Author's Note: Set during Upping the Ante, and inspired entirely by approximately one second that was played out on-screen—the expression on Billy's face, after Tim was whisked away by the rally girls for the calendar photo shoot. Because…ouch.
Beta thanks go out, as always, to overnighter and crashcmb, for tightening this up and making it—you know, make sense. For reals. All remaining mistakes are my own.
Moved from the miscellaneous television section, since there's now a Friday Night Lights section. Whee!
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Don't Forget, Not a Mother
At first, even Billy himself hadn't completely understood what it was that he was feeling on the night when the rally girls showed up and absconded with Tim, mere moments after his little brother had announced that he'd somehow miraculously secured their father's signature on the paper from the traffic court.
He'd been amused—staring out of the blinds and grinning like a god-danged fool—watching as the girls had surrounded and then ferried Tim away in a cloud of beer fumes and cheap perfume, and then in the next—in the very next instant—he'd gone all grim and cold, an icy mass forming instantaneously in the pit of his gut, the very second Tim had been whisked out the front door.
If pressed, Billy would have said that it was disappointment, pure and simple, because he had wanted the chance to find out from Tim exactly what it was that had gone down in Corpus Christi. He had wanted to pump Tim for information. Information, at least in part, about the whats and the wheres and the whos of their father and his new life, one with no family, no responsibility to speak of.
The kind of life that was completely foreign to Billy. The responsibility of raising Tim, pretty much all by his lonesome, had commenced at just about the exact time that he'd reached his own adulthood. A technical adulthood, at least—and a responsibility he'd inherited shortly after their father had taken off in the winter of 2001.
He'd been called to the task—left with no choice, really—once and for all when their mother had followed suit not long after. She'd followed her husband's example, walking out on their younger son—abruptly and with no forewarning—in the middle of the night some six months later, apparently having decided that she'd rather slip into some other, even crappier, Podunk town under the cover of darkness, if only to be able to awaken the next day and pull on a suit of comfortable anonymity.
It wasn't a suit that she could have worn in Dillon, where she'd been born and raised, recognized and judged by everyone in their too-small hometown. Here, she'd never stood alone—Vern and Regine's daughter, Billy and Timmy's mom, and always—always, Walt Riggins' wife. After all, even in a town a whole lot bigger than Dillon, Walt would have cast a mighty long shadow.
Walt, who'd been picked up and locked up more times for petty offenses than Billy could rightly remember. Walt, who'd earned a well-won reputation of sleeping around with just about any woman who had…skin, pretty much…even if he'd had to pay for the pleasure. Walt, who'd bestowed the ultimate insult on his wife—who had stayed for better and for worse, through his nights in the drunk tank and his days in the county jail, through his multiple infidelities, through his drunken rages and his downright nasty temper tantrums—by leaving her and the boys behind, and at Christmas-time no less.
The more he'd thought about it, the more Billy had been convinced that what had been important to his mother wasn't so much that she'd be leaving Tim—it was that she'd be leaving Dillon—making a break from her former life and all of the reminders of everything that came with it.
Everything and everyone.
It had been hard for him, at first, to imagine her mustering up the energy to disappear.
Apparently, an escape plan had been worth the one-time hassle—the payoff in the simple ability to sit outside of a new place smoking the same old menthol lights, drinking the same old bourbons and Coke in relative peace, without even having to expend the negligible energy necessary to periodically lift a half-assed one-fingered salute in Mrs. Timmreck's general direction, as their neighbor had tssked and clucked her way around the adjoining yard, pulling weeds and pruning shrubs while throwing barbed glances over her shoulder and pointedly questioning their mother about where that sweet little Timmy'd gone off to now, in her soft, lilting, yet harshly accusatory drawl.
Billy had wondered where it had come from—that final burst of motion, that moment that broke the entropy—but he had since come to recognize that his mother, in her new life, no longer even had to bother to sit and simmer in the bitter resentment that the mere presence of her children in her old life had seemed to cause. A presence which had to have taken considerably more energy than had been required to deal with their elderly neighbor once a week or so. At least it had seemed that way, once she'd started hurling shouted obscenities and insults at both boys, going off on long-winded tangents and half-baked, semi-coherent rants with little or no provocation. It had seemed to Billy that it sure must have taken a whole lot of effort to be that worked up all the time.
In short, she had been an absolute mess and—like their father before her—he supposed that she'd just wanted out—out of Dillon—out of responsibility—out of the glare of critical and knowing eyes.
Out of motherhood.
At least, that had been the impression that Billy had gotten, when he'd finally tracked her down through her sister, his Aunt Lynette, about six months after Tim had shown up on his doorstep, claiming she'd been gone for over a week.
He hadn't been entirely sure of what he was expecting to find—something, someone, maybe, at least as critical as making sure that her eleven-year-old wasn't left alone in a house with no adults, no money and not one good goddamned clue as to the when, much less the whether it was her intent to return. But in the end, he'd had to admit to himself that he really wasn't surprised to see her, legs stretched out before her, in a low-slung, rainbow-colored beach chair. The folding chair had been sitting out on a little patch of cracked cement just outside the front door of the number he'd been given, 127, less than ten feet from an empty and dilapidated pool—containing a cracked and filthy vinyl lining—at a depressingly shabby motel just off the town's main drag, as it were.
A motel that had advertised that they rented rooms by the month—or by the hour—on a faded signboard with three words misspelled in two lines of text.
The motel had been mere yards away from a small strip mall with a half-dozen empty storefronts, almost all of which had sported large and colorful balloon lettering on their heavily barred glass-plated front walls, charting the former tenants' slow demises with falsely cheery, but increasingly desperate, announcements: Half Price! and Buy One, Get One Free! The least sun-faded signs of all proclaiming: Everything Must Go!
The four surviving shops peppered amongst the dead and dormant remains had consisted of a laundromat, a convenience store, a pawn shop/check-cashing place and a liquor store.
Billy had sat in the truck for the better part of an hour, trying to figure out just what it was that had brought him there—just what it was that he had thought that he wanted to say to her—just why it was that he had driven for four hours to some godforsaken crap-assed little town to find her. Why had she chosen this place, this motel, he had wondered as he sat there, staring at his mother as she had alternated between taking puffs on a constant succession of cigarettes from the pack that rested on the beach chair's battered metal armrests and taking swigs from a big blue plastic Solo cup, which she had already gotten up to refill twice.
The figure of his mother sitting there in front of the motel room's door had been so familiar—so recognizable—that he had briefly wondered if what she had really wanted had been not so much a change of pace as a chance to never change at all. After all, it was the exact same pose she had struck, sitting on their own back porch—day after day after every fucking day—for years, before she'd finally just got up and gone.
And yet, in that moment, as he had looked out at her familiar silhouette through his bug-splattered front windshield, as the sun had slowly dropped in the sky, dipping slightly behind the motel, casting bigger and bigger shadows across her form and warping her features ever so slightly, Billy had come to a sudden realization—his mother had been gone a long time before she'd left. The woman that he'd been looking at for the last hour or so was a stranger—and had been one for years.
It was at that moment that Billy had understood the full extent of what he'd have to do. After all, even if he had been holding onto some unrealistic hope that he could have somehow found a way to convince his mother to come back to Dillon with him—to come home and to move back into the house with Timmy—doing so would have done Tim just about as much of a good goddamn as handing an armadillo a five iron, for fuck's sake.
What the hell was his little brother supposed to do with that pathetic, broken, heaping pile of mess?
It was not like she'd be able to help them keep the house. When Billy had moved back home for Tim, he'd had to scramble and beg, and lie and plead and—in the end—pony-up a good hunk of cash to stop the grumblings of foreclosure, which had already started. It had been the first of only a few times that Billy had had to resort to—less than legal means to keep the brothers afloat.
Even if he had somehow managed to convince their mother to come home—freeing himself to take off like he'd half-way allowed himself to hope, still clinging desperately to the thought that he could pick up where he had left off pre 9-11, pre Christmas 2001—there was no going back. Left alone with his mother, Timmy'd end up homeless, or in foster care or right back with Billy again—and Billy'd be left right where he was sitting right then—except, most likely, this time minus the house.
Jesus, Billy!
He had wiped a heavy hand across his face and steeled himself to face the reality of the thing he was doing. The thing that Tim and he were doing and had been doing for the past six months. He had steeled himself to face the fact that it wasn't going to be any short-term fix.
Strangely enough, once he'd faced it, however, he'd felt an unexpected sense of relief. It had been like a mother-sized weight had been lifted from his shoulders and with that, Billy had known—almost immediately—that he wasn't going to be getting out of the truck.
He had pulled away from the curb slowly and turned into the strip mall's parking lot. In the liquor store he'd bought a six-pack of PBR and a tin of Skoal for the ride home, placing a $20 bill in the shallow opening between the bottom of the bullet-proof glass that separated him from the bored clerk. The clerk had glanced up briefly from the baseball game playing on the small, portable black-and-white television perched precariously on the counter as he'd entered the prices into the register, made change and slipped the handful of dollars and coins back under the partition towards him, and Billy had thought himself lucky. He'd been in no mood to be carded or denied.
When he had gotten back to Dillon that night it had been close to 1:00 a.m., and Timmy had been lying on the couch, asleep in front of the TV. Billy had gently picked up his little brother, careful not to wake him and had carried him into his room. He'd eased off Tim's battered sneakers, noting the holes and reminding himself that they needed to get some new ones that weekend. He had pulled a sheet over Tim and had looked down at him for a full minute, before brushing his bangs out of his eyes and kissing him lightly on the top of his head. Billy had left the room and turned to softly shut the door. He had then headed back to the other room where he had gotten good and stinking drunk.
In all the years since, he had never told Tim that he'd made the trip.
Six years later, in the wake of his own memories of that long-ago lost mission, Billy had been equal parts apprehensive and curious about the whats, the wheres and the whos of their father's new life, just as he still sometimes wondered about their mother's. But, mostly—mostly it was the hows that had hung Billy up on the night that the rally girls had squired Tim away. He had just wanted—needed, really—to know exactly how their old man had managed to fuck up his little brother.
How, and how badly.
Because if there was anything Billy was sure of in life, it was that it was impossible to spend any amount of time with that man and come away unscathed.
Not if you were a Riggins. And more specifically, not if you were one of Walt Riggins' boys. That much—that much was a given.
The rally girls standing in their living room in their skin-tight jeans and whisking Tim away—had prevented him from grilling his brother about how he had spent the last few days, but they'd had little to do with the hatching of the veritable nest of pterodactyls which had seemed suddenly to have burst forth in full adult form and begun to immediately fight for the territorial rights to his stomach.
This was Tim, after all—Timmy, who was not exactly the most talkative kid in an otherwise empty room, even under the best of circumstances. And these past few days had hardly been the best of circumstances.
Not to say that the last few days had been all that atypical of recent life in the Riggins' home; the two of them hadn't exactly seen a whole heaping mess of good times, or at least they hadn't in a good long while, anyhow. Not since Tim had stopped cutting, washing and combing the hair up there with any sort of regularity, along about the same time he'd started sprouting the hair down there.
Ingrown ones, at that, Billy'd wager from the way Tim had been lashing out at him time after time after fucking time, especially as of late.
Billy was actually pretty certain that he'd already heard just about exactly as much about the Corpus Christi trip as he was ever going to hear—and in about exactly as much detail as Tim was ever likely to give up.
Got the signature.
Jesus fucking Christ—the sweet baby Jesus fucking Christ, drop-kicked and bouncing all caddy-wompus, having landed just short of the goal posts at Herrmann Field.
Like the signature was even remotely what mattered. As if Tim hadn't known that Billy could have signed for traffic court, just like he had signed for every other goddamned piece of paper that the schools, football camps and free clinics required, sent home or threw at them for a parent's signature over the past half-dozen years.
In fact, if it had been a document from the high school, Billy had been utterly convinced that Tim would have had his ass hauled in for trying to pass a forgery—ironically enough—since if Tim had brought in a signature from their dad, Billy was pretty damned sure it would have been the first legitimate signature from Walt that the school would ever have seen.
Even when Billy had been a student there, he'd forged his dad's mark on just about everything. He had signed for his own report cards and pink slips—not that his parents would have given a rat's narrow behind that he'd been dangerously close to failing Modern American and British Literature; not that they would have noticed that he had come dangerously close to getting the boot from the football team his junior year.
He had written up his own notes explaining absences, mostly to cover up the occasions when he and Katie Connelly had skipped school and used the time and each other to learn and practice the elementary basics of Fucking 101. He'd been a sophomore, sneaking back into her house and breaking into the liquor cabinet once her parents had left for work at the chemical plant, and Katie'd been double-majoring in The Art of Giving a Blow-Job—so, needless to say—Billy'd racked up a healthy number of absences that year.
Once, he'd even signed his own suspension notice, later that same year, after he had shown up drunk to his driver's education class. A suspension notice that had been sent home a full month after the incident had occurred, and only then because the school had failed in close to a dozen attempts to reach his parents, to discuss the problem—well, that problem and an assortment other school-related issues, which were mostly connected to his repeated absences and his apparent inability, when he had actually bothered to attend class, to keep his attention on the teacher, instead of trying to make time with the girl in the next seat.
By the end of that month, though, he'd come to the conclusion that there was exactly one advantage to having parents who were so completely tuned out of their own lives and even more spectacularly removed from those of their children—an advantage that had become clear over the course of just a few nights—nights in which Billy'd come home reluctantly, just a bit on edge, after the office had told him his parents had been "contacted" about his "issues" and behavior.
What he'd realized soon enough was that there had been no real reason to waste his time with the worrying, since both of his parents had had an apparently instinctive tendency to hit the delete button on the answering machine before, if not at, the exact time the principal's secretary had finished announcing just who in the Hell she was, and always a good long while before she had even begun to explain the exact nature of the call, which invariably interrupted their happy hour—or…happy hours, technically, he supposed.
Hours, which, by the time he had reached high school, had crept closer and closer to the other side of noon and had lasted until—well, until whatever time it was that the one parent or the other—or sometimes the both of them—had passed out sitting on a chair on the back porch; perched on a stool and slumped over the breakfast bar or lying on the couch in front of the television; that is, if his father hadn't stumbled over to The Saloon at some point, looking to hustle a game of pool or two—or, more probably, looking to get laid.
Not that Billy had thought that either parent would have cared all that much about a week-long suspension and the few failing grades on tests and quizzes that would accompany it, even if someone from the school had managed to talk to them. Neither of them had been particularly invested in Billy's high school education and only one of them—Walt—had ever even bothered to show up to a smattering of Billy's football games throughout the season. But Billy had been a sophomore playing varsity on a squad of 50 kids at one of the consistently dominant teams in the nation—it hadn't been like he had seen much time on the field.
It hadn't been like he'd played much that year, but his mother's absolute disinterest and the fact that she never even went to one goddamned game in his entire high school career—well, it had meant enough that Billy had always made it a point to go to most of Tim's Pop Warner games and as many JV and varsity games as his work schedule would allow.
So, it hadn't really been fear of disappointing his parents that had made him pause at the front door, trying to reign in his anxiety, before entering the house on those few nights when he had come home late and the school had called. Rather, it had been the wildly increasing unpredictability of his parents' behavior, his father especially.
As Billy had progressed through high school, his parents' moods had become more and more volatile. One minute, his father could be all smiles and encouragement, the poster-child of patience, as he tinkered with Billy's swing for hours at a time at the local muni-course—and the next, he was blowing up violently and physically over the stupidest of shit—seriously stupid shit, like one of the boys taking a swig straight from the carton of milk in the refrigerator, or a swig from Walt's beer, or leaving a cap that wasn't entirely sealed on a bottle or a jar, causing it to come off in his hand and the contents to spill all over the floor.
So, Billy had been a bit apprehensive on those nights when he'd arrived home late enough that he could be pretty damned sure that his parents had had more than enough to drink—those nights before he had figured out that the odds were weighed pretty heavily in his favor against the prospect that they'd even listened to the school's message.
Of course, once the pressure was off—once Billy had signed the form and served his time—he'd revisited the incident that had gotten him suspended and he'd committed himself fully to the conclusion that there was no goddamned way that he had been entirely at fault. After all, the Panthers had won state in a squeaker just the weekend before. He'd barely gotten into the game, but he'd ridden the aluminum right on into the fitting for his championship ring and, in celebration of the occasion, he'd been cruising high and happy on a 3-day bender—the first two days thanks almost entirely to Walt himself.
And really, seriously—he'd only just gotten busted, after he'd refused to get behind the wheel of the school's weathered, battered and goddamned ancient Grand Torino. For whatever reason—lapse of judgment from the beer and weed, most likely—he'd balked at driving and—after the circumstances surrounding his refusal had become self-evident, he'd somehow managed to piss Coach Mac off even further than he'd ever though possible.
Of course, pissing off the coach had led to multiple and varied profanity-laced threats, in which an irate Mac had colorfully and descriptively illustrated to anyone within earshot the numerous and innovative ways in which he could and should and absolutely would revel in kicking Billy's scrawny, sorry ass.
Nope, Billy had managed to fully convince himself that he had not been entirely to blame for the mess that followed. After all it wasn't even his scheduled day to drive. Instead—well, instead he'd blamed Tyler Reynolds, who had unbelievably stayed home sick on the day that it was his turn to traverse the pylon jungle set up amongst the cars in the school's back parking lot.
Tyler fucking Reynolds, a tuba player in the marching band, no less.
Which is why, even all these years later, Billy still only tipped Tyler, at most, a whopping five percent each and every time he was seated in Tyler's station at the local Applebee's.
Tim's nonchalance in dropping the papers on the end table had bothered Billy a bit. After all of the talk about their father the last few weeks, it had seemed—while slightly cavalier—also entirely empty of gloat—empty in a way that had made Billy wonder again just what the hell had happened in the time that his brother was away.
But, again, it wasn't that Billy hadn't been able to grill Tim about what went down between him and his father that had Billy feeling weirdly off-kilter—especially since any attempt at an interrogation would have most likely ended with Tim's patented stonewall. Tim's stonewall, in that flat and deadened, but yet still improbably half-amused, voice, in that tone that Timmy had fucking perfected as a means of avoiding any issue of real consequence, to the aggravation of just about anyone who had ever had to deal with him—that stonewall, which would eventually lead Billy to commit justifiable homicide. So, the lack of interrogation wasn't the problem—not really.
Actually, the ill-timed arrival of a gaggle of rally girls had probably helped the brothers avoid the inevitable exchange of angry words—and the occasional knockdown, drag-out fight—which usually followed any attempt Billy had made to connect with Tim on anything other than a superficial level these days. So it wasn't their interrupted conversation that had raised Billy's hackles.
At least, not at first.
But, the longer he sat there trying to figure out what it was—exactly—that had made him so unsettled in the wake of Tim's departure—the more he'd thought about it—the more he'd become convinced that it was the uncertainty itself that was the problem. He could deal with the fallout, if only he knew what the fallout would be. The not knowing—the not having a friggin clue whether Timmy'd been okay the whole time he'd been gone—still hadn't left him.
When his little brother had not returned the night before, without even a phone call to tell Billy that he was sleeping over, it was all Billy had been able to do not to go tearing off after him. Truth be told, he'd almost relished the thought of taking Tim straight out of the lion's den—of facing their father and asserting his own goddamned right to his brother—his own good goddamned right—to ensure that nothing and no one—least of all Walt—was going to touch one hair on that kid's greasy little head—to mess further with his head—or to mess further with his heart.
Billy had known exactly why Tim hadn't called. Billy would have gone through the roof, for fuck's sake, and Tim was the most stubborn, mule-headed kid who'd ever lived. He'd simply chosen not to engage in the fight.
And so Billy had spent a sleepless night repeatedly thinking of gruesome scenarios, each one improbably worse than the one before. He'd started with car wrecks and drunk driving arrests and serial axe murderers, and worked himself right up into the one in which Walt had somehow miraculously managed to pull his shit together enough that Tim had decided to never come back to Dillon at all.
So as he'd been sitting by the front window, blinds open, reading the same paragraph in the newspaper over and over again, he'd felt an enormous sense of relief—mixed with a bit of dread—when he'd heard the unmistakable sound of Tim's truck pulling up.
Then Tim had come inside and he—well, at least he had looked okay.
The fact that the only thing Tim said about the trip was that the paper was signed and that, Dad says "hi"—hadn't boded particularly well for the time Tim'd been away, especially since Billy was pretty damned sure that the latter was complete and utter horseshit—but then the rally girls had shown up and had broken up whatever it was that had been about to happen. Billy couldn't help but be slightly amused—and Tim had seemed more than slightly relieved—and then—just like that, Tim was gone…and Billy was left feeling—like he hadn't a clue about what exactly it was that he was feeling.
If Billy had been honest with himself, he would have admitted that he'd wanted to be able to keep an eye on his little brother and check for collateral damage—right then—that night—when whatever it was that had happened between Tim and their father was still fresh and raw. Now, Tim could go out and get a buzz on and come home and pass out and wake up tomorrow—when it would be a whole heck of a lot easier to pretend that nothing had happened.
He had wanted to sit down next to his brother, pop a few beers, watch Sports Center—and hopefully—catch a sideways glimpse of that slightest of grins that Tim would sometimes flash—that glimmer of a smile that he'd throw Billy's way, mostly when he thought Billy wasn't looking—the one that let him know that they were okay.
Hell, if Billy had been really honest with himself, he would have admitted that he had just wanted Tim home.
He had wanted him safe. From rally girls and absent parents and axe-wielding serial killers, too.
When the rally girls finally dropped Tim off later that night. Billy was in his bedroom, lights off, pretending to sleep. He heard Tim stumble around a bit and several minutes later, he heard the bedroom door close.
Billy waited another several minutes before he got up and made his way to Tim's door. He stood in the half-open doorway, looking down at his little brother's face, half in shadow from the light that shone in from the hall. Once he was sure that Timmy was truly asleep, he crossed over to him, brushed the hair out of his face—and kissed him gently on the top of his head.
Heading back out of the minefield Tim called a bedroom, Billy tripped over a shoe. He picked it up and carried it out into the hallway with him, where he noticed that it was battered and coming apart at the seams. He made a mental note to take Tim to pick up a new pair that weekend. Then he softly closed Tim's door and he made his way to the other room, where he was fixing to get good and stinking drunk.
-End-