Aurora(21)

Rusty just looked at her, saddened. His icy eyes, courtesy of his Irish mother, sloped down at the sides, and when he’d hit his forties, he’d acquired a permanent heavy-lidded look. The resulting effect was that he struck most people as a man who carried a burden of great sorrow. It wasn’t so terribly far from the truth; it just missed the mark. He had inflicted far more suffering than he’d endured.

“It’s not natural,” he said.

“What?”

“You. My kid. Living together. You’re not even related anymore.”

“That was his choice, not mine. I thought it was brave.”

“I want him to come live with me.”

“Then you probably shouldn’t have hit him.”

She regretted it immediately. Not because it was unkind or uncalled for, but because it meant this conversation was going to go on a lot longer than she’d hoped.

“I told you, I don’t remember doing that.”

“Well, Scott and I do.”

“Did I ever hit you?” She didn’t answer. “Did I ever hit you?”

Aubrey turned, looking inside. Scott was looking back at them over his shoulder, his senses hyper-attuned to the slightest change in the calibration of a conversation’s hostility level. Aubrey called to him. “Can you get all the cold stuff into the freezer in the basement? And move it in there all at once, don’t leave the freezer door open for long, OK?”

Scott nodded and headed into the kitchen. She knew the coffin-size freezer Thom had gifted her during COVID was empty, save for a single five-pound bag of ice, and she hoped to get it as full as possible while they still could. It was a plan that was doomed to failure after a few days if the power did go out, but it was all she had at the moment.

Rusty was still looking at her. “I stopped. Drinking. So that you know.”

“I’m glad. Rusty, I have a lot of work to do.”

“It was the times I blacked out. That was it, right? Because every other time, I was myself, and I was in control. You know that. But I can’t remember what I can’t remember, and I couldn’t control it either. It wasn’t me.”

Aubrey turned and looked across the street, westward, where the sun had fully set behind the row of maple trees that bordered the school behind the houses. It was cool mid-April, so it would be dark soon. Maybe really dark. She was desperate to wrap this up.

Rusty wasn’t finished. “If I got pissed off, I could tell, and I could always control it, no matter how much I’d had. I could feel it coming and I could walk it down, I could make it go back in, and I never, ever hit anybody or anything when it was like that.”

“But you did, Rusty.”

“In the blackouts, that’s what I’m saying. But I don’t remember those, because I was switched off. I couldn’t stop it because I wasn’t there. It sounds stupid, but it’s true, and that’s why this is all so unfair.”

He’d leaned in on that last sentence, and when he hit the f in unfair, she could smell his breath. Southern Comfort, maybe? A spicy, earthy thing, the kind of booze nobody sits down with a glass of, the sort of thing you only drink if it’s the very last thing in the cabinet and you gotta get a buzz on right this fucking minute. She saw the little red streaks in his eyes then, and she marveled at her defensive ability to miss things she didn’t want to see. The last two years of not seeing Rusty drunk had dulled some of her formerly razor-sharp observational skills. Of course he was fucked up, and of course he was scared and full of regrets, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

She attempted a neutral tone. “Thank you for checking on us. I hope you’re right about all this.”

“Oh, come on. Like you never wanted to smack the kid?”

“No. Never.” She picked up her groceries, glancing at the screen door. “Would you mind?”

With exaggerated gallantry, he reached out and opened the door for her. She stepped through, but instead of closing it, Rusty leaned in the doorframe, lingering.

“Look, it’s a weird time.”

“It is.”

She turned, bags still in her arms, hooking her foot under the front door to close it.

“And it catches me at just the worst possible moment,” he continued.

She paused, realizing what he was actually there for. She sighed. “How much?”

“I’ve got a twenty and a ten in my wallet and the ATMs are shut down. How much can you spare?”

“Wait here.”

She turned and walked into the house. He watched as she went into the kitchen, put the bags on the counter, and turned to the half-open door that led to the basement stairs. Leaning slightly to his right, he could just see her back as she spoke to Scott, who was still downstairs, probably loading up the freezer. Rusty frowned, wondering why on earth she was asking Scott before dipping into her own finances, but that was a puzzle he knew he was never going to figure out. Those two had been tight since the day he’d first brought her home, when Scott was seven or eight, and they’d been conspiring against him ever since.

The more he watched, the less Rusty liked the conversation. Aubrey was at the top of the stairs, gesturing, trying to make some kind of point to Scott, who must have been resisting it. He could hear the boy’s surprisingly deep tones countering her emphatically. Wait a minute, was this the actual situation here? Was Rusty a man standing on the threshold of what had once been his own home, watching while his ex-wife attempted to convince his fifteen-year-old son that it was OK to give him a couple of twenties?