“I’d be lying if I said I thought you’d actually come out here,” he said. “But here you are.”
“Here I am,” I said. “So what’s going on? Why did you want to talk?”
He chuckled.
“Why I want to talk and what I want to talk about are two very different things,” he said, taking a sip of his beer. “But to answer your question, I have had some kind of a fucked-up night.”
“How so?”
“Well, for starters, my mother went to the hospital with a heart attack.”
“Oh my God, is she—”
“Alive,” Steele said, his words punctuated with a long gulp of his beer. “But it wasn’t easy seeing her like that.”
“I’ll bet.”
But something in Steele’s eyes and his words made me realize that whatever it was, it wasn’t just as simple as his mom having suffered a heart attack. I thought better of asking for more; if Steele wanted to tell me, I wouldn’t scare him off again by probing. I’d let him bring it up.
“Mom’s always been a bit of a nutcase to me,” he said. “And tonight didn’t help.”
He drank again.
“My mother’s a bitter, cruel old lady,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone who was so callous and so mean, and so resentful of the world. It took her something like fifteen years or so for her to finally start to come clean about why tonight.”
He chuckled.
“Fifteen fucking years. Can you believe that shit?”
I grimaced, empathizing with him.
“Might as well tell you now,” he said. “Fifteen years ago, my dad and brother died. I…how and why doesn’t matter.”
That’s not true. It absolutely matters.
But I’m not going to press you now. I’ll let you tell me on your own time.
“It broke my mother. It cracked me, but it broke her completely. She was never the most caring person in the world, but she wasn’t cruel and heartless. After the accident, though, she started treating me like shit. Berated me. Said I couldn’t live up to the standards my father set. Called me a disappointment. The usual.”
That one sure sounds familiar. At least the echoes of it…
“So for the course of my teenage years and on, I did everything I could to get the hell away from her. Brock and I became close. We made a club of sorts, the Bernard Boys. Mom moved away from the street, but I used every excuse I could to return. Mom, meanwhile, got more and more unhealthy by the day. Gained weight. Got arthritis. Started smoking. So fucking self-destructive.”
He leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t looking at me as much as he had when he’d started speaking, and I understood why. He was probably trying to figure things out for himself.
“And through it all, I pushed myself away from her, which probably caused her to push herself away from me. When her health got bad enough last few years that I had to be her caretaker, I did it with the bare fucking minimum. I made—still make—once a week runs for her to get groceries and medication. And that’s it. I don’t do jack shit otherwise. That was, until tonight, when she had her heart attack.”
What Steele was going through with his mother obviously was nowhere near what I was going through with my father. But the sense of an inability to connect, the failure to live up to their standards, the feeling that things were drifting apart…if there wasn’t overlap, there were certainly parallels.
“I was at the graveyard tonight for my father and brother, actually. That was what you were asking me about on Thursday.”
Finally, he started looking at me again.
“I didn’t want to dive into it, but I knew that was the same damn excuse that I gave Tara. And so for my own sanity, I had to go to that graveyard. I did. And it was fucking gut-wrenching. Seeing my dad and Stan. And…”
His voice trailed off.
“Anyway, when I saw my mother, I felt like I needed to be more considerate and kinder. So I tried listening to her. And when I did, I realized if I wasn’t careful, that was my fucking future right there. Bitter and angry at the world because I didn’t trust anyone with my weaknesses. My mom thinks it’s too late for her. Maybe. But I know it’s not too late for me. And I know you were the last person that I really hung out with.”
