Will Willoughby
Now that he’s dead, it’s time for my father to go. That’s how my mother says it, anyway. She calls me one afternoon in September, six months after he sauntered back into the kitchen despite having just been buried. “He’s just eating all day and night,” she says. “I’m all out of steam, David.” She says this like I’ve got plenty of steam to go around. But there’s no reason I shouldn’t help out, and the story I’ve been writing is stalled anyway. So I drive over there to take another shot at booting my voracious, insufficiently deceased old man.
When he first got back, he was delightful. Death had changed him from that shrunken, nonsensical thing in hospice into the plump, 1970s version of him. Black horn-rimmed glasses, nominal hair loss. Content, breezy. A father prone to playing his gut like a bongo or trotting out an uncalled-for Nixon impression. Not the trope I remember—the father brooding in his recliner, stewing over insults at work, or otherwise nursing the ambiguous grief that had seized his life.
All that first week, my mother stayed with him in the kitchen. They just sat there holding hands, leaning together, saying soft things.
Me, I was hoping for a Field of Dreams scenario. I thought we could be pals, maybe head to the beach for some cinnamon fried dough. If anyone asked, I’d say he was my odd little brother with a Nixon fetish. Maybe I could even tell him about my writing, let him know I’d done alright. Maybe he’d clap me on the shoulder, tousle my hair, and go, “You’re okay, kid.”
None of that would happen, I knew, and I felt quietly ashamed I wasn’t somehow above that kind of thing. Worse, I’d been churning out endless drafts of a short story with the working title “Night of the Living Dad,” a thinly veiled fictionalization of my father issues. I’ve even thrown in a divorced, overweight son with sporadic seizures, chronic dental pain, and writer’s block. Why not? A consolidation of all my woes. A value pack of catharsis.
My father kept being delightful in his own way, but for my mother, the summer smeared out into a single sleepless night. He never went to bed. Never left the kitchen. Never let up with the gut bongo. He puttered. He noshed. The only peace she got was when he’d read the vintage Portland Register he’d brought with him. Even then, he was hard to ignore. He’d grumble to himself, or he’d recite news tidbits from half a century ago, getting annoyed if she didn’t appear to be listening.
So when I drive over, I take my time.
Their house, a creaky New Englander blistered with flaked paint, squats in a profusion of thistle and ragweed, daring me to include it in some moody story about my childhood home. Big, airy gaps have opened up around the windows, and rotted pickets jut from the porch railing like dislocated teeth. Grim stuff, I admit.
I go in through the side door, which opens right into the kitchen.
He’s standing at the open fridge, working on a cold chicken wing. He’s always this way. Always just home from work. Always wearing his untucked white shirt and loosened plaid tie. Always famished.
“Oh, hey,” he says when he sees me. “What’s Mr. Davy up to?”
He tosses the unfleshed chicken bones onto a laundry heap and swigs from a jug of milk.
My mother shuffles over. “This is my point. He’s just eating all the time. Mr. Chocolate Pudding for Supper, you know, Mr. Lasagna for Snacks. I can’t keep up.” She picks up the chicken bones and places them on the crest of an overstuffed trash barrel.
As if we’re not there, my father pads around the kitchen as well as he can among the drifts of hoarder junk. He grazes on potato chips and dry spaghetti. Swallows a tea bag like an unchewed grape. He finally settles at the kitchen table and holds his paper up to read.
“Maybe this time . . .” My mother flaps her hand in a shooing motion.
“Maybe,” I say, surprised at how positive I sound.
I consider all my usual points in the case for leaving. I’d tell him again how unnatural this is, how untenable. Pacing like a movie lawyer, I’d point out how haggard she’s become, how unwashed. A permanently nightgowned widow, always indoors. See the long white hair swaying like willow branches, the eyes shriveled like black olives. He’d had his time, I’d say. But the living, they already bear the weight of absence. Why add the burden of presence?
It’s a hard case to make. His only alternative, as far as I know, is lying in the fusty dark in a box underground—no way to sit up, turn on his side, or even lift his head. Is eating chocolate pudding for supper somehow worse?
My mother squeezes my arm. “You boys have fun.” She limps to the living room, steadying herself on piles as she goes.
I move a stuffed cow off one of the kitchen chairs and sit down facing my father’s wall of newsprint.
For him, it’s always May 25, 1971. He knows I’m his son, but he doesn’t know anything about the last fifty-three years. Over the summer, I’d quiz him on increasingly bygone events—the pandemic, 9/11, the Berlin Wall, the premier of Jaws. He’d blankly nod until I got to Alan Shepard playing golf on the moon. He’d become animated and speculate on how far a ball could be driven in an airless, low-gravity environment.
But it’s curious. Why that date in particular? I was just a squawking thing in a bassinet at the time, so I ask him now: “What’s so special about May 25, 1971?”
“It’s Tuesday,” he says from behind the paper.
“It’s got to be something, though, right?”
“Don’t know what else to say about that.”
“But you wouldn’t come all the way back here just to read some random paper.”
“Dear me suds,” he says. “‘Saboteurs ignite 1.5 million gallons of aviation fuel at American base in Vietnam.’”
“Dad,” I say.
“‘Black Panthers sent back to prison after mistrial.’”
“Dad.”
“Oh, hey, we should go see Andromeda Strain.”
For a moment, I think it’s possible to go see Andromeda Strain. I even draw a breath to tell him I’m not up for a movie, but he says something I don’t expect: “‘Palm Beach awaits.’”
“Palm Beach, Florida?”
“That’s where they keep Palm Beach. They got vacations down there. It ain’t cheap, but I think we can hack it. How’s about getting your folks to take the baby?”
“What baby’s that?”
“They’ll definitely watch him. Then you and me, we go catch some rays down in F-L-A. Do whatever they do down there. Drink straight from the oranges. Go snorkeling. Things pan out, my dear, maybe we move down there for good. Your folks can fly the kid down later. Do they let kids fly on their own?”
From the present day, I crinkle the top of the paper down. He watches it in disbelief, as if the horizon itself is crumbling right in front of him. Then his thick-rimmed glasses level on me, and he grins.
“Oh, hey,” he says. “What’s Mr. Davy up to?”
***
Hypothesis: Tuesday, May 25, 1971, was the day my father’s life diverged. That morning, the house looked the way it does in old photos—clean but not sparse, the living room tastefully appointed with a braided rug, midcentury sofa, and console TV. My father was tucking into the newspaper at a clean table while sunlight glinted off a recently waxed floor, the house redolent with bacon and coffee. An ad made him consider Palm Beach. A life there. But the idea evaporated as soon as it took shape. Maybe the baby started fussing, or the wife asked him to pick up some eggs after work. Whatever it was, he became, without realizing it, someone else. A man in suspension. A man whose dreams, if they happened at all, extended only so far as Palm Beach.
I stand in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.
My story, the stalled one, comes to mind. I’d like to put it behind me, but it won’t leave me alone. Most of it’s okay—the voice, the imagery, the tension—but the ending keeps unraveling on me. In most versions, the main character seems hell-bent on standing pensively on the beach unleashing tepid ruminations on estrangement, deep time, and video games. A real fucknut.
It’s not for lack of material.
Most of the living room, for example, appears in the story unembellished. There’s an old braided rug, now fossilized under fifty years of deposition. The mother character is pitched back in the recliner (as mine is now) with her eyes clenched, her mouth agape. The stagnant air, says my narrator, smells like old books and stale cat urine. Sometimes dusty cat urine. Stale, dusty, peed-on old books.
In the real kitchen, my father’s getting restless.
He rips a corner off his paper, wads it up, tosses it back like popcorn. It’s not enough, though. He stands, gives his belly a two-handed whomp, and starts opening cabinets, slapping them shut.
“There’s nothing to eat,” he shouts.
My mother’s eyes snap open. She pushes a button on her armrest and rises with a sci-fi whir to an upright position.
“What’s jackass doing?” she says through a yawn.
Jackass is shaking instant rice from the box directly into his mouth like M&Ms.
“Eating,” I say.
“Well golly gum, call the papers.”
When the rice runs out, he sits cross-legged on the floor and starts in on the box itself, earnest as a preschooler eating his afternoon snack.
I ask my mother, “You ever go to Palm Beach? Like when I was a kid?”
“Palm Beach?”
“He was talking about Palm Beach earlier.”
“No, not Palm Beach. Maybe he means the beach, you know, our beach. We used to go down there to visit Twinkle Toes. His little friend from work. Doreen, Susan, something like that.”
My father drops the remains of the rice box, stacks some junk mail on the floor, and drizzles maple syrup over it. Starts in.
“But, you know, we never went back after the accident,” she says. “You were, what, five or six. You wouldn’t remember.”
I do remember, but I’ve never told her that. I know, for example, that Twinkle Toes was named Clara. She had wispy yellow hair and nervous blue eyes. She served us pillow mints from a white glass bowl. A cat clock in her kitchen looked side to side as it ticked.
And I know accident is the wrong word.
I’ve already written it into the story. It was a summer night, I say in a flashback, and we were driving home from the beach. I was curled up in the backseat while, in the front, they bickered through a ball game on the radio. It played that whole time, the announcer droning through static about the winding up, the swinging, the missing. It played when the bickering turned to screeching and when my mother opened the passenger door as we raced down the road. It played through the wind in my ears and when her feet, in clogs, heeled the door frame. When she jumped. And when my father howled and pulled over and piled out, and there were two away, no men on base, at the top of the third. Outside were peepers and the faraway voices of a man and a woman beside the road in the dark while, in the car, their son pretended to sleep.
For a while in the spring, I thought that’s why he’d come back. Closure. Atonement. Not just for the incident. For all of it. He’d never meant for things to be that bad, he’d say. And we could talk it over, the three of us. Say all the things we never did. Move on.
But aside from occasional monologues, he wasn’t a talker and didn’t seem especially contrite. And what if he did apologize? What would I say? “Hey, it happens, Pop. Who hasn’t at some point had their wife hurl herself from a moving car like a fucking paratrooper?”
So, for good reason, I keep my mouth shut.
My mother tries to stand but falls back into the chair.
I reach down to help. “You okay?”
“Funky-dory,” she says. “You go home, kiddo. I’ll deal with Mr. Palm Beach in there.”
“What can I do?”
“Nothing to do. It’s your father.”
I help her up, and we both stand in the kitchen doorway.
Mr. Palm Beach is still sitting crisscross applesauce on the floor. He’s reading a box of prunes as he licks maple syrup from his fingertips, oblivious to the smooching sounds.
I say to my mother, “What if you lived with me for a while?”
She says, loud enough for both of us, “I’m not the one that needs to go.”
“But if we’re gone,” I say, lowering my voice, “maybe he’ll go back.”
“That dingbat’s not driving me from my own house, end of story.”
I let it drop, unable to refute her claim to the house under squatter’s rights. There’s a more pressing situation anyway.
My father, having set the prunes aside, is eating the thumb on his right hand. Not the nail. The thumb. He’s biting into it. Like a cheese stick.
I rush to bat his hand away, but I stumble on a pile, and by the time I get there, he’s already swallowed the segment above the knuckle. There’s no blood. It’s just a stump terminating in a star of puckered skin, like the tip of a hot dog. He works the stump back and forth, testing its range of motion, and regards it with a kind of pride. He gives me a half thumbs-up.
“Maybe you’re right,” I tell my mother. “Maybe I should get him out of the house.”
***
Over the summer, my mother and I would discreetly withdraw to the junk dunes in the back hallway and consider extreme measures. Appealing to reason, we agreed, was futile. And he hadn’t apparently acquired any empathy on his brief trip to the hereafter. There was forcible removal, of course. Decisive manhandling. Or necrocide. But I’m not, by nature, extreme. And not especially oedipal. So we held off, played it by ear, waited to see if things would just get better on their own.
Now, though, after he eats the northern reaches of his thumb, I figure it’s time to do something.
In a credibly nonchalant tone, I ask him if he wants to go to the Crab Shack. There’s no such place. But it has a nice ring, and I really sell it. I tell him they have this meal deal called the Mile-High Pile. You park out front, I say, and order from a waitress who comes out to your car. They’re on roller-skates, I say. They twirl. After letting that image sink in, I lean in and whisper, “I won’t tell Mom.”
He instantly agrees. Even pretends, in his John Wayne voice, that it’s his idea. “Well, saddle up,” he says. “We’re burnin’ daylight.”
So I do what my fucknut protagonist would do. I drive him to the beach.
On the way over, he sits in the passenger seat lulled by the sunlight flashing through the trees. The Register is folded into a paper-route burrito on his lap. He’s taken his glasses off, so his eyes look squinty and infantile, vaguely subterranean. When we get to the salt marsh, he puts his glasses back on and reads the back of the burrito.
I turn onto the main drag, where all the cottages and storefronts have been boarded up since Labor Day, and pull into a parking spot facing the water. I cut the engine and listen to it click as it cools.
The beach, covered with patches of dried kelp and frayed nylon netting, looks cold even in sunlight. Gulls peck at a half-buried pizza box. Jacketed old couples walk the shoreline, and a gray-bearded man canvasses the foot-cratered sand with a metal detector.
My father looks around. “Where’s Crab Shack?”
“It’s too late,” I say. “They’re closed.”
“Maybe they’ll open yet,” he says. “Maybe we can sit inside.”
“Maybe,” I say. I crack the window so I can listen to the waves and smell the salt air. For a second, I get a peaceful feeling that seems somehow quaint, but it doesn’t last.
“See the boat!” he shouts, pointing to a cargo ship offshore. Then, clutching the paper with his good hand, he hops out and lingers in the maw of the door.
I lean over so he can hear. “Let’s stay by the car, bud.”
He waves me off and trudges across the sand, still dressed for work in 1971.
I scramble out and give chase but instantly become winded, so I slow down. Where can he go, really? The only thing in front of him is the ocean and, beyond that, Gibraltar and northern Africa.
I catch up to him on the tidal flats. He’s standing there with pocketed hands, the paper wedged under his arm like a billy club. His tie snaps in the wind.
“Let’s head back,” I say, shivering.
With his eyes on the ship, he says, “They knew the earth was round a long time ago. You know how they knew?”
He’s about to talk about the sails.
“It’s the sails,” he says. “When they headed out to sea, the sails would sink below the horizon.”
“Better get back to the car,” I say as gently as I can.
He stares at the freighter with a wolfish look, like it’s the last cruller in the breakroom, and steps closer to the water. I stay with him.
“Of course,” he says, “they saw the earth’s shadow was curved in a lunar eclipse.”
“Neat,” I say.
I could leave him there. Just walk off and let him gaze into the distance mumbling about freighters and the moon. Maybe, when the tide rises and the water swirls around his black work shoes, he’ll dissolve and shrink into the sand until there’s nothing left but little rafts of delightful foam.
“They knew,” he says, watching the ship. “Don’t give me this horseshit about sailing off the edge of the world.”
A thin, sizzling wave spreads over the sand and almost bubbles over our feet.
“We’d better go,” I say.
“Don’t know about that.” He takes his glasses off and hands them to me. His baby eyes make him look blind, like all he can do is address the point in space where I might be.
“We need to go,” I say.
“Agreed.” He marches into the water like he’s late for a meeting, plopping his feet into the surf with unnecessary theatrics.
“Where are you going?”
He turns around, his pants soaked to the knees. “Leaving.”
“Where, though?”
“Going.”
“There’s nowhere to go.”
“Then not staying.”
“What about Mom?”
His face pinches up like he’s got acid reflux. A wave knocks him off balance, and he staggers. He looks in my direction.
“What about Mom?” I repeat.
“Here’s the thing about your mother,” he says.
I wait to hear the thing about my mother.
He scratches his ribs, squints into the distance, and says, “She’s driving me apeshit, bud. Just royally apeshit in the classical sense. I can’t . . .”
I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t know what he expects me to say. I know he’s leaving, though. He said so. If I say something, it should be what you’re supposed to say—that I’ll remember him, I was lucky he was my dad, thank you. All of that. The best I can do, though, is let out a series of howling caveman grunts. Don’t, the grunts are saying. Don’t go. Just stay. Don’t go. Please.
Without saying anything, he shakes his head—a little sad but mostly confused—and wades out into the Atlantic.
He splashes through the shallows until he gets out beyond the breakers, where he starts doggie paddling, stretching his neck to keep his mouth above water. He keeps swimming until he’s just a head bobbing out there, and he turns around and treads water, scanning the shore with his puffy infant eyes. Even from here, I can tell how lost he looks, how ready he is to cry. I lose him behind a swell, and when it flattens out, he’s gone, and there’s nothing left, nothing to show he was there, no swirl or plume or spray. Just the wide, ageless sky and the rolling of the waves of the ancient sea.
I stand there long enough for the sun to sink behind me and my shadow to creep toward the water. He doesn’t come back.
It’s going to be hard to explain.
I’ll try, though. I’ll go back to my mother’s house, hand over his glasses, and tell her it’s over. I’ll have to make something up. Tell her he simply vanished from the beach. We were standing there, I’ll say, just taking everything in—the flamingo-colored haze ringing the horizon, the tiny deltas braided into the glassy sand, the icy wind coming in from the north. And when I turned around, he just wasn’t there. But he was calm near the end. Warm. Talked about science the way he used to. Mostly, though, he talked about her, talked about how much he’ll miss her, how much she meant to him. All of it’s true. Or at least true enough.
I’ll put the rest of it—the freighter, the apeshit, the unmanly grunting—into the story. I figure I can use that gray-bearded man for the coda. The real one went home a while ago, but I’ll bring him back for the last paragraph.
Here he comes, I’ll say, sweeping his metal detector in wide arcs in front of him, his black eyes fixed on the ground as he listens to his headphones. Every so often, he kneels, scoops something up, looks it over, and drops it, clapping the sand from his palms. And he keeps going, keeps looking, keeps hoping he’ll hear something—a buzz or a beep or a spiraling chirp or whatever tells him his time here has not been wasted.
#
Will Willoughby, a Maine Literary Award winner and Pushcart nominee, writes short stories populated by characters facing absurd, comically sad situations. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Pangyrus, and other literary magazines. Connect with him on Bluesky (@willwilloughby.bsky.social) or Instagram (@willoughbywill6). Read more of his stories at www.willwilloughby.com.