Pain, Roberto A Robles [best classic novels txt] 📗

my finger came up poised to ring again.
God, look at you! was the first thing I thought as soon as I saw him. His hair was dirty, it sat on his head as a mop you use to clean something sticky you spilt on the floor, and never bother to rinse it afterwards. His face was covered with a stubble that must have been growing unattended for two or three days, at least. He smelled, too. He took half a step into his house and motioned me inside with his hand, quietly closing the door behind me.
“Squig,” I began to say.
He turned and started walking towards the stairs. “Don’t make noise, my old man is sleeping,” he said.
We walked up the stairs to his room. Just as it had been on the day this whole thing started, the door to his parents’ bedroom was ajar. Trenton closed the door to his room as soon as I came in after him.
“Long time no see, Priest,” he said.
“Too long,” I said.
“Thought you’d forgotten about your friends,” he said, and somehow I felt he wasn’t joking.
I chose not to go that way. I didn’t mind telling him what I’d been doing, but I found myself not wanting to. Once friends see getting together as an obligation, things start rolling downhill, and explaining my activities of the summer felt too much like justifying not having fulfilled an obligation. Instead I said, “What’s going on, pal?”
“Lit seminars with Mr. Jablownski,” he said. Mr. Jablownski had been our literature teacher three years in a row. He had worshipped “the Bard of Avon” until leukemia sent him to recite “Macbeth” to an incorporeal audience.
“What about them,” I asked.
“All our yesterdays have lighted fools, the way to dusty death,” he quoted, perfectly remembering that well-drilled drama from our sophomore year.
“It is a tale told by an idiot,” I said, skipping a few lines from the original quote, so we wouldn’t do the whole thing just now.
“…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We finished together.
Then we fell silent.
“Your dad’s dying?” I asked in a way I would never dare ask Ginny. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Yeah,” he sighed.
“I’m so sorry, man,” I walked up to him, meaning to embrace him, but he turned and walked to the window.
“Yeah,” he said again.
I didn’t take offense at his rejection. I was always the touchy-feely one, not him. I sat on the edge of his bed. It was unmade and his room didn’t smell like a garbage dump only because the overhead fan was on at full speed and the window was open. I could see unfinished bits of food on plates that seemed to have been lying there longer than since last night, clothes strewn haphazardly all around me, and his ashtray was overflowing, which was surprising, since his parents knew we smoked and we occasionally did at their house, but never so openly and never carelessly leaving the evidence for his mother to find.
“We’re not taking it well, my friend,” he finally said. “And I don’t think I’ve handled things very well lately.”
“How so?” I asked matching his quiet tone of voice. By now I was dying to get some answers to all this mystery, but I didn’t think coming right out and saying so would be such a good idea.
“I’ve gone and done one stupid thing after another since the day Ginny and I fought in the kitchen, remember?”
How could I forget, I wondered. Instead, I said, “Yeah, I remember,” and then my personality set in and I said, “Slime in a hooker’s toilet,” and laughed. I soon wished I had stapled my lips together, or that I had suddenly swollen my tongue, anything so I hadn’t caused such a sad look on his face.
“Yeah, that” he said, and turned around to face me, “Guess who the hooker turned out to be?”
He and Ginny had decidedly taken a liking to speaking in riddles, recently. “Huh?” I more or less asked, already knowing what was coming, of course.
“She’s pregnant, you know?” he said. “The silly bitch.”
I remained silent. What could I say? I didn’t want to speak ill of Ginny. Even if I thought that, on this day and age, a girl with Ginny’s education, supportive family, and intellect would be hard pressed to make such a mistake, unless stupidly careless, but I wasn’t going to say things I would later regret
She doesn’t even have a boyfriend, I thought stupidly. I felt as if I had been swallowed down the fabled rabbit hole. How had things gone so wrong, so fast for my friends?
“I know, but I don’t understand how that could happen!” I blurted out.
“Dude,” he said, for a minute reverting to his old self. “I know your experience is limited, but surely you know how.”
“Asshole,” I said. “When? Where? You know what I mean.”
“Well,” he explained. “She’s already two months along, but where and other details, uh, uh, she’s not talking.”
“Did she say who the father is?”
“No,” he replied. “But my money is on this guy from twelfth grade who’s been hanging around her group of friends. Why would an older guy hang around a group her age, if not because she’s got a girl in his sights? I guess that girl was Ginny.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That makes sense. How are your folks taking it?”
“Man, let me put it to you like this: my old man doesn’t sleep, because he’s in pain half the night; my mom doesn’t sleep because she’s discovered that she’s going to be a grandmother right about the time she’s going to… lose her husband,” his voice broke down on that last sentence, but he went on, “and I don’t sleep because I’m paralyzed with dread over what’s going to happen to us, about not being able to make it to college -how could I leave my folks like this?- and, even though she wouldn’t believe this, because I love my sister, and I feel for her.”
“I know, man,” I said. “I know.”
“She stayed out really late one night, around the time you came back from your trip with Father Tim to pick up your stuff for summer camp,” Trenton explained. “She said she was going out with some friends and would be back in a couple of hours. She didn’t return home until 2 A.M. My mom was ready to call the police, I tell you.”
Surprised, I said, “Man, that’s not Ginny. What the hell was she thinking with your dad sick and all?”
“We’ve done a good job of not being judgmental, Priest,” he reproached me, “but I hear you. Who knows, man? Everything that’s been happening… maybe she was just looking for some comfort, to forget about stuff…”
“You said you had done a bad job adjusting, Squig,” I told him, “but you sound mature about this, man. You’re scaring me.”
“Nah, it’s just old me,” he said. “Truth is, man, I’ve had time to think things through and am telling you the short version. There was some shouting going on in this house, you better believe that.”
“I wouldn’t believe it if you said different,” I said, meaning to joke a little, but realizing it was the truth.
Ginny had refused to offer an explanation to her parents about arriving home so late, other than to say she had stayed with one of her friends, and they had spent the night talking on the porch, outside his house. Her parents had been furious when she got home that night, but Ginny had never been wild, so they’d had no reason to doubt her honesty, even though they seriously questioned her judgment.
So far as Trenton could tell, either Ginny was lying, or talking the night away on the porch could get you pregnant, because eight weeks later, while I was away teaching pottery to ten-year-olds, Ginny had confronted her mother with the news that she had missed two periods in a row, and had reason to believe she might be pregnant.
To her credit, Mrs. Dobbs didn’t slap her that time. Instead she maintained her composure as her daughter refused to offer details, then she had serenely picked up the phone and arranged for a consultation with her gynecologist. She instructed Ginny to buy a pregnancy test at the pharmacy, and gave her money to do so. On the day of the consultation with her doctor, Mrs. Dobbs already knew she was going to be a grandmother, right around the time when the doctors predicted she would become a widow.
Mr. Dobbs’s condition had deteriorated in just a few weeks. The pain in his legs became increasingly unbearable, while pain killers became increasingly useless for him. He started taking his meals in the TV room upstairs as the pain in his legs grew worse. Mrs. Dobbs on her part, started looking as harried as a one-armed waitress in a bustling diner on a Saturday night.

Time flew by unnoticed as Mr. Dobbs’s condition grew steadily worse. Ginny gained weight and started looking like a blotted beauty. I’d expected that once she lost her fabulous figure forever, she would look less desirable, but I found her even more fetching in her new colorful maternity wardrobe, hip but loose. She and Trenton helped their father as much as they could, but certain things only his wife could do for him. So Mrs. Dobbs started aging prematurely, I sadly noticed one evening I went to visit with my friend’s father, and read to him those Alistair Mclean novels he liked so much for a little while. Life has a twisted sense of irony, and the novel I read to him that evening was the author’s acclaimed “The Way to Dusty Death.” Getting up to carry himself over to the bathroom, aided by a light-weight aluminum walker, became all but impossible for him. So from then on, he was subjected to new indignities, like the use of a commode. Naturally, he soon stopped coming downstairs altogether.
Still, before that happened, as I said in the beginning, I was present on the evening the Dobbs sat down to eat dinner together, as a family, for the last time, and as I also said, I wouldn’t have been there, had any of us known that but, although everyone was coming to terms, in their own way, with the fact that the end of Mr. Dobbs’s life loomed close, acceptance and resignation were denied to Mrs. Dobbs, and she kept insisting Mr. Dobbs try to walk slowly downstairs to share a meal as a family. She probably thought this would cheer him up. She probably believed that mere motivation would somehow provide his failing body with renewed resources with which to fight off the invading malignant cells now roaming his body. She probably just wanted to enjoy another meal sitting at their kitchen table, as they had done so many times before, trying to recapture even a little of that domestic routine that strings the moments of a group of people and makes them a family, whereas blood merely makes them kin.
Mrs. Dobbs insisted I stayed for dinner. Maybe she thought I was such a familiar fixture at their home that I would provide ambience for her desired semblance of normality. Whatever the case, I was there. I loved them all. We all have our defects, our personality quirks, and theirs was, perhaps, a flaming temper and a readiness to argue and let arguments escalate, but otherwise they were as normal as your family, or mine. Tell me the perfection of your family isn’t marred with a few peculiarities and I will call you a liar to your face.
It wasn’t a happy evening. Mr. Dobbs was in