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Nothing I do. I’m failing to be the son he needs, and it’s eating me the fuck up inside.
Jesse and I guide him up the front steps of Ganny’s house and to the door.
“You can’t give up,” Dad mumbles. “Taylors don’t quit.” And his gaze sweeps up, blue-eyed and surprisingly lucid. “Taylors don’t quit, son.” And then his look goes hazy again, and his head bobs.
“Get the door open,” I say, taking my father’s weight from Jesse.
We all have keys to Ganny’s house and have since we were kids. Jesse unlocks the door, and we carry my dad inside and up the stairs to his room. We get him onto the bed, and Jesse takes off his shoes. I turn him onto his side and make sure he’s comfortable. Jesse gets a bucket, just in case.
“Goodnight, Dad,” I say, as we leave.
On the sidewalk, I pause and stare up at the moon. “Fuck,” I mutter, then shout, “Fuck!”
“You want me to arrest you for being disorderly instead of Dad?” Jesse asks, switching off the lights on his car. The side is printed with the Sheriff’s Department logo.
I don’t reply.
“We’ve got to do something about this,” Jesse says.
“What?” It bursts out of me. “What are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse replies, a whole lot calmer than me. “But we can’t spend the rest of our lives picking up the pieces of a broken man.”
“He won’t listen.”
“Yeah. He won’t. But something’s got to change. Look, I’ll figure it out, okay?”
“It’s not your job to figure it out,” I say.
“Yeah? It ain’t your job either.”
I shake my head. Because it is my job. The minute I left this town and started getting famous, my entire family went to shit. Everything changed. Mom got sick. She suffered for years while Dad watched her waste away, beat the disease, fall into remission again.
Jesse leans in and inhales.
“The fuck?”
“You wearing cologne?” Jesse asks.
“Fuck off.”
Jesse gives me a knowing look.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “Savage and I went to Longhorn’s.”
But the knowing look stays. “How’s June?”
“Fine.”
“She doing a good job as a nanny?”
“Sure.”
Jesse won’t quit it, and it’s annoying me. We have bigger problems.
“You know,” Jesse says, “you wouldn’t have all this repressed rage if you’d just do what you wanted to do.”
“Who says I don’t?”
