Sean sat at the kitchen table and watched his father drink. If you could call it a kitchen. It was more like just a corner of the trailer, the sun coming in through the windows that opened in those little slats, coming in through the spider plants and ferns his mother kept hanging up. It was the middle of the day and his father was drinking.
He was drinking a beer with a shot of whiskey next to it in a thick little shot glass. The whiskey was a deeper amber than the beer, which was pale and bubbly. It was the whiskey that was that deep amber, just like that stuff prehistoric bugs were frozen in. The bubbles raced up to the top of the beer glass, trailed by little wakes, like little skiers in a hop lake. Sean could smell both liquors. He could smell the way his father smelled after he drank them.
Sean sat at the kitchen table, arms folded across his chest. His father leaned over the table, arms on the table, his face hovering over his shot and his beer. He had that bleary eyed look of being drunk, already. The heavy lidded, droopy eyed drunk gaze. Somehow it was worse because the sun was still up.
He looked around the cheap trailer, everything in it seemingly made of plastic. Even the knick knacks were a cheap plastic, the features and details of the figurines blurry somehow, like they were all made in some massive plastics factory in Hong Kong or Korea before World War II. The furniture was cheap, rough fabrics and cheap pine wood and gaudy prints. It looked like vomit, not furniture. The kitchen floor was faded linoleum. The plates didn't match. The cups were jelly jars cleaned out and provided a rough time line of his parents' marriage based on the popularity of various cartoon characters depicted on them. Sean cringed. It wasn't like he was hung up on money, but this trailer, this drinking at noon instead of working, everything always second-hand, it was wearing him down.
He noticed how old his dad's hands looked, one cupped around his beer glass, the other resting on the table. Wrinkled, dry, age-speckled. Did drinking cause that or just genes or both? Sean squinted at the rough ragged nails, the freckle on the right index finger he'd always noticed. Looked at his own hands, young and free of blemishes. Maybe his hands would cup the same glasses of beer. Maybe he'd be a lush, too.
He didn't attempt to talk to his father when he drank like this, heavily and early. He'd tried before. That was before he learned that there was no getting anywhere with it. The conversation would become a circle, a spiral, and all his points would be lost. And it was his dad's eyes that got to him, that funny bleary lower lids pulled down look.
Tracker got out. Tracker wasn't here anymore, not in this crappy trailer in this crappy beach town, not in the kitchen with the booze and the sunlight. Sean narrowed his eyes, thinking of his brother. Maybe he could live with his brother in Toronto. Maybe he could get out of this alcohol haze his parents lived in.
The glass raised to dried, cracked lips. Sean watched him gulp the beer and slam the shot. When he was younger his father would let him "finger dip", put his finger in the shot of whiskey and suck the whiskey off it. He'd liked the sharp flavor, the bite, the tang. When he was younger he didn't realize that not every father drank a lot every day. Adults drank alcohol. That's what they did. But as he got a little older he began to see. They did not have nice things. They did not have relationships that made sense. Helping your stumbling mother to bed every night was not normal. Talking to your father in endless circles, never getting anywhere, questioning yourself and everything around you wasn't normal. Tracker got out. Maybe he could, too.
They weren't violent. That much he could say for his parents. They weren't present, even when they were here. But at least they didn't hit him. Or each other. Sean closed his eyes, smelling the alcohol smell that permeated the wood in the kitchen, the table, his father. That smell was constantly in his nose.
His mother came home, already half in the bag. She had a ways to go to catch up with his father, but Sean was certain she could do it.
"Seany," she said, slobbering him with a kiss, squishing his face in her hand. He recoiled. His father barely spared her a glance. He did get up and pour himself another shot. Sean noticed how malnourished he looked, his legs sinewy, the knees prominent. How his collar bones nearly jutted beneath the t-shirt. How old his hands looked pouring the whiskey, splashing some onto the table, adding to the smell that rose like miasma. Vapor. Fog.
His mother putting away the few things she had bought at the store, cans of spam and macaroni noodles and canned soup, all of which Sean prepared for himself. By dinner time they'd both be too cocked to even consider turning on a stove. They both ate very little, the calories in the alcohol sustaining them. The kitchen was crowded with the three of them, and Sean barely remembered when Tracker had lived here, too.
The sun was going down, the red rays of sunset coming in through the slats, coming in around the leaves of the plants, igniting the edge of his dad's shot glass. Sean wondered what it would be like to have been dealt a different life, one with sober parents, one with things that weren't junk, one with a brother who hadn't taken off at the age of 16. One where he could keep his temper in check. One where he wasn't the kid in the second-hand, salvation army clothes. If he could squint hard enough he could almost see that other life. Almost.
His mother opened her cheap bottle of wine, poured a hearty glass. At the table his father's eyes were closing and his head would slump down and then jerk back up as he struggled to stay awake. The sun was gone, replaced by the dim porch lights of the neighbors. Sean could see the weak light through the leaves of the plants, the dried out plants that would die soon because no one watered them.
He wondered what Toronto was like, what Tracker was doing, wondered if he could go. What was here for him? Drunk welfare cases who weren't even pretending anymore to be his parents. They were bodies that went to the office to get the free check and bought boxes of wine and three dollar bottles of whiskey, keystone beer. Sean shook his head.
Night. The moon was high. His mother poured a sloppy glass of the rose colored wine, and it smelled cheap. His father had passed out, his head laying on his arm, a sip of beer and whiskey left beside him. His mother walked/danced across the floor, tried to pull him into her embrace.
It went on. Sean marveled that he couldn't get used to it. Watched as his mother coaxed his father to bed, but he only got as far as the couch and fell onto it, sprawled across the limp cushions. His mother clung to her glass of wine, took a swallow, danced off again.
He felt the tears coming to his eyes, hot and salty tears that didn't solve anything. He felt the cool air coming from the screen door, saw the bugs floating lazily outside in the soft night air. Heard his father's loud, drunken snores. Heard his mother puking in the bathroom, heard the splash of the vomit against the porcelain bowl.
Sean stood up, his muscles stiff, stretched his spine. The floor creaked beneath his feet. The table was sticky with the spilled whiskey. He went into the living room, the rug matted and crushed with dirt and ashes from careless cigarettes. He took the afghan from the back of the couch and covered his father gently with it. He peeked into the bathroom and saw his mother slumped against the side of the toilet. He helped her up, led her to bed. She leaned as she walked like someone walking on the deck of a ship in stormy seas. He covered her with the old bedspread with the faded pattern of daffodils that reminded Sean of some 50's sitcom he used to watch.
They were in bed, hangovers brewing. When the sun came around again they'd be chewing aspirin and drinking black coffee, moaning and telling him to keep it down. He didn't know how much longer he could keep it down. It was all threatening to come up, every last bit of it.