Fuck
The drive to the airport was one of the longest of my seventeen year old existance. My dad sat complacently in the driver’s seat, humming a song to the radio, tapping out the beat with his fingers, a rat-at-at-rat-at-at. I sighed and looked out the window, the sun shining down, but the AC in the car keeping me cool.
“Come on, Dad, lemme crack a window or something.”
“No point in that, Beau. We’re almost at the airport.”
I had been living in sunny So-Cal for most of my life with my father, Dietrich Grace. My parents split when I was young, and I used to fly out for two weeks every year during the summer to spend time with my mother, who lived all the way across the country. Ever since I was fourteen, she had been flying out on her vacations, thinking that she was taking me away from my friends. As if someone like me could have friends.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Crooked nose bridge on which my too-big-for-my-face glasses sat, lenses dirty. Dull, brown eyes hidden behind clumped eyelashes – but as a guy, I wasn’t allowed to care about things like that. My hair fell plainly to my ears, before swooping up in the back at the base of my neck.
It was considerate of Claire to fly all the way out, but in reality, the only reason I didn’t contest her visits was my extreme loathing of her housing location. I was thankful that I hadn’t had to fly out there in some time, but things change. People get new jobs.
Dietrich had been toiling away, training for years hoping to get signed to a new team after the dissolution of the So-Cal Spinners, a minor league baseball endeavor. He finally got the call from a scout that had seen him playing in a community game, all the way from Georgia. Penny, my step-mother, was all the more encouraging. Dietrich Grace, on the meteoric rise to fame, going to play in the hot south with the boys from Atlanta.
Of course, he told me he wouldn’t move down there if I didn’t want him to. The job would require a lot of traveling, and he didn’t want a nomad lifestyle to effect me. But this was his dream. Who was I, Beauregard Grace, to stand in the way of something he had strived so hard to achieve?
When he laid the options out on the table – either allow his dream to wither and keep his desk job selling pencils in bulk to schools – or move with Claire to the east coast, the frigid, God awful state of Maine, I was most displeased. It was as if the Almighty Himself were casting a shadow over the rainy town of Spoons, Maine, known in the almanac for having the most annual precipitation in the east. Hiding beneath the cover of looming, gray clouds.
I stared at the sun. I think I would miss it.
I turned, and looked at my father, somewhat envious. I had inherited none of his looks. He was a regular Adonis, the mere thought of glasses on his face causing uproarious laughter deep inside me, his lush, brown hair seemingly able to bend to his will.
Penny sat in the back, staring vacantly at her hands. I wondered if the would be all right without me to keep after them, to serve as the mediator between their frequent, insignificant fights, or if their world would fall apart.
Dietrich was a wounded dog after my mother left. It was all I could do to keep him together.
Things, they fall apart.
I said my goodbyes to Dietrich and Penny as I walked through the airport, security features prohibiting them from walking me directly to the gate of the flight. They left me at the baggage check. I reminded them courteously that my phone was always on, that they always had a direct line.
Penny, never the best at giving hugs, tried admirably. They both knew the sacrifice I was making, how much I dreaded Spoons, but like me, they were incapable of showing the proper gratitude. That’s one thing I inherited from Dietrich, I suppose. I never liked showing my emotion.
Quiet.
Introspective.
My red hoodie was my carry on.
The flight was uneventful, a boring, torrid 8 hour ordeal, during which the entire flight watched a saga of vampire films revolving around undying love or some other such nonsense that I didn’t quite believe in. The stewardess, despite repeated requests, had failed to bring me a set of head phones. From what I could tell, the actors were constipated most of the time, and very much lusting after each other.
I tried to picture how my mother would look, hoping that she didn’t pick me up in an ambulance, but knowing that she was probably on the tail end of a long shift and lacking proper transportation.
Spoons was such a small town, with a population of a little over 2,500. I hadn’t set foot in Spoons in a long time, but Claire loved it so much. My father, he couldn’t stand it. From the stories he used to tell, about how there was nothing to do, nothing to see, a whopping total of two diners, that he was glad when Claire decided to get her own place.
I could always see the hurt in his eyes. Even if he didn’t love Spoons, he did love her.
Dietrich had never been back. I can’t blame him.
The plane landed, and I could see the ambulance from my window seat, the faded reds on the white paint matching the color of my faded sweat-shirt.
If anyone had been more terrible at giving satisfactory hugs, it was Claire. She awkwardly moved up to greet me, wrapping her chicken-bone arms around me, trying to pull me close. I relented. She smelled of cigarettes and blood.
“How you doing, Beau? Oh, it’s good to see you.”
“You too, Cla – Mom.” I wasn’t allowed to call her ‘Claire’ unless I was around Dad.
“I hope you don’t mind riding in the ol’ blood mobile. My car is in the shop and I just finished a shift. You won’t believe the things I’ve seen this year alone.”
She paused and noted my disinterest. With her car in the shop, the chances of me getting my own vehicle were slim to none. Mounting debts are not something the Grace’s handled with ease.
“And your father, you must be proud.”
I could see in her eyes that this was only a formality, the mentioning of him. Her eyes were my eyes. Her hair was my hair. I had never pictured my mother as extraordinarily ugly until I thought of myself the same way, and who I had inherited my looks from.
I sat with my suitcase on my lap, not wanting to throw it back on the stretcher. Ambulance 2 pulled its way onto the long, winding road that lead up the mountain. I sighed deeply as we passed the sign –
“Now entering Spoons.”
The car ride was an exercise in precision silence. Every time I went to speak, Claire went to speak. Every time Claire went to speak, I was getting ready to talk. Eventually, I just closed my eyes, and thought about getting a job at one of the two diners in town so I could eventually have my own car. Not that there was anything to do on the roads in Spoons. The woods were nice enough, but... Maybe it would be a better idea if I bought a better jacket first, so I could go walking in the woods without hypothermia stabbing me in the back.
“My ex-boyfriend, you remember Dane, right?”
I shook my head. Another in a long line of male suitors.
“Well, he left in a hurry, left some of his clothes, and he’s just your size. Left a pretty good jacket, too, which is good, because the kind of jacket you need up here isn’t the kind of jacket that fits in that tiny suitcase.” Claire lit a cigarette and cracked the window. “So you can have it, if you want.”
It bothered me, the thought of putting on something that someone who had been intimate with my mother had worn.
“And I went ahead and got you a car.”
I blinked. Twice. It was a moment where blinking twice was completely acceptable.
“What? Why?”
“Well, I can’t cart you to school every day, especially in this thing. What will the other kids say?”
“What kind of car is it?”
“A station wagon. A stick shift.”
“Wow... Thank you. What year?”
“No idea, hun. It was probably new in the 1800’s, though. But you know, small town, someone worked on the engine. I think it was one of the Whites.”
The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t match any faces.
“You didn’t have to. I was going to get a job and buy my own.”
“Oh, please. You wouldn’t be able to save up enough money in a few years to buy your own car working at a grease joint. Besides... It’s a thank you. I know how much you dislike Spoons.”
Dislike is too impotent a word. I loathed Spoons like I loathed looking at myself in the mirror.
“And would you stop brooding? It’s ugly on you.”
I sighed. If only she knew, brooding was my thing, the one thing I could do well. I brood excellently, especially given the right lighting.
I fully expected to hate the car, but to my disappointment, I found myself enamored of it. It was an old brick, as red as my coat, with paint flecking off the sides. It was the kind of car that you could wrap around a tree, have the tree fall over, and then drive off safely – possibly on said tree, into the distance. Claire had bought me a tank with a paint job to match my power color.
“I love it,” I said, surprised at the ‘L’ word coming out of my mouth.
“There’s no need to be a smartass,” she said, dropping the cigarette and stomping it.
“No, I really do like it.”
Claire smiled, revealing a row of off-white teeth, partially stained by constant smoking.
“Come on, lemme show you your room.”
