Family and Other Accidents (5 page)

“ ‘Jack's brother'
is
what it says on his birth certificate.” Jack smiles, shoulders loosening; he's known girls like Melanie all his life—in advanced placement calculus classes, at law school, at Jones Day—her he can handle.

“His name is Connor,” Frankie says with more authority than the eight minutes she's known his brother should warrant. “My sister Melanie.”

Melanie nods, and Frankie ladles eggnog from a giant copper pot on the stove into green plastic cups for her and Connor. She offers Jack a glass, but he shakes his head.

“So what is your drink then, son?” Mona's father has one hand on Jack's back, the other around a tumbler of amber alcohol the same color as his daughters' eyes. “Scotch? Brandy?”

The closest thing Jack has to “a drink” would be the gin and tonics he orders at business lunches if clients are drinking. “Coffee?” he asks, noticing the half-full pot in the machine next to bottles of red and white wine for the post-dinner party Mona warned about.

“Baileys and coffee?” Mona's father asks hopefully.

When Jack agrees, her father actually winks at him. But in the Lockridge house, there's an incredibly skewed ratio of Baileys to coffee—a strange upper-downer combination. It warms his lungs and chest as he sits in the empty chair next to Melanie. Mona rests her butt against his knee, a display of affection Jack isn't sure about, not with Mona's father, round and red and Santa-like, hovering and topping off everyone's drink; not with Connor so close to the Total Sexual Predator.

Mona's mother balances on tiptoes to grab an upside-down shoe box lid from the top of the refrigerator.

“Everyone who spends Christmas Eve in our house has to hang an ornament on the tree,” she says, and Jack realizes the things on the box lid are little crafty projects fashioned from pipe cleaners, glitter, and molded plastic: things likely learned from the home and garden channel, a channel he always skips. “Usually we insist everyone make their own ornament, but Mo thought you boys wouldn't want to. So with you all getting here so close to dinner anyway, the girls and I went ahead and made ornaments for you.”

Jack looks at Melanie with her Dostoevsky; he can't imagine she had much to do with the ornament making.

“We weren't sure what your major was,” Mrs. Lockridge says to Connor. “But Mo said you loved skiing, so Frankie and I came up with this.”

She hands Connor a pair of Popsicle stick skis with poles fashioned from mini-marshmallows and toothpicks, everything painted and shellacked. Holding the wire hook between his long thumb and forefinger, Connor thanks Mona's mother with so much sincerity he may actually mean it.

“The poles were my idea.” Frankie winks at Connor, and Jack is pretty sure the
Jaws
theme plays somewhere.

The ornament they've made for Jack is a palm-size, construction-paper Constitution—a document he hasn't had much use for since passing Con Law six years ago, certainly nothing he needs at the lawyer factory. A more fitting representation of his life would be a mini-carton of sesame beef from the twenty-four-hour Chinese place across from his office.

“This is great,” Jack says. “I've never had my own ornament before.”

“The joys of Christmas at Chez Lockridge,” Melanie offers, but even she shuffles with the rest of them to the living room, where the massive tree narrows into the ceiling plaster.

There's a weird moment when Jack, Connor, and Mona are supposed to find spots on the tree not already occupied by lights, figurines, popcorn and cereal chains, to hang their ornaments. Mona easily makes a place for hers—a pair of pink ceramic ballet slippers, remnants of some long-extinguished dancer fantasy she has never mentioned. Connor, likewise, threads the wire over a green branch and silver foil slivers. With seven sets of eyes on his back, Jack tries twice to hook his Constitution, but it keeps falling onto the packages stacked at the tree's base. Finally, Mona puts her small, cold hand on top of his and helps.

“There you go,” Mona's father says. “You make a good team.”

Jack nods and worries about Mona's family, who have a better understanding of Connor, who likes to ski and doesn't have a major, than they do of him.

         

Four hours later Mona is shuffling Jack from one cluster of wine-drinking guests to the next. Some are colleagues of her father, others additional carrot-topped family, but they all have questions. It's as though he's on a never-ending job interview. So many “what kind of law?”s, and “where abouts are you from?”s, and a bunch of “you went to school where?”s.

Making things all the more challenging, he's lapsing into a turkey coma from the multicourse dinner, and Mona's father keeps freshening Jack's mug of Baileys and coffee. If that weren't enough to contend with, his brother, fresh glass of eggnog in hand, dances somewhere between fast and slow with Frankie to “It's a Wonderful World.” In April Connor will turn nineteen, but with his dental-floss frame and too-long-in-the-front black hair, he could pass for fourteen—far too young to be drunk at his brother's girlfriend's house on Christmas Eve, to be dancing so close with his brother's girlfriend's sister.

Easing away from Mona and the mini-circles of mingling professors and redheads, Jack puts a hand on Connor's shoulder, bony even through a thick cable-knit sweater. The song has stopped, but Frankie stands close enough to Connor that the dun dun dun dun of the
Jaws
music is blaring.

“Can I talk to you for a sec?” Jack asks, and leads his brother to the kitchen, where dozens of dirty dishes fill the sink and there are enough empty wine bottles for a three-lane bowling alley. Jack had been legally in charge of his brother until Connor turned eighteen, but he hadn't thought to make any rules other than common-sense understandings:
Don't block each other in the driveway. Buy more coffee if you use the last of the beans. If doors are closed, knock before entering.
Now Jack realizes there should have been all kinds of things Connor shouldn't have been allowed to do.

“Hey, lamppost, whatcha knowin'?” Connor asks. “I'm about to barf from all those cookies; you?”

“You'd feel better if you took it easy on the eggnog.” Jack takes the cup from Connor's hand and sets it on the counter. “And can you
not
fuck around with my girlfriend's sister in her parents' house, as like a Christmas present to me?”

Blood rushes to the hollows under Connor's cheekbones.

“I'm only here because of you,” he says, voice suddenly hard. “The only reason I even came home for break was because of you. And you know what would be a great Christmas present? If you could at least pretend to have the teeniest bit of faith in me.”

“It's not that—” Jack says, but of course that
is
exactly what it is. “It's just, Mo says Frankie is a total sexual predator.”

Eyes blank, Connor stares at him. “She's a hundred-and-ten-pound girl,” he says, brushing Jack's hand off his shoulder. “I think I can handle her.” Taking his glass, he's through the swinging doors before Jack can say anything else.

The continuous job interview in the living room is such an unappealing prospect that Jack doesn't follow. Despite being sickeningly full, he opens the pantry and looks inside at boxes and cans—Chunky soup, Rice-A-Roni, dry pasta, an all-purpose cleaner he recognizes from one of the infomercials on overnight programming, cling wrap, foil, five different kinds of cereal—things he never had growing up. His mother had been anorexic before it was fashionable, and his father had made it home by dinnertime maybe once a week. There'd been lots of ten-dollar bills and notes taped to the freezer
—Jack, showing a house at seven, pick something up for you and The Kid, XOXO, Mom—
not many turkeys with homemade dressing; no mixed nuts and red and green M&M's in cut-glass candy dishes.

“Hey, you.” From behind, Mona laces arms around his hips. “Hungry?”

He shakes his head, turns to face her. “Your mother made me eat enough for three weeks.”

“You're being so good about this family stuff,” she says. “I'm sorry.”

“It's no big deal.”

“Sure it is.” They're alone with the dirty dishes and canned goods, but she still stands on tiptoes to whisper in his ear. “Certainly worth a blow job.”

“Re-ea-lly?”

She gives him a quick kiss, and he taps her nose with his finger. “That is
not
what you said you were going to do.”

Laughing, she reaches for the back of his neck.
“Later,”
she says, words muffled as her tongue flirts with his lips. “My family really likes you.”

Her mouth tastes like bubble gum, and he chews the meat of her lower lip, harder and harder, until she pushes him away. Her hand flutters to her mouth, and she smears the small blood drop. Together they stare at the thin red stain on her fingertip; her eyes are the eyes from his dream. Finally she shakes her head.

“That is
not
the way to get me to do
that
other thing,” she says, but it seems forced.

In his mouth he tastes her blood.

         

Because her parents passed out on the sunken couch, mother's head on the shoulder of father's corduroy jacket, father's head stacked on mother's, Mona sees out the last professors and redhead. She's the one who gets down on hands and knees to scrub a circle of red wine spilled on the cream carpet.

“Here, try this,” Jack whispers, getting the bottle of cleaner from the kitchen cabinet. “I saw this infomercial where it worked miracles on grape Kool-Aid.”

Kneeling beside Mona, he sprays the product on the carpet, takes her dish towel, and begins to rub.

“No wonder my parents love you,” Mona says. “Frankie and Mel never bring home guys who wash our floors.”

Though he has no memory of ever cleaning anything, Jack scrubs the carpet as if the fate of the Western world depended on it, as if he's trying to prove something to someone. Finally Mona puts her hands over his—the nurse on
ER
telling the handsome surgeon he has to give up, that the patient is lost, that he can stop shocking the body with those paddles. Jack hopes the food dehydrator does a better job living up to its “as seen on TV” promise.

“Come on.” Mona takes his hand. “Everyone's outside.”

She leads him past the tree in the living room, through the kitchen, to the deck with its patio furniture and gas grill covered with a fitted tarp.

Connor and Mona's sisters sit against the wood slats with their legs jutting out in front of them, passing a joint. The phone number of his own college dealer is probably still in Jack's address book, but he's furious at his brother. Not getting high at his girlfriend's parent's house is another rule he should have made. He glares at Connor, but his brother's eyes are downcast and dull.

“Where have you guys been all night?” Frankie asks from between Connor and Melanie, her elbow resting on Connor's thigh. Melanie hands Frankie the joint, and she takes a long drag, closing eyelids dusted with sparkly purple shadow.

“We've been around,” Mona says, an edge in her voice Jack isn't sure he's heard before. “Someone had to put Mom and Dad to bed.”

Frankie hands the joint to Mona, who brings it halfway to her lips, then stops and looks at Jack for approval. Shrugging, Jack tells her to go ahead.

“You don't have to ask him,” Connor says, words lubed by alcohol—one of the first things he has said directly to Mona since Jack introduced the two of them last year. “Jack may have decided he's Dad, but you don't have to ask his permission.”

“Conn—”

“What?” Connor's eyes narrow to coffee beans. “You live in Dad's house, you work Dad's job, you periodically show up and tell me all the crap I'm doing wrong. But she shouldn't have to ask you what she can and can't do.”

“Don't—” Jack says, but Mona speaks at the same time.

“Don't worry,” she says to Connor. “I know it's good to piss him off every once in a while. You know, keep the big guy in line.”

Connor nods, but Jack just looks at Mona. He thought she would apologize, but instead she turned Connor's anger in a way he wouldn't have thought her capable of. Conspiratorially, she bumps Jack's hip with hers and passes him the joint.

Jack wants to get high at Mona's parents' house with his brother like he wants major dental work, but Connor is looking at him, and Frankie's and Melanie's mouths curl in the same curious way. Even Mona's lips (lower one still puffy) purse into a question. For the first time in his twenty-eight years, Jack understands what junior high health teachers meant during peer pressure lectures. Still, this is a test, and from opening doors on first dates to the SAT, Jack always aces tests. It smolders his lungs, and he wrestles back a cough, but everyone's shoulders relax. Connor offers the truce of a shy smile.

“I like the Reed boys,” Frankie says. “You guys are okay.”

And maybe it is okay. Jack straddles a patio chair, Mona between his thighs, her back pressed against him. She shivers; it's thirty degrees and she's wearing a silk shirt. He rubs her arms, moves her hair off the back of her neck.

“I hate it when it's cold without snow,” she says. “It's like, I don't know, pizza without cheese.”

“Doughnuts without holes?” Connor's eyes and voice droop again.

“Sex without love?” Melanie looks up from tapping weed out of a film canister.

“Naw.” Frankie smiles a naughty, practiced smile. “See, Mel, that one can be okay.”

They pass the new joint until it's spent, while Jack contemplates sex without love. He thinks about Mona moving into his house, about whether or not he
is
becoming his father. But, God, pot is stronger than he remembers. His head weighs more than the turkey Mona's mother served, and his lips feel as though they're made of rubber.