Empty Mile by Matthew Stokoe Page B

say anything else. Eventually he thanked me and we hung up.
    I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and called Marla on my cell and gave her the same news. After we’d arranged to meet the next day I put the phone down and turned on my side and closed my eyes. The windows were open and a hot, slow breeze moved over me.
    I woke to Stan shaking my shoulder. It was dark outside but the light was on in the room and moths pestered the bulb. Stan was still in his Captain America suit.
    “Dad’s downstairs. Something’s wrong.”
    “What time is it?”
    “He came in and went into the kitchen and when I said hi he wouldn’t lift his head up. He just kept staring at the table. He’s got a bottle of booze.”
    “Booze?”
    “Yeah, booze .”
    “He’ll be all right, don’t worry. I’ll go see him. You go to bed.”
    “Shouldn’t I come down with you?”
    “No, just let me talk to him.”
    “Okay, Johnny.”
    I walked Stan along the landing to his room. He climbed under the covers of his bed and took off his glasses and mask.
    “Aren’t you going to get rid of the costume?”
    Stan shook his head.
    “Are you okay about Pat?”
    “Yeah. You don’t have to worry about me, Johnny.”
    He nestled against his pillow and for a moment I saw him as a young boy again and was freshly overcome with a sense of loss for all the time that had passed while we were not together.
    I turned out the light and went downstairs to see my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his suit. His tie was loose at his throat and his hair was mussed. There was a half-full glass and a bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him. He looked up as I came into the room and smiled weakly. He was a man who rarely drank and he seemed embarrassed at himself.
    “I’m afraid I’m a little drunk.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “Just had a few at the office after work.”
    “Dad, I know you were seeing Patricia Prentice. Marla told me about the room.”
    “Oh … I see.”
    He nodded slowly. Everything about him was heavy—the words he pushed from himself into the over-bright kitchen air, his head on his shoulders, his arms bent on the table. His gaze would not hold mine and slid constantly to his hands. He seemed a man monumentally overwhelmed by the weight of being alive.
    He lifted his glass and drank from it like a child forcing down medicine, then coughed and wiped his eyes.
    “Pat was a person who needed emotional support. Her mistake was looking for it in me.” He shook his head disgustedly. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I did. I just didn’t have it in me.”
    “I don’t think there was much you could have done either way. She was a sick woman.”
    My father poured another drink and swallowed it. He was very drunk. His words were beginning to slur.
    “What sickens me is that I always had it in the back of my head that if I stayed with her long enough some of her money might rub off on me. And all the time I was thinking about money, she was thinking about killing herself.”
    He slumped forward on the table and put his head in his arms. I waited for several minutes until I thought he must have fallen asleep. I was going to rouse him and try and get him up to bed, but when I shook him he lifted his head and told me to leave him where he was. There wasn’t much else I could do, so I put a glass of water on the table next to him and headed out of the room. As I reached the doorway he called to me.
    “Johnny, that friend you used to have—Gareth.”
    “What about him?”
    “He isn’t the sort of man you want to be mixed up with.”
    He pointed his finger at me. His face was swollen and loose and his eyes were bleary.
    “You hear me?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Good …”
    He dropped his head into his arms again and his breath came out in a sob.
    The room felt abandoned, as though everywhere outside was empty and gone. The electric clock on the stove ratcheted painfully through