could see who was calling you, but ours was a cracked brown cordless, older than I was.

  The phone quieted briefly, then started up again.

  I could almost see her, sitting at her trim kitchen table, a cup of the great lemonade she made perched on a coaster at her elbow, Jasper, her dumb cross-eyed Siamese cat pawing at the dangling phone cord as she dialed over and over.

  “You mind your manners, young man.” That’s what she’d tell him. As if a cat could understand.

  Grammy was from Tennessee, originally, and I always liked the soft, careful way she spoke. Dad had some of it in his voice too, but he sure never sounded soft or careful when he spoke. To be honest, where that accent made Grammy sound eloquent, it made Dad sound like a hick. And Dad hated for people to think he was a hick.

  I’d loved going to Grammy’s house, which was always very neat and peaceful, and smelled of Yankee candles instead of old socks and last night’s dinner, like our place did. You could get a drink of soda without finding dried-on crud stuck in the glass right after your first big gulp. She’d cook up huge dinners—macaroni in a big yellow bowl that she kept especially for the purpose, or hamburgers on the little grill out back of her house, served with humongous salads, which I didn’t much care for, but ate anyway because she liked to see me enjoy her food.

  But then she’d say something like, “Growing boys need real food,” and Dad’s face would go red, the furrow between his eyebrows turning into an ominous canyon.

  Grammy would start in on how Dad and I were always welcome to move in with her. Her house was “too big” now that Poppa was gone, and she could “use the company.”

  Dad reckoned that asking that of him meant she didn’t like the way Dad ran things at our house. She didn’t visit us too often, but when she did, she’d remark on the dirty dishes in the sink, or the stains on my clothes, or the empty Coors bottles lying out back of the house. She didn’t see that Dad tried his best. It’s hard work raising a kid on your own, that’s what Dad always said.

  Ring-ring.

  Ring-ring.

  “Sorry, Grammy,” I muttered, as I fished around in the nest of chip packets and dust bunnies to yank the phone cable out of the wall. The phone went dead mid-ring and a wave of relief filled my body, followed by the usual backwash of guilt. I pictured her putting the phone back in its cradle, maybe turning to Jasper to sigh over her ungrateful son.

  Poppa had been around to help Grammy when Dad was little, and anyway, Dad said, women were better suited for raising kids. Dad was kind of old-fashioned with some of his opinions, and it used to make me embarrassed when we were out in public and he’d get to ranting about one thing or the other, but he meant well. Dad called the way we lived “bachelor living,” and I liked it pretty well.

  Me and Dad, just two guys trying to do the best we could with what we had.

  The other thing that would chew Dad’s ass was that Grammy would never give him money.

  “You just smoke it or drink it anyway, Carl,” she’d tell him.

  At the end of our visits, she’d slip a twenty into my hand, and I knew that she put away a little money in a bank account for me, because it used to drive Dad crazy that he couldn’t get to it.

  “Here’s you with your toes busting through the ends of your sneakers, and that old bitch is putting money away for some college you don’t want to go to,” he’d say.

  We hadn’t talked to her in mor
e than a year. One time, after me and dad had had a blowup about something, I’d thought about hopping on a bus and going to see her myself, but I never got further than stuffing a few clothes in my duffel bag.

  What would dad even do without me around to remind him to eat, or get up for work?

  My mom’s family called every Thanksgiving to talk to me. They’d never liked Dad too well while Mom was still alive, and they cooled off a whole lot more after she died, to hear Dad tell it. They thought he didn’t take good enough care of her when she was sick, but Dad told me they’d thrown her out of the house when she was fifteen, so what did they know about caring?

  I didn’t think much about my mom. I knew that Dad had a bunch of pictures of her in a box at the back of his closet where I wasn’t supposed to go prying. When I was younger, I used to look at those pictures, but when I grew older, I stopped. I didn’t know the girl in those pictures, though her long nose and blue eyes were the same as my own. One day, those pictures were gone, and although I wished I’d saved one, I didn’t get too bent out of shape about it.

  “What’s done is done, what’s lost is lost and there’s no getting it back,” said Dad, when beer or weed made him thoughtful.

  Gracie

  atie and Zach walked up Auburn Street toward me, Katie in a short dress that showed off her long brown legs, and Zach with his shirt tied round his waist and a basketball jammed under one muscular arm.

  There was no time to duck off down a side street. They’d seen me.