I sit down at their kitchen table and try to understand what my dad has done this time, if a crime has been committed.

     “Nothing happened,” he says with a wave of his hand. He looks me in the eye, brow furrowed, then looks away.

     “Then why’d the police bring you home?  Where’s the car?” Rose, my stepmother, says. In the twenty-five years she and Dad have been married, I’ve come to see her as a barometer of trouble. If she’s worried enough to ask me to come over, I ought to be worried too.

     “It’s state law,” dad says, “to keep people my age from driving.”

     “Ridiculous,” Rose says. “Why can’t you tell the truth?”

     “Come on, Dad. Let me see the ticket.”

     “There’s no ticket,” he says, tight-lipped, with a shrug. “It’s all a misunderstanding. It’ll work itself out.”

     “Like hell it will,” Rose says.

     He rolls his eyes and gets up from the table. I try to see him objectively. Maybe at seventy-six, the years are finally catching up with him: no longer muscular under the striped t-shirt that used to be a little too tight, no longer tanned from all that fishing when he first retired.

     He takes a beer out of the refrigerator, pops it open, and takes a long sip. He holds the rest of the six-pack in front of me. When I give in and reach for one, like always, he pulls it back, shakes his head, and laughs.

     “Gentlemen?” he says, a word he often uses, that seems to resurrect an invisible circle of male compadres. All my life, I’ve wondered who exactly they are supposed to be. As a boy, I blushed whenever he seemed to include me among them, but since early on in my adult life, especially after my failed career and marriage, I hear nothing but irony in the way he says it.

     “Why don’t you stop all this bullshit and tell us the truth,” Rose says. “Justin’s here to help you.” She looks angry enough to knock the beers out of his hand.

      “Justin is going to help me?” With a dubious raise of the eyebrows, Dad winks at me and hands me a beer. “I guess things have turned around, eh bro?”

     He sits down at the table, takes a long drink, taps his sternum twice with his fist, and belches.

     “What a fool,” Rose says. She starts listing off the litany of his failures and misfires. While she worked to support them, she says, he played cards with other bigshots.

     “Where are any of them now?”

     “Where indeed?” he says without much emotion.

     “We could have had a comfortable life, but someone was too smart to listen to anybody else. Too important to let anybody in on his big secrets.”

     It’s a scene I know by heart, the dialogue borrowed from Dad and my mom. Just hearing it makes my chest tighten.

     “You talk to him, Justin,” Rose says. “He’s afraid to tell me the truth.”

     She pushes through the swinging door and leaves the two of us alone.

     After a moment, I say, “I feel like I’m intruding here.” Then I say, “Look, are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

     Dad lets out a sigh. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten myself into a pickle,” he says. “I’m not good at admitting things like this, no sir. It was minor, but there were some differing opinions about what happened. It all comes down to insurance, if you follow me.”

     “You’re afraid somebody’s going to sue you,” I say. I sit forward as he sips his beer and eyes me. “Shit, did anybody get hurt?”

      “Not that serious. But you know the way things are now. Everyone wants to play the victim.”

     I roll my eyes, just wanting him to get on with it. Admitting this is killing him. It’s as close to vulnerability as he gets.

     “Listen,” he says. He leans forward on his elbows. “I need to connect with somebody who was at the scene. Before this escalates any further.”

     “A witness?” I say.

     He nods. “I need to talk to him, man to man. You ready for another beer?”

     “Definitely,” I say. He pops up and gets one out of the refrigerator.

     “Hey,” he says, as he sits back down, “why don’t you go with me?”

     “What?” I say.

     “I think you may even know the guy. In fact, I know you do. What’s his name?”  He snaps his fingers. “Neal Puddle?”

     “Neal Tuttle?” I say.

     He nods. It’s weird to hear him say Neal’s name again, wrong in the same way he always got it wrong.

     “Didn’t you used to be friends?” he said.

     “Yep,” I say, “way back.” I’m starting to wonder how much of this conversation he mapped out before I rang the doorbell. “Do you think it’s wise to just drop in on a witness? Have you even talked to a lawyer?”

     “I don’t need a lawyer. I need somebody I can depend on and trust. Family.  Think of all the times I helped you, all the times I went out on a limb when you made a mistake.”

The night that first comes to mind, a month or two after I got my driver’s license, I’d borrowed my mother’s Nova. The car was packed with my high school friends, we’d just come out of a movie. I backed into a parked car at the mall cineplex, panicked when I heard the loud thump, and floored it. My friends whooped out the windows and beat drum solos on the armrests. Then someone in the back seat noticed headlights bearing down on us, a pickup, they said, right on my tail. Everybody got quiet and adrenaline turned my high into a focusing superpower. I ran red lights, took turns too soon and too wide, but the pickup stayed with me. When I finally put enough distance between us, I turned into a crowded church parking lot and parked in the back. We crouched down and watched the pickup barrel by.

     When I dared come home, after getting stoned with my friends and cooking up an explanation for the dented fender, I saw the living room light was on. My mom worked early and went to bed early, but I’d sometimes find Dad up late on the couch watching TV.  Increasingly, I’d find him in the same place, asleep, in the morning.   

     Trying to look cool, sober, like everything was A-OK, I marched into the house.

     “What do you have to say for yourself?” he said as he got to his feet.

     I shrugged.

     “Well, you didn’t get away. Someone wrote down you mother’s license plate number       before you left the parking lot.”

     The police had called the house, spoken to my mom, and he’d gone down there to straighten it out. He was famous for straightening things out. In those days, he knew everyone: the manager of the theater, the cops, even the guy whose car I’d hit. He’d assured all of them he’d take personal responsibility for the damage, although I would pay for it myself, every goddamn penny.

     “Are you ready to face the crime and accept the consequences?” he said. “Like a man. No excuses.”

     I nodded — what else could I do? — and he suggested we drink a beer together.

     I didn’t protest that, so we moved to the kitchen table. After about half a can, I’d told him about the furious chase around town.

     “Interesting story,” he said. “Only those folks you hit never left the parking lot.”  He lifted his eyebrows and pointed a finger at me. “It was that imagination of yours, your own guilty conscience chasing you.” He shook his head. “A conscience like yours will do you in one day.”

 

     It turns out Neal is living in a trailer court on the hillside behind Bravo Bros. Grocery, a place where we used to shop every Sunday after church and where my dad would chase me up and down the aisles growling like a monster while I laughed hysterically, until the manager, a guy with a haircut like Shemp Howard, caught me by the arm and ordered me to settle down while my dad stood by making an exaggerated innocent face. Most of the trailers in the park were rusted-out heaps. I drive slowly along the gravel road until my dad spots the number he’s looking for. His special gift for Neal, Christmas paper taped around it, jostles around in his lap and clinks against his big square belt buckle as I pull over and park.

     Dad holds the bottle out to me, then takes it back, a shadow gesture of our game. His eyes are ice blue, as steady as I’ve ever seen them, like part of him is scared he can’t even trust me with a bottle of good hootch for the short distance to Neal’s front door.

“This is important,” he says. “You have to be able to deal with people like Neal.  You have to get what you want out of them.” His tone implies these are more lessons he meant to teach me long ago and now he’s paying the price for having failed.

     “For a sorry sot, you can be so goddamned earnest,” he says. “If this Neal wanted to, he could fuck us up.”

     “Fuck you up,” I say, “because of something you did.”

     “See?” he says. “You’re showing your hand already. Maybe this isn’t such a hot idea. Can’t you see I’m desperate here?  I’m asking for your help. Just tell Ol’ Neal the bottle is from me. Tell him it’s a gift, a peace offering. Be polite, but for God’s sake, don’t admit I did anything wrong because I didn’t. Not really.”

     “I need to know,” I say, “what I’m walking into. I’m walking in blind, you know.  Swear nobody is lying in a hospital somewhere.”

     “I swear,” he says, making his voice important, like someone reading the news.                 “Nobody is lying in a hospital somewhere.”

     He pushes the bottle toward me. It falls into my hand.

     “Thanks,” I say, and he gives me that ‘You owe me much more than this’ look. I open the door and climb out, happy for the chill and to be away from all that hot air.

      I look at the bottle, good stuff. Somewhere in the trailer park a penned-up dog barks as I climb a set of concrete block steps to a low creaky porch. When I push the button beside the door, nothing happens. I tap lightly, shaking the whole trailer.  Someone gets up off the couch, and I feel every footstep. The door opens an inch, and a woman with a sallow, pockmarked face peers out at me.

     “I need to speak to Neal,” I say. I tell her who I am, an old friend.

     She nods, lips pressed together. Only then do I realize she’s Sarah. She stares at me, a hurt, disbelieving look on her face.

     I start to say I didn’t recognize her, but I stop myself. Has she changed that much? Yep. Before I can say anything else, the door opens wider.

     The man facing me has tired eyes, a weary, gray face. Tall and stooping, bald with a long gray mullet, and as thin as she is. A square bandage covers his right temple.

He glances past me at the car, at my dad, a look on his face like he’s been waiting for this unpleasant visit all day.

     My mind is blank. What did I plan to say?

     “Look, Neal, I know this is awkward.”

     Neal nods. At least we agree about one thing.

     I remember the bottle, which is angled like a gun-barrel at his breastbone. I move it, point it at the night sky.

     “My dad wanted you to have this,” I say.

     “We don’t drink anymore, Justin,” Neal says. “Sarah’s a Christian. I struggle with the higher power, but we’re working it out.”

     He looks unsure about something else. Sarah’s eyes narrow on the bottle and then on me, and I remember that her eyes could take you apart, so impossible to read she had to tell you what she was thinking, to spell it out. Her eyes are the only thing about her that look the same, full of intensity and urgency.

     “Come on in, old buddy,” Neal says. Maybe he’s genuinely glad to see me, to let bygone troubles slip by.  “Unless that’s all you wanted to say. I guess your dad can come in too.” He taps my arm lightly. “Ain’t there something he wants to talk to me about?”

     He tilts his head back and laughs, reminding me, for just a second, of better times, but showing his yellowed, craggy teeth. I glance at my dad, his head cocked to the side, straining to listen, so afraid I’ll fuck up. I let out a breath and wave for him to come on too.

     When my dad comes in, Neal thanks him for the gift. “We don’t want it, Mr. Franks. We’re in recovery,” he says.

     “Recovery?” my dad says. We sit in the living room, the two of them on the couch, my dad in a chair. I sit on a wobbly barstool at the short counter that separates the kitchenette from the living area.  Sarah cuts the TV off. When I came in, I set the bottle on the coffee table in front of the couch without thinking. I feel terrible for having put it right in front of them, but I decide it might make them feel more self-conscious if I got up to move it, so I leave it there. How these two people ended up together, I couldn’t guess, save for meeting in rehab, I suppose. Neal asks how I’ve been doing, and I tell him I’m good.

     “Pretty good,” I correct myself.  “I’m working for Price Oil, driving a delivery truck.”

     “See where that college education got you?” Neal says. “Hey, they looking for drivers?”

     “Not really,” I say. “I’m the oldest driver, and the only one there that’s not related to Mr. Price.” I start to say I’m standing on shaky ground myself, but I don’t want to give Neal any ideas. The only reason I’ve got the job in the first place is that Mr. Price is an old buddy of my dad’s.

     We talk a little about a few people we went to school with, where they are now and what they’re doing. Out of nowhere, Sarah brings up a party at a lake house that belonged to her parents. We were in high school. Everybody ate mushrooms, took off their clothes, and went swimming in the lake.

     “I remember,” I say, although I don’t remember much more about it. A lot of those times run together.

     “We might have all drowned that night,” she says. “End of story.” She slaps her hands together.

     “What were we thinking?” I say. It must have been a weird scene, but no weirder than this one, with these two sober, the stupid bottle standing on the table, and my dad in the corner, wondering where he went wrong.

     Neal laughs again like he used to, when we were sitting in his folks’ trailer, not all that different than this one, catching a buzz from the bag of weed I’d bought from him.

     “It’s all about what you see and what you don’t see,” my dad says suddenly, like he’s tired of waiting around.

     “Yeah,” Neal says after the second of dead silence that follows, “I hear that.”

     My dad starts working on Neal, asking him if the sun was in his eyes earlier.  Couldn’t it have been? And there was a truck blocking his line of view. Wasn’t there?

     Neal says he’s pretty sure of what he saw.

     “What?” I say. “What did you see, Neal?”

     Neal turns to me and says he was coming out of the launderette where he’d left Sarah while he popped into Circle K to get a couple of sandwiches. My dad interrupts him and asks if he couldn’t think a little harder. “Or just a little bit softer.”

 

     Sarah gets off the sofa and goes to the refrigerator to fill her water glass. On the way back, she pauses and says, “But it wasn’t really the end of any story, Justin.  Fortunately, we lived long enough to put away childish things. It took us long enough.”

     There’s that look in her eyes, like she can see inside me and search around in my brain with a flashlight. There’s some pain in her eyes, too, and when I look at her and then at Neal, I see that they have something in common, that they’re both committed to, that they’re fighting together. I’m envious and ashamed at the same time, even angrier that we’re here, that my dad is trying to get Neal to lie for him, and that he’s brought that bottle standing on the table, even though he didn’t know their situation.

     “Couldn’t you tell them you’re not sure?” my dad asks Neal. “Couldn’t you at least say you didn’t see anything?”

     Neal shakes his head and says, “I’ve got a carburetor that needs rebuilding, Mr. Franks. My problem isn’t my eyesight. It’s a lack of doe-rei-mi.”   

     The dog is still barking when we leave. Across the road, a man stands in his yard, smoking and spitting, watching us get in the car. I follow the narrow road between the trailers. Silent driving, very tense in the car. After a mile or so, I reach for the radio but my dad bats my hand away from the knob and says he doesn’t feel like listening to any dumb racket. His movement is fluid, no clinking.

     “Where’s that bottle?” I say. Right before we left, I’d gone to the bathroom, and when I came out, it wasn’t on the table anymore. I assumed Dad had picked it up.

     “We need to go back,” I say.

     “Nope,” Dad says. He doesn’t even bat an eye. “We went there to give Neal a little present, and by God we did it. Give it time, let it do its work.”

     “You left it there on purpose,” I say. “Where did you leave it?”

     “Next to the TV,” he says. “They’ll find it.”

     I stop at his house and when he turns to look at me, I see in his face what he’s going to say before he says it: “What difference does it make if it gets under his skin, if that bastard’s not going to help us. And gentlemen, if it helps him to help us, it is a gift indeed.”

     “It makes a big difference,” I say. “They’re trying to work out their problems.”

     “Oh, they are?” he whines. “Boo-hoo.”

     He looks at me like he’s wondering if I’m really his son. Without another word, he turns and starts down the sidewalk. The light is out. Maybe Rose has left him. He doesn’t seem phased by the dark house. He takes out his key and goes inside, and I’m left wondering how many more of these sad adventures I’ll go along with. It’s that conscience of mine, as he says, mixed with a kind of morbid curiosity, getting the best of me again. Or maybe it’s just habit.

 

     When I get home, I remember that I haven’t eaten, so I take a six-pack out of the refrigerator and cook a burrito in the microwave, eat it in front of the TV and fall asleep there. When I wake up, the eleven o’clock news is on: some cop dressed as Santa Claus is down at the homeless shelter, handing out blankets. Even a person with no conscience might have seen the bottle as a gift, plain and simple, and once you give a gift, it’s out of your hands, it’s in the ballpark of the receiver; they can make of it what they will. But my dad sees everything, even a gift, as a tool for getting what he wants, and nothing more. I get up and cut off the TV. I’ve had more than enough bullshit for one night.

     As I get out of the car, I hear that same dog yap once and then go quiet. I knock and just like before the door opens an inch, revealing parts of Sarah’s face, her nose and eyes. There is, I’m realizing, something urgent about the way she’s changed, like age and the disfigurement of substance abuse have stripped her soul bare.

     “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean for him to leave it here. I’ll take it now.”

     She laughs and says, “You’re always sorry for something. I knew you’d come back. Isn’t it funny that nobody ever changes?”

      Not funny, I think. I owe both her and Neal something, but I’m unsure what or how much. I’ve never been good at measuring my debts.

     “It’s cold,” she says. “Why don’t you come on in and shut the door?”

     The metal doorframe by my hand feels like a loose, flimsy threshold.

     “I’ll get you that bottle,” she says. “Neal was pretty pissed off about him leaving it here. He’s borrowed the neighbor’s car and gone to your dad’s place to give him a piece of his mind. Don’t worry, Neal’s not violent anymore.” She shakes her head and laughs.       “He might even lie for your dad, if your dad came across with some cash.”    

     “Do you know what happened?” I say. “About my dad’s accident?”

     “I saw the whole thing,” she says, “what there was of it. Your dad swerved, for no reason I could see, and sideswiped a parked car. No big deal, except for the people that owned the car.”

     “Thanks,” I say.

     “Don’t thank me,” she says. “I figured you knew. I’m guessing it’s not even about the money, more about your dad’s pride. Look, can’t you see how arrogant he is?  He’ll never admit that he’s responsible.”

      She hands me the bottle, and says, “Alcohol doesn’t have any effect on us anymore. It’s powerless.”

     “I hear you,” I say, as I tuck the bottle under my arm. “I’m sorry anyway.”

     “Whatever, Justin,” she says. “You want some coffee before you drive home?”

     She looks at me so seriously, so sure I need it, that I’m halfway convinced. I remember what my dad said, about my conscience doing me in one day, and wonder if it will be tonight. Already, I hear the bottle rolling and tumbling on the floorboards of the car, clinking against my dad’s belt buckle in my dreams.

     “Okay,” I say, and Sarah goes to make coffee. I sit down on the couch with the bottle next to me, close this time, touching my leg so I won’t forget it when it’s time to leave.