The Punch Read online

  I miss my dad.

  Or maybe the story begins here, at six A.M. in a house in Portland, Oregon, where Scott’s mother, Doris, emerges slowly from her bedroom, checking the hallway for signs of life, moving furtively, sneaking into the kitchen to pour herself another glass of wine before anyone else is up. She is having anxiety attacks these days, experiencing shortness of breath, feelings of panic and hopelessness. Her husband of almost forty-two years has been dead for three months, and his ashes are locked in a cheap wooden box in her sister-in-law’s garage, and the idea of this—the knowledge that all she has to show for four decades of having and holding, loving and obeying (though let’s face it, she was never that good at obeying), is a box of human kitty litter—keeps her up at night, makes her feel like an elephant is sitting on her chest. The deep-organ certainty that he will never again call her at eight in the morning from his nursing home and tell her his pancakes are cold, will never again kiss her forehead, hold her hand, and call her beauty, makes her want a cigarette, two, six, ten. But because of the emphysema she isn’t supposed to smoke, isn’t supposed to light up, close her eyes, and inhale that deep, chemical sense of calm. And yet, give me a fucking break. If there was a big glass case on the wall with a pack of cigarettes inside and a sign that read DO NOT BREAK EXCEPT IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, now would absolutely be the time to smash it open. Because if not now, then when? The man is dead, for God’s sake. All the information stored in his meaty gray brain has been returned to its original sources. All those memories, all the history books he used to pore over, now may as well have been unread. It is thoughts like these that drive Doris into the kitchen to uncork a bottle of Merlot at six o’clock in the morning.

  Or maybe the real place to start this story is in Los Angeles, at the home of Doris’s other son, David, the eldest, the family man who, on a cold, unforgiving Valentine’s Day, will break Scott’s nose. He is a tall man with sandy brown hair and straight white teeth, a sales executive for a major pharmaceutical company. As our story begins, it is six-thirty in the morning and the kids are awake, running amok—Christopher, ten, and Chloe, eight, and the new baby, Sam—and it is time for brushing and dressing and eating. Time to pack lunches and buckle up. His wife, Tracey, isn’t a morning person and so David rises with the first rustle and herds the kids through their routines. He makes their breakfast, ties their shoes. His days are scheduled down to the millisecond. He has meetings to go to and sales strategy memos to write. His father has been dead for three months. He is stressed out and overwhelmed but has no time to deal with it, so he tells himself to man up. At this point, with a new baby and a full plate at work, grief is a luxury he can’t afford. Since his father died there hasn’t been a single moment to stop and take it in, to cry or scream or punch a hole in the wall, and it doesn’t look like there will be a moment in the foreseeable future. So he locks it away and steps into his underwear. Yesterday his brother, Scott, called and laid out this long, rambling monologue about some girl who’d broken his heart, the latest in a series of obviously unreliable lunatics, and it was all he could do not to tell him to shut up. Not to tell Scott to call back when he had some real problems—kids who need braces or a mortgage that needs paying.

  David’s wife shifts under the covers, murmurs something encouraging, like Have a nice day or I love you. David knots his tie, unravels it, knots it again until the dimple is perfect. This is what he needs, for everything to be perfect, to be just so. But the truth is, David’s life isn’t perfect. Far from it. In fact, he has a secret. A big one, and the secret is this: He has a second wife in New York City. He never meant to have a second wife in New York, or anywhere else for that matter. It just sort of happened. He met a girl on a business trip last winter (Joy. Like how could you not fall in love with a girl named Joy?), and had a fling, and somehow she got pregnant. She wasn’t supposed to get pregnant, but she did. And when she told him, he found himself asking her to marry him, heard the words coming out of his mouth, even as this polite, semi-English-sounding voice piped up in his head and said, Excuse me, sir, but aren’t you already married? Like a butler was reminding him of some minor engagement he was late for, instead of the reality, which was HE WAS ALREADY MARRIED. He had two kids and a third on the way. He couldn’t get married again. There were laws against that kind of thing, not to mention all the moral implications. And yet there he was, proposing. And the next day he and Joy went to City Hall and stood before a justice of the peace—a foppish man with a comb-over—and Joy floated an inch above the floor, beaming, while David swayed on his feet, sweating, tugging at his tie. And now there is a baby boy, also named Sam. (He tried to stop her. Sam was, coincidentally, Joy’s father’s name. Like what are the odds?) And so in just twelve short months, David has turned into one of those Montel Williams Show subjects (Next up on Montel: Bigamy!). But it’s not his fault. He swears. He never meant for any of this to happen. Things just kind of…escalated.

  But that’s not even the worst of it. The worst of it is, in three days his mother and brother are going to arrive carrying a cheap wooden box of ashes. They’re going to show up with all their chaos, their alcoholism and tragic love disorders, and turn his life upside down for two days. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the four of them (David, Scott, Doris, and Joe’s ashes) will wing to New York City for Joe’s memorial service (big party, historic location, towers of shrimp). After which, if they manage to survive, the four of them, exhausted and cranky, will pile into a rental car and begin the seven-hour drive to Bailey’s Island, Maine, where on a rocky, winter beach they will open the box and spread Joe Henry’s ashes into the sea.

  It’s enough to make a grown bigamist cry.

  There was an article in the New York Times recently about a survey given to scientists around the country. In it they were asked to answer the following question: What do you believe is true even though you can’t prove it?

  Kenneth Ford, a physicist, wrote, “I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy.”

  Roger Schank, a psychologist and computer scientist, said, “I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made—who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue—people’s minds simply cannot cope with the complexity.”

  Scott Henry is an expert on the complexity of life’s decisions. He knows these kinds of choices—who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue—are not easy. In his job, he hears a lot of waffling. Scott is a spy. A corporate mole. When you call customer service for any one of a dozen companies, he is the one who monitors the calls. Quality assurance, they call it. Day after day he sits in a cubicle in Emeryville, California, surrounded by other spies in cubicles. They all wear headsets and listen in real time to the conversations of others. Standing in that room, surrounded by bodies, one hears nothing but the collective breathing of a hundred eavesdroppers.

  Right now Scott is at the Oakland airport waiting to board a flight to Portland, Oregon. He is going to see his mother. This is the first stage of his dad’s final trip, the four-city tour (like his father’s ashes are some kind of rock band: Hello, Portland! Hello, Los Angeles! Hello, Madison Square Garden!) that will put to rest his father’s physical remains. Scott wants to do this as much as he wants to take an electric drill and bore a hole in his head. He remembers reading an article about people who do that, who drill holes in their heads. The rush of air on their exposed brain tissue is supposed to get them high. He wonders if any of those people ever called customer support while he was listening. If, as they were on hold waiting to speak to a friendly, conscientious salesperson about a faulty microwave they bought online, they revved up the old Black & Decker and set the drill bit to their temples. It wouldn’t surprise him.

  His phone rings. It’s his brother, David, calling from L.A.

  “Are you there yet?” David asks.<
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  “I’m at the Oakland airport. I’m considering drilling a hole in my head to relieve the pressure. What do you think?”

  He can hear his brother typing at the other end of the line. That’s the thing with David. You never have his full attention.

  “I’m supposed to tell you that we have plenty of room if you want to stay here once you reach L.A.,” David says.

  “Supposed to?”

  “Tracey thinks it’s the right thing to do. To have the family all together.”

  “Is she crazy?”

  “That’s what I wondered, but of course you can’t say that kind of thing out loud. Not to my wife.”

  Scott watches a woman wipe chocolate off a toddler’s face. The toddler is the size of one of those yoga balls you roll around on to stretch your back. Outside the window, his plane looks like nothing except a giant, passenger-laden missile. Not for the first time in the last few years Scott longs for a simpler era, the 1980s or ’70s, when terrorism was someone else’s problem and hijackings were quaint, semicivilized political acts, the start of a conversation. He remembers reading a survey of common passengers’ responses to hijackings back in the mid-’70s. The answers people gave were straight out of Leave It to Beaver:

  1) “History is being made and I’m part of it.”

  2) “Gosh, I wonder what I’ll see in Cuba.”

  3) “If they put us in a hotel, will there be any women?”

  Scott hunkers down in his seat. He says, “You can have Mom if you want, but I’m staying at a hotel. Something hip and fabulous. I think I’ve earned that. I think I’ve earned starlets in bikinis drinking screwdrivers poolside.”

  “You’re going to put Mom at a hip L.A. hotel?”

  “Oh, no. Once we get to L.A. she’s your responsibility.”

  In his six years listening to other people’s phone calls, Scott has overheard all kinds of dialogue. He once listened slackjawed as a technical service question from a bored housewife to an Internet provider turned into a multiorgasmic phone-sex session. What kind of operating system are you using? Windows 2000. What are you wearing? A camisole, some pedal pushers. Do you know what I’m doing to you right now? I’m fucking you. Oh, God. Don’t stop.

  “Do you still have that drill handy?” his brother asks.

  “Very funny,” says Scott. “I’m serious. I’ll be in Portland for three days and then we’re coming to you, and once we get there I expect to scrape her off at your house and go to my hotel for a very large drink.”

  “Fine. I’d put her up here, but she can’t do the stairs, which I told Tracey, but she says, Can’t you carry her? Like this is what I want to do, carry my sixty-five-year-old mother up and down the stairs for three days.”

  “Sixty-three.”

  “What?”

  “She’s sixty-three.”

  Silence. Scott worries he has lost his brother’s interest entirely. In fact, David has just gotten an instant message from his second wife in New York, Joy. MISS U. CALL ME. This is what happens when you don’t deal with things head on, he thinks, deleting it, erasing the trail. When you don’t nip problems in the bud.

  On the other end of the line, Scott hears David crumple up a piece of paper and throw it in the trash. This is how fine-tuned Scott’s hearing has become in the last six years: He can tell that the paper is a sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven laser-printer paper, not a piece of newspaper. He is like one of those submarine sonar men who can differentiate between thirty kinds of whale farts.

  “Are you there?” he asks.

  “Just a second. Okay. What was I saying?”

  “The stairs.”

  “Right. I’ll put her up at the Hotel Bel-Air or something swank.”

  “She’ll hate it.”

  “She hates everything.”

  “At least we know we’re talking about the same mother.”

  A flight attendant comes over the PA to announce the pre-boarding of Scott’s flight. He panics. He sees the world now for what it truly is, an uncontrolled assault. How is he ever going to survive the next two weeks? He needs more time, more time to prepare, to get his head together. The flight is too short. Why couldn’t his mother live in Boston instead of Portland? Why couldn’t she live in Florida? Japan? Scott checks the clock on the wall. Barring an act of God or some kind of mechanical failure, he will be in Portland in two hours, pulling his rental car up to his mother’s apartment—a soulless condo in the Pearl District—fumbling in his pockets for change for the meter. Standing by the front door, his suitcase at his feet, he will take a deep breath and pray silently (not to God. He doesn’t believe in God. But to some kind of fickle, punishing fate. He will stand there for ten minutes, eyes closed, begging the Universe for a break. Just one break. Come on. You owe me) before ringing her bell, before beginning the elevator ride that will finally and irrevocably prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his father is dead. Not just dead, but cremated and stored in a Ziploc bag inside a cheap wooden box in his aunt’s garage. At the airport, Scott feels the egg of sorrow crack open, feels sadness seep down slowly over the crown of his head. Sitting in the terminal, he prays for engine failure, for faulty landing gear, a crucifix-shaped crack in the wing.

  “That’s my plane,” says Scott. “I gotta go.”

  He joins the line snaking its way slowly onboard. He has never been the kind of man who drinks on planes, but right now he’s wondering how many beers he can consume before the landing gear descends and he finds himself in Oregon, as if that isn’t bad enough, being in Oregon, without a dead father and a clingy, punishing, drunken mother to contend with.

  At six P.M. Scott parks his rental car outside his mother’s apartment building. It is misting out, a classic, gray Pacific Northwestern winter dusk. His luggage is on rollers, and the wheels make a steady thrumming drone as he walks around the block for the sixth time, trying to get up the courage to go in.

  “Didn’t you just come by here?” asks a woman with a stroller sitting outside the Starbucks on the corner.

  “My suitcase needs the exercise,” he tells her.

  In his job he has heard every personal detail you can imagine about strangers: their dates of birth, Social Security numbers, their wives’ maiden names, how much money they have in the bank, which communicable diseases they suffer from. He eavesdrops while people are on hold, cataloging the private interactions of the average American household. People mumble to themselves on hold. They sing. He has heard men batter their wives while waiting to make flight reservations, has heard women shout at their children and punish their dogs. One woman, calling in to the headquarters of a home-pregnancy-kit manufacturer, spent her time on hold talking to a woman in her kitchen about how the baby’s father was, in fact, her own father, and what the hell was she supposed to do about that.

  The operators he monitors live in all parts of the world. He has eavesdropped on technical services personnel in India, has overheard inmates in federal penitentiaries in Wyoming take telephone orders for cookwear from people in Hawaii. He listens to customers in New York talking to operators in Frankfurt. He scores operators on their openings, grading them on the friendliness of their greetings. He flags annoying habits, redlining operators who speak in monotone or use run-on sentences. He black-marks operators who transfer callers without asking, blackballs those who purposefully give out faulty information.

  He cannot begin to quantify the number of angry callers he has heard since he started the job, the sheer volume of verbal abuse, the death threats. Profanity, forget about it. After six years on the job, he knows how to say motherfucker in twenty-one languages. People lose their minds on hold. They go crazy talking to machines, pressing 2, pressing 3, speaking their account numbers, answering questions asked by robots. They curse and belittle. They fume and gnash their teeth.

  Scott Henry believes but cannot prove that, at heart, people are inherently rotten.

  Riding up in the elevator, he checks his reflection in the mirrored doors. Not
bad, he thinks. He is thirty-five, medium height, hair thinning slightly on top, but basically handsome. He works out, goes to the gym. His stomach is pretty much flat. Things could be worse. Except that the two beers he had on the plane have now worn off entirely, and he’s not sure how he feels about this. On the one hand, it seems morally and strategically dangerous to face your alcoholic mother drunk. On the other hand, it does take the edge off.

  He takes a deep breath, rings her bell. He hears footsteps. The door opens. A strange man is standing there, mid-fifties, bald on top with hippie hair hanging down from the back of his head. Scott doesn’t know what to say. He thinks maybe he got off on the wrong floor, but then the man, who Scott now notices is wearing glasses and a tattered green army jacket, says, “You must be Scott.”

  Scott manages a nod.

  The man turns around, leaving the door open.

  “He’s here,” he says, retreating inside.

  Cautiously, Scott enters the apartment. His mother is sitting at the kitchen island, a glass of red wine in front of her, a thin plastic oxygen line looped over her ears and positioned under her nose.

  “Here he is,” she says, smiling.

  Scott gives her an awkward hug. She feels like a bag of sticks. The man has taken a seat on the sofa and is reading the paper.

  “Who is that?” Scott asks, voice low.

  “Oh, that’s Joe,” she says. “He’s my roommate.”

  “Your roommate.”

  She sips her wine.

  “I told you about Joe.”

  In the past three weeks she has, in fact, referred to Joe on numerous occasions, but since Joe was also her dead husband’s name (Scott’s father’s name), Scott assumed she had simply lost her mind and was hallucinating. That in her grief-stricken, alcoholic haze she imagined her dead husband going grocery shopping twice a week and running downstairs every afternoon at three to get the mail. Now Scott sees that there actually is a Joe, and he’s some kind of aging hippie who’s living with Scott’s mother, probably stealing every penny she’s got every time he goes to the ATM.