Home: Part 28

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

July 1974

I was home. The taxi driver had made his way through the traffic north of the airport and dropped me in front of my apartment just after dark. He got out of the car and pulled my Samsonite from the taxi's trunk. He looked at me as I turned to pay him.

"You okay?"

"Tired," I said.

"You need a hand with this thing?"

I handed him the money. "No, thanks."

He pocketed the bills. Fog seemed to drift down from the streetlights above us. "You have a good night, then," he said. He buttoned his coat and stood with his hand on the car door. "Everything okay?"

"Tired," I repeated. "A long day."

"Get some rest, then. This fog's killing my hands, you know?" He settled into the seat and drove away.

I knew what he meant about the fog: Even inside my apartment my own hands felt chilled. San Francisco was always a shock after being in the Philippines. I poured a bit too much Scotch into a tumbler and sat in the kitchen nook from where I could see out to the street and, on a night clearer than this one, glimpse the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. I'd inherited at least part of my father's penchant for drinking alone in dark rooms, and even as I sipped from my glass I thought there were other, better things I should be doing. I'd not had a real conversation with anyone since leaving Narcie what seemed like weeks before; the stewardess on the plane were the only ones I remembered talking with.

Shannon, before she experienced what she said was her "life's epiphany," had once found me asleep with my head on the kitchen table, my fingers wrapped around the stem of a martini glass. "Wake up," she'd said. 

"I'm awake," I said though I moved neither my head nor my hand."

"What are you doing out here?"

I sat up straight and took in my surroundings. "Drinking and sleeping."

She took the glass. "Yes," she said, brushing the hair from my forehead. "Are you really this lonely?"
"Just had one martini too many," I said.

"Yes," she said.

Afterward I became more careful about letting myself get like I was that night. It was something my father never learned to do--keep the dark away when things mattered. My sister and I had both tried to get him to quit drinking altogether, and he feigned his changed habits well enough--and often enough--that Cindy and I chose to believe his act enough to make us give up. We were both, I suppose, fools to not realize that our mother had tried just as often and had been just as unsuccessful. 

But sitting there and watching the fog, I let myself drift into weariness. I would wake up late the next morning and be glad that the glass was still half-full of Scotch, something I counted as no small achievement.