Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl

eyes after he opened that letter.

3

      I decide to take a break from the manila folders and go down to the kitchen for that other airline bottle of Old Crow. It’s the only decent booze left in the house, so I want to nurse it. I take my drink out to the living room and sit down in the red and gold striped easy chair where my father was sitting when he opened the letter from the Bank of Wisconsin. The arms of the chair are worn through the fabric to the white stuffing, and in one spot through the stuffing to the wood frame. The chair smells like stale cigarette smoke, and the fabric is stained orange in several places. The brass floor lamp next to it is encrusted with tarnish, the harp is bent, and the pull chain to turn it on is missing.

      “Did it have to be that big a deal?” I say, out loud. In the silence of the empty house, the kitchen faucet answers, “Plop . . . plop . . . plop.”

      The living room drapes that used to be white but are now yellowish-brown are open a crack, and through the milky fog in the window I can see a snow flurry astir outside. I realize my fingers and toes are cold. A small pile of firewood is stacked on the hearth. Probably sitting there gathering dust for years, it should burn robustly. I wonder how long it’s been since the chimney was last cleaned. If I opt to burn the place down, a fire in the fireplace might be all it takes to do the job.

      I look down at the glass in my hand. It’s empty. I set the glass down on the coffee table, which is embellished with ring-shaped stains that form Venn diagrams and Olympic symbols on its nicked surface, half expecting to hear my mother say, “Use a coaster.”

      * *

      My father didn’t get out of his chair and carry the letter over to my mother, who had three balls of different colored yarn on her lap. She was working them into a sweater that Jamie got for his birthday that year. When she said, “David, what’s the matter?” with that dire tone in her voice, my father just looked down at his lap and held the letter out, as if it were too heavy and he was too deflated to carry it over to her. My mother stood up and took it from him, then sat back down to read it.

      She had a nervous habit of picking at her fingernails with her thumbnail, which made a clicking noise. As she looked at the letter, she clicked like she was playing castanets.

      “What does this mean?” she asked.

      “What it says,” replied my father.

      “It’s a mistake, right?”

      “No.”

      There was a long pause, during which my mother stared at the letter and clicked her fingernails furiously. The normally smooth, even features of her face were pinched into a scowl of equal parts fear and anger. I was curious as hell as to what was in the letter, but I didn’t think they’d tell me if I asked. They were acting guarded and deadly serious. I pretended to read the sports page while I listened surreptitiously.

      “Who’s this Newley?” my mother asked.

      “Customer of the Dieworks,” said my father. “Friend of Leon Bridette’s.”

      Leon Bridette was my father’s boss. From the tone in my parents’ voices whenever they spoke his name, I had the sense that they both mildly disliked him, and less mildly feared him.

      “Where is he?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “What happened to the money?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Why would you do such a stupid thing?”

      “Bridette made me.”

      “How could Bridette make you? Did he put a gun to your head?”

      “He might as well have!” he thundered. My father rarely raised his voice, almost never when he was sober. He caught me peeking at him, and said, “Not in front of the children, Lou.”

      I don’t remember my parents arguing or even discussing grownup matters around me and Jamie very much while I was growing up. For people with so little experience fighting in front of the kids, they sure got good at it towards the end.

      My mother stood up suddenly and walked to the staircase, which descended from the upstairs right into the living room. She turned at the landing and glared at my father for a moment, then made a show of stomping up the steps. In my memory she has on a purple ski sweater with pink snowflakes on it, black stretch pants and black suede lace-up shoes, but that may be because we had several snapshots of her in that outfit. My father tried to salvage a little dignity by waiting long enough to make it seem like he wasn’t scrambling after her. Then he shuffled over to the stairs and slowly ascended, without saying a word to me or Jamie.

      I could hear them through the ceiling, could hear anger and anguish in their voices, but I could not make out their words. I turned the volume down on the Philco. Jamie turned it back up. I turned it down, he turned it up again. He wasn’t about to yield, so I went over to the stairs and crept halfway up on all fours, being careful to avoid the squeaky fifth step. There, I could make out some words, snippets of the exchange going on in my parents’ bedroom, but I couldn’t quite get the gist of the conversation, just that it scared me.

      My mother’s voice: “ . . . end up on the street with two children! ”

      My father’s voice: “ . . . never let it come to that. I will take care of my family!”

      Mother’s voice: “ . . . man wouldn’t let his boss push him around.”

      Father’s voice: “ . . . don’t understand how these things work.”

      There was a lull in the action on The Mod Squad, and I heard one sentence from my mother clearly: “I am not going to let the rug be pulled out from under me now, not after everything I’ve had to put up with!”

      I had never thought of my mother as spoiled. On the contrary, she was sturdy, practical, what we now call “low maintenance.” So I was baffled by her exclamation. What was this “everything” she was claiming she’d had to “put up with”?

      We weren’t well off by anyone’s standards, at least not anyone American. I knew my parents were perpetually strapped, hanging on to modest suburban home ownership by their fingernails. Whatever we did, money was always an issue, whether it was a vacation up north or a trip to 31 Flavors for ice cream cones. Sometimes an unexpected expense like a furnace repair would cause my father to miss a mortgage payment. Once the well pump went out and we couldn’t afford to get it fixed until my father’s next paycheck. We had to go to the bathroom in a plastic bucket and bury our feces in the backyard for five days. Maybe this was what my mother was talking about, but she had not made much of a fuss about it at the time. If she was that dissatisfied with the way things were, I had never noticed it.

      My father opened the bedroom door suddenly, and I scurried backwards down the stairs like a startled crab. I forgot to skip the fifth step, and it let out a squeal like fingernails on a chalkboard, announcing to my father that I’d been eavesdropping. He appeared at the top of the stairs and we locked eyes. His face was flushed and he looked more embarrassed than I was.

      “Go to bed, Jonathan,” he said. “Tell your brother to go to bed, too.”

      I turned the TV off. Jamie yelled at me that the show wasn’t over and turned it back on. “Dad says we have to go to bed,” I said.

      “Forget it,” said Jamie.

      We argued for a minute, but it was obvious Jamie wouldn’t budge. Taking the opportunity to demonstrate how much better a son I was than Jamie, I went upstairs, stopping to tell my father, “Jamie refuses to go to bed.” My father just stood there while I went to wash up.

      When I came out of the bathroom my father was still standing at the top of the stairs, frozen, as if he just couldn’t decide whether to go back into the bedroom and face his indignant wife, or go downstairs and deal with his stubborn, disobedient son. So he just stood there, a guy with no place to hang out in his own house.

      I