Untitled Family Drama by Michael C. Lorah

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Untitled family drama

By Michael C Lorah

Chapter One

The Thresher’s season might as well be over, Roy Templeton thought. Mid-June, the long baseball summer just barely underway, and the team had sunk like an anchor to the rocky bottom of the Florida State League. Little Leaguers played with more poise; the Thresher kids threw the ball around wildly, hurled bats and water coolers at the slightest suggestion of a controversial call, and self-promoted at any opportunity. No matter how creative Roy’s public relations campaigns, getting fans into the ballpark to watch such immature gamesmanship proved impossible. Roy was under considerable pressure to improve attendance, but he didn’t have anything in his bag of tricks to overcome a simply terrible product. The blistering heat of Florida’s early summer certainly wasn’t making his job any easier either.

It was too damn hot for baseball anyway. Who wanted to sit under the cancerous sun, breathing scorched, humid air? He hadn’t walked down to the field, the open, sun-baked, heat-shimmering field, for three weeks now – never left his temperature-controlled office unless he was meeting in somebody else’s temperature-controlled office or stepping out for dinner at a too-air-conditioned local eatery. He could see the sunlight lancing down into the Earth, burning away any comfort, eating up the life of Floridians everywhere.

            Roy looked forward to getting away for two weeks, even if he had to take his laptop and work cell. All the summer’s giveaways and major promotions were already scheduled, so it was only the follow-through that required his attention. Getting fourteen days off early in the baseball season, even at the minor league A-ball level, required calling in a lot of favors. Roy’s boss Paul Simonson called him into the office three different times to ask why he couldn’t have vacationed during the offseason. Of course, the year’s promotions needed to be arranged prior to the season starting. The kids being in school added another wrinkle. Roy wasn’t sure those unavoidable factors registered entirely in Paul’s mind, which had sincere difficulty working outside his own box of strategies. But he’d gotten his vacation approved, and it was time to enjoy it.

            When the alarm went off, much too early for comfort, Roy considered not moving. The combination of air conditioning and comforter coddled him in the most perfectly toasty snugness he could recall, and the mattress cupped him evenly, supporting him completely. Lately, he’d begun checking the mirror for gray hair, and he’d found a handful of color-challenged follicles in the past week. Children and work, climbing all over him, hanging like sacks of flour. His doctor told him to relax, as if he could with everyone’s relentless demands.

            The shower knob squeaked as he turned the water off, then he stepped out of the shower, toweled off and rubbed his fingers over his eyes, down his thin, nub-like nose. His sandy brown hair lay matted to his skull, and his azure eyes stared out from baggy, bleary sockets. Christ, he wanted a coffee. After a splash of stinging aftershave, combing his hair, brushing his teeth and clambering into a pair of jeans and one of his many giveaway t-shirts from work, Roy went in search of some caffeine.

            At the dinner table, Luanne was finishing a pop tart, while Missie sipped a cup of tea and placed her dirty plate in the sink. In the living room, Russ ate his cereal inattentively while logging a final few moments on his latest video game quest. Missie had already started the coffee maker, so Roy grabbed a mug from the cupboard and filled it nearly to the tiptop with bitter blackness. Gulping it down, he singed his tongue lightly, but the effect was immediate. Fog lifted from his brain and his eyes were able to focus on something other than what lay right in front of him.

            “Eggs?” Missie, a yellow towel still wrapped around her hair, asked dotingly.

            “Mmm,” he agreed. Missie spooned some scrambled eggs onto a plate, and added a few strips of charcoal-burnt bacon alongside. Roy grabbed a bottle of ketchup from the refrigerator, emptied most of it onto his plate, and joined Russ in the living room.

            “I need to get the weather, Russ.”

            Russ sighed. “Sure, Dad. Give me a second to get to a save point.” His character moved erratically around the screen, an electronic dance of searching. Roy didn’t understand it, but Russ had already proudly committed over fifty hours to the game. An unbelievable beast soon attacked, opening another screen and beginning the awkward dance of turn-based warfare. Roy sighed impatiently, and so Russ fled the battle when he couldn’t conquer the beast quickly.

            Luanne entered the room, sat down on the couch. Her compact opened its gaping mouth and wiped its pink tongue all over her face, smoothing out her skin tone to an even if slightly orange color. It didn’t look natural against the sun-bleached paleness of her hair, though the color worked with her Kryptonite-green eyes nicely. After placing a half-empty bottle of nail polish on the coffee table, she began applying eye shadow.

            Russ finally reached his save point, and the game winked off. Roy flipped to the local news, just as the weatherman was introduced. Missie entered the room, the towel gone, her dark brown hair a tangled mess, and scooped up Russ’s plate. “Hurry up with your breakfast, Roy,” she said. “I need to do the dishes before we leave.” Roy obediently shoveled a forkful of eggy ketchup into his mouth.

            Peter Sellers, the local weatherman who rattled off Pink Panther jokes with far too much frequency, explained in his squeaky drawl that a high pressure system in the Gulf should pull the most recent heat wave out of the state. If true, it couldn’t happen soon enough, Roy thought. All but the most ardent global warming-deniers had to be having second thoughts this year; the average temperature over the past month was perilously close to one hundred degrees. Add the Sunshine State’s oppressive humidity and the heat index seemed to set a record high every other day. The rest of the east coast trailed Florida only slightly, but the promise of some slight relief offered hope that their vacation wouldn’t be spent entirely indoors.

            Only a week before, Roy had been forced to purchase a can of Freon to recharge the air conditioner in the family’s seven-month old Subaru Forrester. Although his frustration at having to orchestrate even a minor repair on such a new vehicle irked Roy, being able to rely on the climate control to shield them from Rao’s wrath provided some balancing calm.

            Missie’s sister Claire was organizing a party for the occasion of Missie’s parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. The gala was scheduled for Saturday at their home in White Plains, New York. Roy hated White Plains. Truthfully, Roy disdained the entire northeastern United States, jammed full of freezing winters and roads impassable with caustically aggressive drivers. Missie, a dark-skinned sun worshipper, had come to Florida for college, where she met native son Roy. She simply never went back to Gotham. Shortly after marrying, Roy found work with a PR firm in Orlando and, seven years later, was hired as the Director of Public Relations by the minor league Clearwater Threshers on the outskirts in Tampa.

            He and Missie rarely traveled north to see her parents, but the anniversary party clearly required their presence. Seeing Missie’s parents was never a concern; Roy got along with them fabulously, but one never forms the connection with one’s in-laws that exists with true family – particularly for men, who feel under the control of another man’s territory.

            The Templeton’s Cape Cod home, popped up in the front to accommodate the family, sat in the deepest recess of a sparsely populated cul-de-sac, in a neighborhood whose quiet was every librarian’s envy. Its brick façade had been in place when Roy bought it, but he’d had to tear off the tawdry orange 70s siding from the side and back walls, replacing with a textured brown surface that was still clearly siding, but gave at least the impression of natural building materials. Despite constant watering, the thick Bahia grass browned under the summer’s relentless sun, and several patches of dusty baldness had developed in the yard. Alongside the house, a two-car garage shielded the cars from the worst of the heat wave. The stagnant air clung to Roy’s lungs every morning, but the cost was small when compared to letting the morning sun bring the seats and dashboard to scalding temperatures.

            Being close to Tampa’s bay, gusts of salty wind off the Gulf sometimes gave the illusion that the outdoors were nearly tolerable, but every time Roy failed to find a shady parking spot, he was reminded of the sun’s brutality. His Legacy sedan, white to repel as much heat as possible, became an oven. The heated seats, an indulgence he rarely used in the balmy Florida winters, couldn’t possibly match the scorching fever the sun provided. A recent trip to the mall, with its open parking lot, left him wishing for a throne of ice.

            Even Missie refused to go outside, and Roy feared her inevitable melanoma. If the sun drove her to shelter…

            Roy rubbed his feet in the plush carpeting. The house was sixty-three years old, but he’d had nearly the entire interior remodeled when they’d purchased it. The carpet, a thick swirl of bright yellows and greens, wrapped tendrils around itself, a caressing orgy. Cream-colored walls played nicely off the bold yellow of the floor, accenting the brightness and size of the room. It was a good home, Roy knew. They’d gotten a good deal on it, and the remodeling had been a tremendous success. It was exactly the type of home that Roy wanted to raise his family in.

            The coffee table, usually littered with opened mail, candles, moisturizers, coasters, remote controls and typically shakers of salt and pepper, gleamed slickly, enjoying a rare burden-free moment. The standard mess has been cleaned away in anticipation of the coming vacation, with only Roy’s half-finished mug of coffee marring the light, prefab wooden surface.

            “Honey, are you done with that?” Missie asked again, and Roy handed her his plate, smeared red. She also took the coffee mug, knowing that they’d stop on the highway for a hot cup before long anyway.

            Moving through the door into the garage, Roy stumbled over a small pile of three duffels. “Missie, I asked you not to pile stuff right next to the door,” he called, not bothering to hide his annoyance, but her hair dryer ate his cries before she could hear them. Exasperated, Roy grabbed the bags, toiletries in the two small ones for at the hotels, and the other containing snacks and a few puzzle books for use in the car. Out in the garage, stuffy and already overheated despite the early hour, Roy tossed the snacks into the passenger seat. He wanted to keep an eye on the food, rather than have the kids devour every crumb before they’d left the county. Then he swung up the rear gate and added the toiletries atop the neatly stacked luggage. He then made another walk through of the house, checking to see if anything had been forgotten. The bathroom checked out clear, and nothing obvious laid out in sight in any of the bedrooms.

            The telephone rang and Luanne answered.

            “Launi!” she squealed rapturously. Missie, fluffing her hair with one hand, checked her watch, knowing that without supervision the conversation would quickly take them well past their intended departure. Roy came back into the room, considered saying something, then patted Luanne’s head gently and absently in his I-love-you-even-though-I-don’t-understand-you manner.

            “Yeah, my bf totally needs to mind his own business,” Luanne said with the earnest seriousness of somebody discussing the nuclear option. Roy followed Missie into the kitchen. Over twenty years they’d known one another, and he still couldn’t take his eyes off her swaying hips. A flurry of attacks on students and teachers at Calvin Hunsicker High School trailed behind him. After placing one last glass – sticky with Russ’s orange juice pulp – in the dishwasher, Missie squeezed a thimbleful of thick, molasses-like detergent into its nook, pivoted the soap trap closed, and lifted the front of the washer closed. The lock snatched, a button was pressed and the dishes were forgotten. They’d empty the chamber when they returned home in ten days.

            Missie sat down at the kitchen table, sighed. “You know, I’m going to miss just laying back down in bed for an hour after everybody’s out the door,” she told Roy. “Just having the mattress cup me, holding me up completely, the down comforter snug around my shoulders, toasty warmth.” Even in the summer, she preferred the air conditioner in the bedroom just a hair too strong, simply for the comfort of snuggling in bed.

            “Sounds nice. Maybe we should spend our entire vacation doing exactly that. Not too late to send the kids on a plane to visit without us,” Roy pointed out. Missie smiled, tempted, then turned the corner of her mouth, an if-only smirk.

            “I’m too much a momma’s girl to ditch my parents’ anniversary.” Roy could not disagree. She shrugged, saying, Oh well, what can we do? “Everything packed?”

            Smiling, Roy nodded. “Your carriage awaits, my princess.”

            “I’ll take the first driving shift, okay?”

            “Of course. I figured you would.” Missie, beautiful, intelligent and funny, was a simply terrible driver, and worse, a fearful one. Allowing her to drive on local roads she was familiar with should, if nothing else, limit any unnecessary shrill screaming, sharp breaking or violent careening. On various highways during over twenty years together, Roy could count hundreds of time when Missie breaked suddenly to avoid a car in a parallel lane. And large trucks, forget it. If one pulled alongside her, Missie simply slowed down to forty miles per hour to let them pass as quickly as possible. Roy, in turn, gripped the door handled, white knuckled, and prayed that the many cars tailgating their already slow-moving vehicle wouldn’t accordian the car’s back quarter.

            No, Missie would definitely drive the local roads and familiar highways. A turn the following day on a strange highway somewhere likely in Virginia would be inevitable, but Roy hoped to at least minimize the stress on his wife.

            A short time later, after several insistent urges to Luanne to wrap up her phone call, the Templetons piled into the Forrester. Its wan exterior acted as a magnet for dust and road grime, and Roy created many weekend rainbows in the driveway trying to keep clean during the winter. The squat vehicle tentatively skulked out of the garage, testing the heat and humidity. Deciding the climate control would keep its occupants comfortable, it rolled into the cul-de-sac and surged steadily forward. With a clank and electric hum, the garage door tottered closed behind.

            Roy hadn’t been mistaken. Missie truly hated driving, and already, safe on comfortable streets, her mind raced insistently ahead to the possibilities of the open highway. What if a tire blew out? What if another drive cut her off and she veered off the highway? What if something, something large, implacable, tumbled off the back of a truck and she couldn’t avoid it?

            As a rule, Missie was not an anxious person, but her ability to avoid stressful situations contributed more to her calmness than any strength of will. She handled motherhood surprisingly well. Call it basic animal instinct, but to protect her children, Missie felt capable of anything. Facing down overzealous Little League coaches, unimaginative teachers or even schoolyard bullies roused a steadily insistent and piquant ire. But driving on a four-lane highway and Missie could barely grip the wheel with her clammy palms.

            Attempting to stay in the moment, surrounded by familiarity and comfort, Missie absorbed her neighborhood, noticing details rarely noticed during routine trips. The paint peeling on the window frames and porch columns of the white house as the mouth of the cul-de-sac. The explosively colorful beauty of the flower garden a half block farther along. A cracked tail light, a pane of glass with a crisp crack slicing across, yellow and orange plastic big wheel tricycles shoved hastily into the corner of a porch.

            She shivered slightly, but Roy made no move to adjust the temperature. He’d been in the garage only a few minutes, making sure the bags were stacked steadily, confirming that everything was present, but he’d clearly begun to sweat, and now enjoyed feeling the cool air, washing over him, drying the slickness of his face. His skin tingled, leaving salty residue on his temples, armpits and thighs. He loved the air conditioning, its antiseptic taste. Missie couldn’t understand it. It felt purer to him, cleaned of impurities and dangers. Controlled air, set to the temperature of his preference, scrubbed of unwanted particles.

            “Tom’s going to see the Rays tonight,” Luanne offered. Her boyfriend, Tom Jurgen, that is. A nice enough boy, Missie thought, but when your little girl is thirteen and with her first boyfriend, is any boy really deserving?

            “White Sox, right?” Roy asked. “Should be a good game. Rays haven’t look very sharp this year though.”

            “Yeah, I guess so. He had an extra ticket. We could’ve stayed a day longer if we flew to New York.”

            “Luanne.” Roy warned her not to go there.

            “It’ll be a fun drive,” Russ said. “We haven’t had a family road trip in years, since we went to St. Augustine and Savannah a few years ago.”

            Luanne laughed. “What’s so funny?” Russ wanted to know. And Luanne retold the story, one Russ knew very well, of her father clowning along the Castillo de San Marcos ramparts. One bit of slick moss later, Roy plunged into the rocky shallows of the Atlantic Ocean. He’d been lucky to fall feet first and onto a fairly flat rock a few feet below the surface. Another place or another angle he’d have been badly injured. But he hadn’t been, so the story mostly involved Luanne or Russ imitating his flailing arms, whirling like the world’s fastest windmill, his eyes bulging out like missiles, and his sudden disappearance as he dropped cartoonlike down, followed moments later by a small spray of water going in the opposite direction.

            Missie wiped a tear from her eye. Russ’s version of Roy’s cries for help – a two-syllable “Hey-yelp” – while standing in water to mid-thigh sounded so much like Roy that she could recall the moment of relief that he was okay, and the realization just how funny the moment would become in family lore. From the sea, Roy’s fingers reached not quite to the top of the giant stones that walled the ocean from the fort. And he couldn’t jump with the water as high as it was.

            Russ and another tourist each took a hand and pulled Roy up from the drink.

            Laughing, Missie didn’t pull out from a traffic light quickly when the signal went green. An impatient blue Taurus swerved past the Forrester’s passenger side, cutting sharply in front of them. Roy cursed loudly and flipped the bird to the driver, who didn’t notice. “Sweetie, please relax,” Missie said hesitantly. The car startled her badly enough; her heart raced and her palms sweated, and Roy’s outburst only added to the anxiety.

            “What an asshole,” Roy sniped, pressing his fingers into his thighs. “I mean, are you about to give birth, because if not, what’s the goddamn rush?”

            “Roy, please.” Missie nearly begged now, and Roy, getting the message, placed a comforting hand on her narrow shoulder.

            “You okay, hon’?” She nodded. Unconvincing to anybody else in the car, but a half-hearted effort to continue on was better than no effort.

            Running along the outskirts of Clearwater in the early morning, traffic was sparse, but anxious commuters brooked little delay in their rush to their respective daily grinds. Horns twitted impatiently, and toes tapped impatiently in line for morning coffees at the coffee houses along the highway. Missie counted to herself, 1, 2, 3, 4, and when the road opened up into four lanes, stayed on the right-hand side to encourage faster cars to pass. Several cars, however, needing to exit the main route, rode on her bumper, pressuring her to drive faster until they could turn off at the next intersection.

            Strip malls, car dealerships, gas stations and restaurants passed by endless variety, a mix of colorful islands trying to lure minnows from the traffic stream. Which caught your eye, the green and yellow fuel station or the blue and red? Four or five cars backed up at every fast food restaurant’s drive-through, loading up on coffees and heavy, fried breakfast sandwiches. Missie would not let Roy leave the house without a homemade breakfast. He wasn’t going to eat that heart-clogging slop, sit on his ass in a car or office all day, and then die of a heart attack before he turned fifty. She refused it.

            “I saw Maggie Smith at the salon yesterday,” Missie said. Roy wasn’t particularly interested, but he knew telling the story would take Missie’s mind off the stress of her driving. “Mm-hm,” he prompted.

            “She was having a pedicure on the stool next to me. I swear that woman has more plastic in her face than we have in the recycling bins.” Missie’s obsession with recycling stood out as one of her more endearing manias, the entire family agreed. At least it did the world some good, as compared to her devotion to Oprah or her staggering ability to use up cell phone minutes during improbably long conversations with her parents or sister in New York.

The car switched lanes, moving over for an upcoming left turn, and Roy realized that she hadn’t checked her blind spot. Biting back on a scolding comment, he tried to rationalize that if she hadn’t learned it by now, she likely never would, and if she hadn’t been killed in an accident yet…

“She’s so particularly about how anybody touches her, like you’ll rupture a lip or something. It’s positively digusting. You should consider your imperfections character strengths.”

Russ snickered. “You mean how you accept your hair?” Missie complained endlessly about the thin, dry straw attached to her head. Every halfway relevant haircare product she discovered ended up in the Templeton shower stall for its two month trial run. Missie’s hair remained brittle and unenthused. Her hair was not a “character strength.” Being a size two was also not sufficient for Missie.

“I’m trying to tell a funny story,” Missie complained, but it was too late. Roy and Luanne were already snickering, and her objections only propelling the laughter more fully forth.

“They’re only character strengths when they’re not your flaws, Mom,” Luanne cawed.

“You’d know, you have character strengths out the wazoo,” Russ said, needling his sister, who scowled for a moment, then smiled. Missie giggled now, a sweet, warm sound, like the drop of honey that bubbled up from the plastic bear when you turned the container over too quickly.

“So what about Maggie Smith?” Roy asked.

Missie paused, eyes open wide. “Oh, Lord, now you’ve done it. I’ve forgotten what the point of the story was.”

“Senility!” Luanne shrieked too loudly for the enclosed space. The echo rebounded off the window and pierced Missie’s ear painfully. Wincing, she rubbed the offended organ on her shoulder, wishing the soft cotton shirt could soothe the bruised sensation within.

The city limits of Clearwater passed by, wishing them a safe trip and a quick return. The mayor, depicted waving on the billboard, looked uncomfortable and smug. “I’m so glad for vacation,” Missie sighed.

“A vacation for you,” Roy teased, but she only protruded a bratty tongue in response. Roy smirked.

“You need to get away from that ballpark,” Missie added.

“Not hearing about attendance numbers for a week or two would be a great thing.”

“Sluggish?”

Roy shrugged. “Don’t count on a big Christmas bonus this year.” Missie’s cocked head and bright eyes suggested that they’d be just fine. “The team’s pretty awful. How do you get people to pay good money to see nineteen-year-old snots fumble around like Little Leaguers. In this economy no less? Those damn kids, all they’re interested in is scoring with women and getting million dollar signing bonuses. The big club needs to learn how to draft again.”

“It’s fine, hon. It’s no big deal.”

“Yeah.” Roy agreed, mostly for the sake of agreeing. Discussing his professional shortcomings, whether his fault or anybody else’s, held little appeal for him. Roy was a proud man, though rarely belligerently so.

The conversation continued amiably for some time, though Missie could see Roy’s annoyance when Russ slipped on his earbuds and into one of his PSP games, until they merged onto I-71, when the family seemed to simultaneously slide into a languorous torpor. The Forrester moved forward, at an immutable 60 miles per hour, sticking determinedly to the right lane. Roy watched quietly out the window, trees whistling past, an indistinguishable blur. He’d dated a girl in college with whom he’d taken long evening walks, during which she’d give him the common and scientific names of every tree and bush they encountered. Roy never remembered them, and wondered idly what trees he was looking at. He hadn’t thought of her in years. Cute girl, wild in bed, but that cools down after college, good sense of humor – strange the connections the mind makes, he thought.

Missie, when she let her eyes wander tentatively away from the lane directly in front of her – part of her insistence on staying in a single lane tied into her difficulty tracking and figuring all the possibilities of cars ahead, cars behind and cars beside – couldn’t believe the brown, wilting grass that crumbled out toward the trees beyond. Cracked, brittle and flaking, the moisture-desperate blades collapsed under the devastating heat and parched lack of rain.

Small particles, whispers of pollen and dust, whipped up by speeding cars, eddied past the windshield, as SUVs, sedans, trucks and variously sized automotive transports shredded the papery atmosphere.