The Lucky Kind (3 page)

History

M
r. Barsky is staring at me, like he’s expecting something, some words, to come out of my mouth. Stevie’s sitting next to me, and he nudges me with his elbow. I must be pretty far in outer space, because my arm hurts where his elbow hit, like maybe it’s not the first time he’s done that in the last few seconds.

“Nick Brandt,” Mr. Barsky says, “would you care to join us?”

“Umm, yeah.”

“And where are we?” Mr. Barsky’s making fun of me now. He’s a nice teacher, but he thinks it’s incredibly rude when kids daydream in class. I can hear the other kids shifting in their seats.

“Umm …” I try to remember what I read in last night’s history assignment, something clever, something to make Mr. Barsky laugh so he won’t be pissed at me for being rude, but my mind is a blank.

“Henry the Eighth’s court, sir.”

“Well, then you should know it’s a treacherous place in which to piss off the king.” Mr. Barsky’s lips begin to curl. He’s gonna laugh soon.

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, then. Anyone else know why we should care so much about Henry the Eighth’s marriage to Anne Boleyn?”

“Because of its contributions to the Reformation” comes a voice from behind my head, a voice that’s kind of scratchy like maybe the talker smoked too many cigarettes last night, or didn’t get enough sleep. It’s Eden’s voice.

“Excellent, Miss Reiss.”

Today Eden’s bra is blue. I saw it when she walked into the classroom, just the strap, peeking up by her neck. I wonder if she’s hot, wearing that long-sleeved button-down. This classroom isn’t air-conditioned, but she doesn’t have her sleeves rolled up like the rest of us. She always seems somehow more crisp than anyone else. There’s a softness around her breasts, and at her hips and her belly, but somehow, she’s … sharp.

Later, when we’ve finished dinner and my mom is reading in the living room, my dad comes into my room looking exhausted.

“Hey there, Buddy,” he says, rubbing his eyes. I’m sitting on my bed, over the covers, doing my Algebra II homework.

“Hey, Buddy,” I say back. Buddy is a nickname from when I was little. I decided a while back that I would stop saying it or answering to it, but tonight I’ve forgotten. I lean back against my pillows.

“This has been a long friggin’ week, you know.” He sits down at the foot of my bed. My mom says my dad used to curse a lot. Not like the angry kind of cursing—like I said, he rarely gets loud and angry. But just kind of peppering his sentences with “fuck” and “balls” and “sonuvabitch.” When they had me, he tried to tone it down, apparently. The result is that he uses words like “friggin’,” which, frankly, I think sounds worse than “fucking.”

“It has?”

He looks up at me, like he’s just realized that he knows something that I don’t; like he forgot that I don’t know whatever it is that’s making his week long.

Maybe Sam Roth is trying to extort money from him. Like, Sam just looked him up, made up some dirt about him, some invented secret from his Ohio past that no one in New York knows about, and he’s threatening to tell my dad’s fund’s investors if my dad doesn’t fork over some money.

I’ll cut to the chase. We can figure it out. I can help him.

“Who’s Sam Roth?” I say quickly, before I can change my mind.

My dad blinks; he starts for a second, like maybe he’s going to get up off the bed, maybe he’s going to get my mom, maybe he can’t stay sitting down. The bed actually bounces a little as he lifts his weight off of it.

“How do you know who that is?”

“I don’t, Dad; that’s why I just asked you. In fact, it’s exactly what I just asked you.”

“Right, but—where did you hear that name?”

“He’s the guy who called last night. I heard him say his name. I think he called Tuesday, too. Someone called asking for you.”

My dad nods. “Yes, that must have been Sam. He told me he’d tried the house before.”

“He didn’t even know your name. He asked for Sheffman Brandt.”

“That is my name,” my dad says, leaning back on the bed. I’d had him momentarily flustered, but he’s composed himself now. Now that he knows how I know Sam Roth’s name.

“Yeah, but no one who knows you calls you that.”

“True.”

He doesn’t volunteer any more information, and it’s not like him not to answer a question directly. I’m sure Sam Roth is trying to screw with my dad, and I want to tell him he can tell me; whatever this Sam Roth is doing to him, I’ll help him figure it out.

“So, who is he?” I say, trying to make it sound casual. I try to turn it into a joke. “What’s he got on you?”

My dad smiles slowly, like I’ve just said something right, something a little closer to the truth than he thought I could.

“Oh, that,” he says. “Just some …”—he exhales, puffing out his lips—“just a little bit of history there, I guess.”

“He from Ohio?”

He shakes his head. “Only kind of.”

“How can someone be kind of from a place? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes sense here.” He smiles. “Kind of.”

He sounds tired, but I won’t let up.

“Kind of?”

“Yup,” he says, like case closed. But he doesn’t get up. He sits there, looking at me. More like watching me. I feel bad for him; he looks pretty wiped. Whatever this guy is doing to him, it must be pretty bad. Just for now, I’ll change the subject.

“Speaking of history, I thought Mr. Barsky was going to eat me alive today.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I totally spaced in class.” Because of Sam Roth, I want to add. And maybe because of Eden Reiss, too.

“Well, careful with that, Buddy. Don’t want to get a reputation with the teachers. Maybe you should do some extra credit or something to make up for it.”

“Jesus Christ, Dad, one space-out in the decade I’ve been at Francis,” I say, irritated. “I don’t think my reputation is destroyed just yet.”

“Yeah,” he says, getting up, patting me on the shoulder, “not yet.”

And as he leaves the room, I think, Yeah, not yet.

The Weekend

W
ell, my dad may have been having a long friggin’ week, but it’s Sunday morning and I’ve been having a long friggin’ weekend. Mostly because if she didn’t think I was an idiot before, Eden Reiss most definitely thinks I am now.

“Jesus Christ, man,” Stevie says when he calls me, “you’re acting like it’s the end of the motherfucking world or something. It wasn’t that bad.”

“Wasn’t that bad?” I say, burrowing under my covers, bringing the phone with me. “Are you an idiot? Name anything worse I could have done.”

“Oh, come on. Chin up,” he says, and it’s then that his voice cracks and he can’t hold his laughter in anymore. “If only you’d kept your chin up last night. ’Cause you were damn sure looking down when you threw up all over Eden Reiss’s shoes.”

I didn’t throw up on Eden’s shoes. Not even that close to them. But close enough. She was at Simon Natherton’s party, too. She was hanging out on the roof, too. She was smoking a cigarette and holding it lightly between her fingers, like she didn’t even care that it was there. So that was definitely close enough.

“Jesus Christ, Stevie, don’t make it any worse than it was.”

“Oh, come on, it’s not so bad. It’s just the natural order of things. You’re a healthy American teenage boy. Only right that you drink yourself sick.”

“You didn’t,” I mumble.

“Can’t go by me, kid. I’m mature beyond my years.”

“Simon threw up, too, goddammit.”

“Yeah, but he just had the good sense to do it on the street outside the house. Not on the roof in front of everyone.”

At least, it’s raining today. At least, Simon’s parents are out of town until Wednesday, and at least, it’s not like the housekeeper would be able to tell that it was my throw-up.

Jesus, that’s nasty. I know his housekeeper; when we were little, we used to eat the cookies she baked after school. I should send her something.

My head hurts. My headache travels from my left temple to my right eye. After Stevie hangs up, wishing me a happy hangover, I lie in bed staring at the ceiling. I close one eye, then the other, back and forth, focusing on a spot in the paint, watching the way it moves back and forth as I look at it with one eye at a time. Then I realize that this winking process of mine is making the headache much worse and I don’t know why I started doing it in the first place, so I stop and roll over to hug the pillow but I can’t fall back asleep because I have to go to the bathroom too badly.

Eden barely looked at me all night; just my luck she waited until I got sick to get close to me. I only went up to the roof because I knew she’d be there. Simon wouldn’t let anyone smoke in the house, and Eden always smokes at parties. I’ve never seen her smoke any other time. She was wearing a white tank top with jeans, and she stood out because every other girl was wearing black.

It was warm last night and Eden was sweaty. It’s almost like she compartmentalizes her bodily functions the way she does her smoking: at school, dry and crisp; at parties, smoky and sweaty. I watched when she brought a cigarette to her mouth and could see the sweat that had formed on her upper lip. And when I saw that, I was glad I was across the roof from her, because I really do think that had I been closer, I wouldn’t have been able to stop my hand from reaching out, my thumb from brushing the sweat away, my tongue from licking it off my finger.

And I’ll bet her smoky party sweat would have tasted like honey.

I literally (and pathetically) stumble out of my bed. It’s noon, and I’m just getting up, and I’m only up because Stevie called. And I’m pretty sure he only called because he wanted to make that “chin up” joke. Friggin’ asshole.

“Look who’s up,” my dad says to me, bright and cheerful as I continue to stumble, now into the living room, where he’s sitting on the couch.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Watching the pregame. Reds are playing the Mets at one.”

“Go, Cincy,” I say pathetically. Dad grew up rooting for the Reds in Ohio, so I root for them, too.

“What did you do last night? You didn’t get home until after two.”

“How’d you know that?” A while back I convinced my parents that a cell phone was actually more restrictive than a curfew when it came to keeping tabs on me.

“Your mother wouldn’t go to sleep till she heard you come in. So she kept me awake while she waited.”

“You guys don’t have to do that.”

“She can’t help it. You’re her baby.”

“Yeah, but I’m not
a
baby.”

“She just sleeps better once she hears your door click shut,” Dad says, shrugging. “Anyway, what did you do last night?”

I pause before answering. I wonder whether he and Mom would be more pissed that I was drinking or that I was doing it perched atop a roof.

“Where’s Mom?” I ask finally.

“Walking Pilot.”

“Well,” I say, “Simon Natherton had a party.”

Dad snorts at me. “I think Simon Natherton had a keg.”

“That, too,” I sigh, too distracted about Eden to even bother trying to cover up.

“You know,” he says, stretching his arms out behind him like he does when he’s making fun of me, “when I was your age we used to imagine the sophistication of the kids from New York City. Surely they weren’t climbing onto rooftops, hovering around kegs like the kids from Troy, Ohio.”

“How’d you know we were on the roof?”

Dad grins at me.

“Boys will be boys.”

“There were girls there, too,” I say, cringing at the memory, lowering myself onto the couch beside him. Why did we start inviting girls to parties, anyway? Whose brilliant idea was it to so increase our chances of humiliation? My chances in particular.

Dad sniffs. “What’s that smell?” he says accusingly. I should have showered before coming out here.

“Sorry, Dad.”

“You reek of cigarette smoke.” He’s really strict when it comes to smoking.

“It was a party.”

“I don’t care if it was a meeting of Winston-Salem.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to your lungs.”

I look down at my chest. “Sorry, Lungs,” I say.

“You’re not funny, Nicholas,” Dad says, but I can tell he’s at least mildly amused by me.

The phone rings. Dad jumps as though the phone has startled him, then looks at his watch, like he’d been expecting a call at some particular time and he has to make sure this is it, this is that call at that time. He begins to get up, off the couch, as the phone rings for its second time. Then he looks back at me, remembering that I’m here, remembering that I will probably notice it if he rushes into the other room to take this call, that I will wonder what call he could possibly need to take out of my earshot on a Sunday afternoon.

And so he stands there. Not even quite standing, really, since he never fully got up from the couch. He’s kind of crouching. The phone rings a third time, and I can tell he’s worried he’ll miss the call.

I want to just get up and go back to my room, save him the trouble. That would be the nicest thing I could do, but then I remember all the effort it took me to get here in the first place. Besides, I’d like to let him know that I know what he’s thinking.

“It’s all right, Dad,” I say. “Take Sam Roth’s call in your room.”

He looks startled, but then the phone rings a fourth time, and he seems to realize that discussing this with me will have to wait, because if he lets it go much longer, he’ll miss that call. From my spot on the couch, I hear him say “Hello,” but then I hear his door latch shut, and then I don’t hear anything.

I’m getting kind of pissed at Sam Roth. Who the hell does he think he is, taking up all this space, taking up my whole house, taking my dad into the other room to be with him?

It’s the bottom of the fifth when my dad comes out. To tell you the truth, I’ve mostly been sleeping; it’s only because of the baseball game that I know how much time has passed. I woke up for a second when my mother and Pilot came home, but my mother only went into her room—my parents’ room—for a second, then she turned around and came back in here and settled herself with her laptop on the dining room table.

“Been on the phone all this time?” I ask when Dad finally emerges. He sits down on the couch and asks me for the score. I tell him and then he says, “No,” in answer to my question.

“What’ve you been doing?” I say it accusingly, like he’s the teenager caught doing something wrong. Smoking up in his room. Watching porn. Sneaking out.

He shoots a look across the room at Mom, who’s looking at us over the top of her computer screen. She doesn’t say anything, but Dad seems to be waiting for her.

“Dad, you won’t even look at me,” I say softly. I can’t remember my dad ever not looking at me. Okay, once, when we were visiting his family and I was three and wrestling with my cousin Sandy, who was also three, and I kicked her between her legs and she started bleeding down there, and all the grown-ups started freaking out, and my father had to explain to me what had happened.

But that was just that he was embarrassed. Also, I think he was trying not to laugh.

“Maybe we should go to brunch,” he says finally.

“What?”

“I think maybe we should all go to brunch. Aren’t you hungry?”

“No, Dad, I’ve got a hangover the size of Texas. I’m not particularly hungry.”

“You’ve got a hangover?” my mother cuts in, and at once my dad and I both turn to her, because this is the first thing she’s said. I find it somewhat ridiculous that my hangover is the thing she’s chosen to comment on.

Mom looks at me hard when she sees the incredulous look at my face. “No matter what else, Nicky, I’m still your mother, and we’ll talk about your drinking later.”

I’m too distracted by the first half of what she’s said to worry about the second half.

“What do you mean ‘still’? ‘Still’ implies that there was a before and an after and that something happened in between, and so some things are now different and some things are ‘still’ the same.”

Now I turn back to face Dad, looking at him hard. “Tell me when this switch happened that made Mom be ‘still’ the mom.”

“We’ve educated him too well,” Mom says, eyeing Dad. “I told you he’d figure something out.” She shoots Dad a look, like “I told you so.”

I’m getting more and more irritated. Whatever this is, it’s something they’ve discussed telling me about; something they’ve apparently disagreed about telling me about. And she’s acting like she’s proud or something; she just knew her little boy would catch on.

“Jesus Christ, Mom, this isn’t cute.” I know I shouldn’t be so smarmy; I should probably appreciate that she’s the one who actually believed I’d catch on to whatever the hell this is.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Dad says finally, standing up and beginning to pace the room. “That’s enough. I know it is. And I knew it would happen, I just … it’s been so many years since I put my name out there, I’d begun to think … But still, I’d hoped that this would happen.” He stops pacing now, and faces me. “I just never thought about telling you, I was so worried about what I’d say to him, and that’s not fair to you. That’s not fair to you. It’s just that he came first.” Dad laughs then. “He
literally
came first.”

“Dad,” I say, standing up to face him, an inch or two taller than him for about six months now, “what the hell are you talking about?”

“You sure you don’t want to go to brunch first?”

“Pretty darn sure.”

“When I was your age—for crying out loud, I wasn’t your age—when I was twenty-one, my girlfriend’s name was Sarah.” He stops. “I think we should sit down.” And he walks to the table, where Mom is sitting, and sits down in his chair next to her, and I sit down in mine across from them. The same seats we’ve always sat in, except on holidays when we have guests, who don’t know whose seats are whose. Mom snaps her laptop shut and pushes it away from us.

“My girlfriend’s name was Sarah,” he says again. “She was my first girlfriend, all through high school, and when I went away to college, she still lived in Troy, so I’d see her when I came home from school, for holidays and things. And my senior year I had to come home in the middle of the semester, during my midterms in the spring, and I had to meet a lawyer in the hospital, and I had to sign the papers.”

“What papers?”

“Papers, you know, the papers you have to sign for that.”

“For what?”

“For a baby.”

“Wait, what are you talking about?” I slouch more so that my shoulders curl over the table, so that I’m closer to my parents sitting across from me, like maybe if I get closer I’ll understand better.

“Sarah was pregnant. And then we gave the baby up for adoption.”

“Oh.” Now I lean back again, feeling ridiculously like I’ve been swaying back and forth in my chair throughout this conversation. And then a strange sentence weasels its way into my head:
I am not my father’s firstborn.

“Oh,” I repeat. Troy is like a whole other world compared to New York, so maybe my dad was this whole other person there—someone with a past, someone who kept secrets.

“I think …” Now Dad hunches over the table, leaning toward me. “I think you have to remember that it was a long time ago, and it was a small town.” He sounds like he’s defending what a big deal he’s made of it. Does he think that I’m quiet because I’m thinking
just adoption
? Is there a disappointed look on my face, like I thought it was going to be something more, something bigger? If I look disappointed, that isn’t why.