Mr. Was by Pete Hautman Read Free Book Online Page B

aside the tangled foliage to get a closer look.
    There was definitely no door.
    Instead, its squat shape was defined by a patch of siding that did not quite match the original clapboard.
    We arrived home in Skokie late. On our answering machine there was a message from a hospital. It turned out that Dad had passed out on the freeway, driven his Cadillac onto the median, across two lanes of opposing traffic, and rolled it in the far ditch. The car was totaled, but Dad survived with only two broken ribs, a mild concussion, a hangover, and an order to appear in court.
    After she got over her hysteria, Mom said it was maybe a good thing.
    She was almost right.
    He was in the hospital for three days. When he got out, on the advice of his lawyer, he started going to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at St. Stephen’s. The way things changed at home was amazing. It was like he’d become a completely different person. He made it to work every day. He came home every night. We started playing tennis together, and he put up a basketball hoop over the garage. He had lost his driver’s license for six months, but when he got it back he bought a Jeep and we went on a fishing trip up in Wisconsin.
    Sure, they still had arguments, but they never lasted long. Their fights were about
things,
not about each other. Whatever it was, they would work it out and nobody got hit.
    Strangely enough, Dad’s new personality seemed to rub off on me. I felt more positive about things, and it seemed to help how I did in school. I started high school thinking that it was going to be really hard, but it wasn’t hard at all. I kind of liked it.
    The subject of my grandfather Skoro’s house rarely came up. The few days we had spent there represented something bad for all of us. I wished Mom would just sell it, but she wouldn’t discuss it. She had a job at the mall working at one of the department stores, so she was able to pay the property taxes by herself. Mom would drive up there once every couple months to make sure it hadn’t blown over or anything. Dad made it a point not to ride her about it. I think he still felt guilty about his drinking and beating her up. He called it her pet house, but he seemed to tolerate it well enough.
    I thought about the door at times, but as the months and years passed the memories seemed more like a dream. Boggs’s End could rot away, and that was fine with me. I never wanted to see the place again.
    We had two good years.
    Sometimes I sit and try to figure out which was the best day of my life. I haven’t had a lot of good ones, but some of the best must have been during those years in Skokie when Dad was staying sober. Other times I wonder which was the worst day of my life. There are a lot of choices there, on account of a lot of really rotten things have happened to me, but I keepremembering one day in April, 1995. I was finishing up the tenth grade then, and it seemed like I was growing about an inch a week. I was as tall as Dad, almost as wide in the shoulders, and I could hold my own when we played one-on-one basketball out by the garage. I remember thinking that when he got home from work that day I’d challenge him to a game. I was thinking I might even beat him this time.
    But when I opened the door he was home already, sitting on the couch, sort of tilted to the side. At first I thought he was sick.
    Then I saw the bottle of vodka propped between his knees.
    He was so loaded he could hardly talk. I helped him stand up, and got him upstairs into bed. I went back downstairs and poured out the rest of the vodka. There wasn’t much left in the bottle. It smelled like lemons and rubbing alcohol. After that I sat watching TV, the sound turned up loud so I couldn’t hear his drunken snores. I don’t remember a thing I watched.
    When Mom got home I didn’t even have to tell her what had happened. She saw the empty bottle by the sink and her face collapsed. I