Awkward Family Moments

Eileen
One mid-morning, Nathan Marszalek wakes up in the second bedroom of Theodore Amherst's town-home.

He does whatever it is that Nathan Marszaleks do when they wake up in second bedrooms belonging to their father because they've decided to stay with him more than they stay at their own (unsafe [haunted]) apartment. There are ghosts everywhere but they don't always choose to speak they aren't always heard they've got their own Stygian laws their own issues and politics to deal with the afterlife takes prisoners everybody eventually falls. There are no ghosts who want things from Nathan Marszalek at Theodore's home.

The town house smells like somebody's making something delicious. Something involving onions because onions always smell good when they're frying in butter. There is a pan in use as a matter of fact: some sort of vegetable scramble-thing going on except it's not really a vegetable scramble-thing, the smell in the air doesn't lie. Bacon, popping and crackling, recently, and now bacon grease for the onions to fry in, strips of crisped meat on a plate by the stove.

There is a young woman, somewhere in the vicinity of her mid to late twenties, in the kitchen listening to NPR while wearing a teeshirt and a skirt. The teeshirt isn't hers. The young woman has dark hair, tangled right now where it's falling out've a clip, and the colour of her eyes isn't something that Nathan is in a position to notice right away, though she's going to look over at him in a moment.

Theodore is nowhere to be seen.


Nathan
Nathan has spent the last two weeks dozing in the break room at the Denver Post. Catching naps in waiting rooms. He spent one restless night with the woman he calls his girlfriend. They didn't spend the night making love or fucking or whatever word they choose to describe the physical aspect of their relationship. They spent it arguing.

Thursday afternoon Nathan called his father to confirm he was still welcome. Maybe they talked for a bit when Theodore came home from work. At the end of the day the young man swallowed a sleeping pill with a bottle of beer and brushed his teeth and went to bed.

He didn't stir until the next morning. The smell of onions hit his stomach and he wasn't sure if he was hungry or nauseous. Sleep deprivation made his mind clamor for oblivion but he rose anyway.

When he comes downstairs it's in jeans and an old t-shirt he bought at the P.X. at Camp LeJeune. His feet are bare. He realizes right away he has no clue who this girl is.


"Oh," he says to her back. Shit he does not say. He starts to step back out of the threshold with the intent to go back upstairs.

Eileen
Already too late to retreat, because the sound he made causes the young woman to turn around and look at him. First to greet him with a smile that's one part sly and one part fond, and then to realize that Nathan isn't who she thought she was going to be smiling at at all, so the smile becomes a baffled cock of her head and then an epiphany and it becomes instead a widening of the eyes. She doesn't start babbling or overcompensating with a grin or anything like that, but she does press her mouth together firmly and ruefully tug down his father's shirt before saying, "Hey. Don't run off. There's bacon and some fresh coffee."

Nathan
That's not his father's shirt.

Maybe taking the sleeping pill before taking a shower wasn't his brightest idea this year. He had stripped and showered and stumbled into the guest room not entirely as if this was a hotel but as if he was just used to leaving his shit lying everywhere. He was going to pick them up in the morning anyway. It's not like his father ever cared about the occasional errant piece of clothing lying around.

... when he was in middle school.

... which is the same period of time in which this chick was in middle school.

... this chick who is now wearing his shirt. Which he got from participating in some sort of a charity run between deployments in 2008. Which he didn't recognize until she turned around because it's white and a lot of shirts are white.

So she tugs down what she must think is Theodore's shirt and Nathan stops in mid-about face to at least listen to her. There's bacon and fresh coffee.

Jesus Christ this chick is cooking breakfast for his father he didn't even hear them come in last night because of the sleeping pill he's not mentally prepared for this Nathan goes straight from the threshold of the kitchen to the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of beer. It needs a bottle opener. He knows where that is now.


"Great," he says. Doesn't touch the bacon or the coffee yet. Just leaves the bottle cap lying on the island countertop and takes a long pull before asking, "So, uh... where's the old man?"

Eileen
If the young woman is at all dismayed to have a scruffy-haired, just-woke-up, around-her-age stranger wander into the kitchen and, once offered food and coffee, go immediately for a beer at this valiant and noble time of nine o' clock in the morning, she hides the dismay really well.

"How many?" she asks him. The vegetable scramble is still frying, but she knows where the plates are, whether because she's had a lot of familiarty with this here kitchen or because she found them when she was finding pans for what she made now, who knows? The point is she gets a plate down from one of the cabinets and puts a strip or two of bacon on it. Slides the plate over to Nathan or hands it to him, and then,


"I'm Eileen by the way. What old man?"

Nathan
The scruffy twenty-something stranger who's appeared in the kitchen looks the same amount of thrilled to see the woman as the woman is to see him. Suspicion mingling with acceptance in both of them and as he starts in on the beer Nathan begins to take a mental inventory of where in the house his father could be.

He wasn't in the bathroom. That's where Nate just was. Nate glanced at the master bedroom only as much as it would take to confirm that the door was open or closed and if it was open that his father was not in some state of emergency and the glance only lasted a second before he pulled on a shirt he'd found crammed in the bottom of his overnight bag and stumbled downstairs.

There may be an office or something that he hasn't seen before. It's a townhouse. It's bigger than it looks.

As for how many pieces of bacon he wants Nathan doesn't know and he doesn't supply her a quantity. Makes some sort of noncommittal noise while he drinks his beer. He accepts the plate when it comes to him though. He's sluggish from the sleeping pill but not trying to be rude. Maybe. It's hard to tell. She just met him.

What old man.
Ugh.


"Theodore," he says. He should just say 'my father' or 'Dad' or something but if he does that his brain is going to do awful things to him and thus far he's managed to stave that off. "Did he go to work?"

Eileen
Eileen turns down the stove's heat and uses a spatula to prod the vegetables around. This means her body's angled slightly away from Nate now. Not completely, because she wants to keep him in her sights -- for whatever reason. Perhaps only that she doesn't know him. She looks like an athlete: long-limbed, strong-flanked, energetic. Not peppy, but energetic in a way that's spare, almost elegant:

yeah think about that Nathan. Think about it when she spatulas some of that scramble into another plate, one which was already out, and half-winces, sitting herself at one of the stools around that kitchen island, the better to say to Mister Beer Drinker, somewhat nervously, "Uh, no. He doesn't have work until later. He just stepped downstairs to get a paper. Are you ... Here because you're going to be...?"


"I didn't think we were going to so... Well, I mean, are you a live-in ..."

Nathan
"What?"

Ugh he should have just turned around and gone back upstairs why is he still standing here watching this girl dole out food and wander around in his t-shirt if she's half-wincing Nate looks as if he has the acute awareness of an ulcer forming in his stomach and his own powerlessness to do anything about it. It's a specific form of discomfort.


"No, I'm his son." Nate puts down the beer and extends his right hand to shake. "Hi. Nathan. Nice to meet you."

Eileen
Eileen does not go 'oh shit,' but her eyes widen for a moment, and she has the sort-of skin that reddens when -- let's just say she sure is red now.

"Oh."

He probably didn't know what she was talking about. Eileen recovers, reaching out across the island to take Nate's hand and grin at him.

"I forgot Theodore had a son. Nice to meet you too. So you got in last night sometime? You um, slept well, I guess? We didn't ..."


Oh, Eileen. This will not make this less awkward. In for a penny, in for a pound, though. Nate has an opportunity here to make her not finish that sentence.

Nathan
He neither knew nor wants to know what she was talking about. That much she can tell from looking at him. Scruffy big-eyed thing that he is. Even if ignorance has just made his life more difficult he's happy to remain so in the face of his father's nocturnal activities. His father at least goes out in the daylight.

So they shake hands. Look at them being all adult and mature. Up until she starts to ask if they didn't make too much noise. Nate swallows like his gorge is threatening to rise up on him and picks up his beer again.

"I heard nothing," he says. "It was pretty great."

He would like to continue to hear nothing Eileen let's just pretend you're here for reasons other than the reason Nate's brain keeps tugging towards.

"So how do you..." He clears his throat. "Are you like his nurse, or... a student, or..."


Two can play at Making This Awkward.

Eileen
The time for turning red is passed. Her ears stay pink; there's a healthy burn along her cheekbones. But mostly, the time for turning red is passed.


"No," she says, in a moment of horror that absolutely makes it difficult for her to see straight, right before she says, firmly: "No, your father and I have sex, but obviously we didn't meet having sex. I'm a legal secretary at the offices of Rogers, Harris & Coll, and I had to chase Theo down for a signature, so..."

Nathan
He's having flashbacks to an argument he and his mother had when he was thirteen or fourteen years old. The divorce was recently settled and she was bringing Ron Marszalek around the apartment that she'd moved him and his sister into after literally taking the kids and leaving their father. Nathan wanted to go to D.C. and live with his dad and he didn't give two shits about whether Dad had custody anymore Ron sucked.

Most of his memories of that period of their lives involve Hannah screaming and crying and throwing tantrums. She was four years old. Old enough to have stopped throwing tantrums. She never really got over their mother leaving their father but she doesn't remember it. Just remembers being confused and angry. Nathan remembers her crying though.

Shira tried to reason with him because hey, in the Jewish faith that she didn't even bring him up in proper because she'd married a gentile and hadn't she told Teddy that she was an atheist so why would she indoctrinate their kid into a religion that she didn't subscribe to anyway but in the Jewish faith children are adults at the age of 13. And she'd tried to reason with him.

He didn't want to hear about his father's drinking and sleeping around thirteen years ago and he sure as shit doesn't want to hear about it now is the moral of that story.

"Right on," he says.


Glug.

Eileen
There.

Eileen looks, perhaps, a touch repentent, but also a touch rebellious. Nathan shouldn't have thought she was Theodore's nurse. Theodore isn't that old, surely, and -


This is still awkward. Eileen nibbles on her veggie scramble thing, a neat smile that isn't very full of welcome. "So what do you do, Nathan?"

Nathan
Nathan has a terrible sense of humor. It's dry and barbed and he takes after his father that way. It must be more genetic than it is anything else. Maybe Teddy doesn't say sarcastic depreciating things around people he's trying to seduce. Maybe Nathan was just too young to recognize when he was flirting with someone and when he was just talking. Most of the barbecues and block parties he got dragged to as a kid, everybody was married.

That doesn't mean anything. This is still awkward.

"I write," he says. "For the paper. I'm a reporter."

Yep. Definitely still awkward.

"Excuse me, I'm..." He points towards the back door. Maybe it's a sliding glass situation. He vaguely remembers there being a Jacuzzi out there and no place to stash a cigarette butt. Alcohol tossed them over the fence into the neighbor's yard last time. That wasn't him. "Cigarette."


He takes his beer with him.

Eileen
Eileen doesn't try to keep him again. The young woman (28!) stays at the kitchen's island counter. Even with her in the kitchen the place looks industrial, looks sterile, looks too clean: all the cooking in the world and it would still be somehow austere.

Out he goes. Back door. Sure. Something austere, of course. Tasteful but because it came with the townhome. Theodore's taste runs to apparently 28 year olds these days. Eileen says, "All right." Then she eats Nate's bacon.


Nate's not outside long when he hears, perhaps, the front door open and the sound of his father's voice. He probably doesn't want to see how Theodore greets Eileen (you're still here? is just one of many possibilities), and not long after Nathan hears the sound of Theodore's voice mingling with Eileen's, he hears the front door slam.

Nathan
He didn't want that shirt anymore anyway. He was still with Janine when he agreed to run in that 5K anyway. Didn't see anything wrong with spending half his weekend off flying from North Carolina to California and back again after an entire Saturday out in the sun running his ass off. Begone, O cursed article of clothing. May Eileen set you on fire thinking she can exorcise Theodore Amherst that way.

"Ugh," he says to himself. Looks up at the morning sky and finds himself grateful that he's standing in a patch of shade. He hasn't seen much sun lately. He takes another pull of beer and realizes it's getting empty. That'll give him something to toss his filter into.


Theodore will be able to see his son through the window if he looks. The kid is taller than either of his parents and his hair is getting shaggy again. He isn't easy to lose.

Theodore
The glass door slides open. The air pressure changes. His father's voice, behind him, "Morning, Nathan."


If Nathan turns around to see Theodore, he'll see that the old man looks (as usual) rather tired, his silver-foxed hair in disarray, a casual long-sleeved shirt in hunter green and a pair of neat slacks on, though he's barefoot. He's also got a plate of bacon and vegetable scramble in one hand, a fork in the other.

Nathan
"Hey, Dad."

When Nathan turns around nothing seems amiss with him. But then nothing ever seemed amiss with him. Not after first or second grade when he started to realize if he reacted to the things he heard that other people couldn't hear when he was out on the playground or out on a field trip that it frightened his teachers and made the teacher call whichever parent was his primary emergency contact.

So even though he just met a girl who's only a year or so older than him and was definitely fucking his father last night see maybe it's not cancer or some other wasting illness it's just too many late nights Nate doesn't look at his father with anything other than his normal dark-eyed grogginess. It's exacerbated by the sleeping pill's lingering and the beer he just consumed.


"What's up?"

Theodore
"It's nine-twenty in the morning; isn't it a bit early to be hitting the sauce?" Theodore replies, around a forkful of food.


He still doesn't know how to deal with having his son in his house. This isn't because he doesn't want him. This is because he's a bachelor, because whatever his relationship with Nate is, the word that best describes it is 'complicated.'

Nathan
"Maybe."

He's got a half-dead cigarette in one hand and an empty beer bottle in the other. He looks like he could stand to sleep for twelve hours like he did last night two or three more times. Whatever is going on with this story is taking more out of him than one would expect given how it looks like it just fell into his lap on the surface.

"Um... I'm... sorry, I didn't mean to..."

It takes him a second to think of a way to word what he didn't mean to do without implying that he had any way of knowing there would be a woman here when he woke up when he asked his father if he could spend a couple nights here.

Complicated is an understatement.


"I'll get out of your hair."

Theodore
"No need," Theodore says. If he thought there was a problem with Nathan Marszalek staying at his place for a couple nights, he would have said so; whatever Theodore and Eileen's discussion in the kitchen was, Theodore seems unconcerned with it or Nathan's effect on his visitor.

No. To seem unconcerned he would have to seem as if he's giving it a thought; as if it matters to him or the woman was in his thoughts. That is not how Theodore seems.

"To apologize or to get out of my hair. As I said, that's what the guest room is for."

Because maybe when Theodore bought this town home he thought: one day my children will want to know me; one day my children might need a place to stay; one day, perhaps, I won't be alone, and then I'll be ready? Probably nothing that sentimental; probably something more visceral.

He also has a lot of guests.


Mm, veggie scramble. Farmer's market vegetables. Delicious. "You want to eat?"

Nathan
He hasn't told his father about his decision to dump his cat off on his now-ex friend or his girlfriend's encounter with said ex-friend. How a woman who was once literally in bed with an eighty-year-old terrorist called him to tell him to be fucking careful and then the case's lead detective took him out to lunch to try and talk him into committing libel. His workweek went from sixty hours to eighty.

They haven't addressed the fact that Nathan confessed to hearing voices. They haven't addressed his paranoia. He hasn't told his father he doesn't trust anyone anymore and it's hard to sleep because he's getting twitchy. He doesn't know if Theodore believes in ghosts or believes his son is schizophrenic. They both look tired.

Does he want to eat.


Nathan nods his head fast and takes a final drag off the cigarette. Kills it with a sizzle as he drops it into the dregs of his Guinness.

Theodore
Theodore waits until Nathan nods and drops his cigarette into the Guiness bottle. He waits until Nathan comes through the door, standing back from it in order to give him more room. Theodore continues to eat standing up, the Spring sunlight weak and watery where it splashes down in what amounts to a 'yard' - a patio - a bit of outdoor space for a jacuzzi to winter, to wait for Theodore to want to use it, and maybe he was using it last night (no, he wasn't).

There is a lot they haven't spoken about. Nathan is an adult, though he is having a difficult time, difficult enough that he confessed things to his father and his father tried to say the right words back, kept his thoughts to himself, continues to keep his thoughts to himself. He doesn't share ghost stories; he just tried to share some of his own history, something that Nathan could use, something other than trouble.

There's so much they haven't spoken about but they're father and son they're not friends.

"Work still working you hard?" is what he says once Nathan is back inside. That, and, "Cereal or what's in the pan?"

He can pour some cereal for Nathan. Sure.

Nathan
So he comes inside and he tosses the beer bottle into the trash can because recycling is a scam and he's already thrown a cigarette butt into the thing anyway. It's a glorified ashtray when it goes into the garbage.

"The pan's fine," he says.

Doesn't say anything about the person who made what's in the pan. He just finds the plate that had bacon on it earlier and starts upending food onto it. Might as well clean up while he's at it. Nathan barks a cough into his elbow as he sets about his task.

"Work's alright. I got my first death threat in the mail the other day, that was pretty exciting."

He says this in a deadpan. Doesn't mention how the letter was mentioned at the morning huddle and the old-timers all sarcastically applauded the novice reporter. They've all had countless death threats.

Theodore
"I remember my first death threat," Theodore says. "Did yours mention Jesus?"

Nathan
"Yours did too?"

The first glimmer of emotion comes into his voice even if it's just feigned astonishment at the coincidence.

"I wonder if that's proper etiquette when you're writing a death threat." He has finished piling food onto the plate and left the pans in the sink to soak. He'll deal with them when he's done eating. He finds a fork and parks himself and the plate at the island. "If you don't mention your deity of choice it's considered poor form."

Chomp.

Theodore
"If Jesus told you to do it, when you're dragged before a judge you'll have some other nutjobs to support your decision," Theodore says.

Then, "Orange juice?"

Nathan
Orange juice?

"Sure."

Still has food in his mouth so that's all the answer his father gets while he finishes chewing. Figures he'd better keep shoveling food in while the orange juice is in the process of going from the carton to the glass. By the time Theodore sets it in front of him he's put a huge dent in his plate. Nathan was always a good eater but he's gotten gangly in his adulthood. He could get scrawny if he doesn't pay attention to what he's putting his body through.

"Thanks," he says once his mouth is cleared again. Takes a deep slug of juice. "Speaking of getting dragged before a judge, can I ask you something?"

Theodore
Theodore leans on his elbows after he sets the orange juice now. He is by chance standing, leaning, where Eileen had stood and leaned so recently, although they are very different, Eileen and Theodore, and the way they carry themselves is very different. This is Theodore's home; his bones are old, are aging; he is tired, though he keeps himself fit - enough. No contained athleticism here, just a certain dissipated air of rakehell sharpness, if one knows how to look. There is a lot of sharpness.

Theodore, you wanted to be a father.

"Do you need a lawyer?" Theodore asks.

Nathan
Does he need a lawyer.

The Denver Post keeps attorneys on retainer for instances like this. Investigative journalists run into situations where they uncover evidence or hear confessions all the time. They may become witnesses for one side or the other or they may end up being charged at some point if they aren't careful. Coverups happen all the time. If a particularly reckless journalist breaks laws while pursuing a story then that's a different can of worms.

That's different than his situation. And Theodore can see from the unfocused stare in his son's eyes that he isn't drunk or zoned out or flashing back but thinking hard before he answers. When he comes back to himself he swirls his juice around in his glass. Watches it dance.

"I have a lawyer," he says.

Theodore
"Ask away," Theodore says.

Nathan
"Okay."

The orange juice doesn't have alcohol in it. It does have sugar and water though. He's starting to revive now that he's had solid food and something besides beer to drink. That sleeping pill kicked him right in the hypothalamus.

"Just, hypothetically: If someone who could be considered an accessory after the fact in, say... a Class One felony. This person calls someone who is involved in, say, covering this Class One felony because he's a reporter, and she knows he's a reporter. That's why she's calling him. But she wants to remain off the record. So she tells the reporter details that could possibly lead to identification, apprehension, and prosecution of a suspect who currently isn't a suspect, but the accessory doesn't want to go to the police because... reasons. Does the reporter have an obligation to take a comment made off the record to law enforcement, and if so, is he also considered an accessory after the fact if he happened to lie by omission when the accessory's name came up in conversation with the case's lead detective."

No wonder he looks like shit.

Theodore
[Law Stuff, one supposes, with Specialty Probs.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

Theodore
[5 suxx. Your ass is covered, Nathan.]

Theodore
There used to be something in Theodore which believed in the law, in justice, in fairness and equality, in something that was instilled in him by his own father, who was sad and had a rough life but did have a certain lack of tarnishment. There used to be something in Theodore which believed in the system, or at least that the system could be used to effect real change, good change, could be used to make a difference; he found it fascinating, or must have, perhaps he did, who's to say? Theodore doesn't say why he went into law. Maybe he went into law because he was lazy, that's what his father did, because lawyers make good money, lawyers get hot chicks, because lawyers frighten people.

There used to be something in him, though.

That isn't there any longer. He listens to Nathan's 'hypothetical' and the expression in his eyes is reserved, judgment not particularly visible, concealed. His mouth presses together, surprisingly firmly. His eyebrows loft, and there's the devil. Devils are always lawyers.

"Off the top of my head," Theodore says, and what follows is

what's very wrong with the legal system. The law is never black and white; it is only black, black, black, prosecution's going to try to cut certain words out've that blackness and defense is going to try to cut other certain words, and Theodore knows how to use that scalpel. In the state of Colorado, this precedent and this one, followed by this one; this defense, followed by that one, followed by what a hypothetical reporter such as the one just described would be bound to say; what he did say, even. Then there is this little-used statute which in a case similar -

etcetera.

The law is magick; it can make anybody blameless, even if their hands are covered in blood.

If you've already broken the law, don't confess, kid. Never admit.

Nathan
Considering the fact that his folks split when he was in seventh grade and he grew up hating his stepfather and refusing to yield to his authority and he and his mother spent his entire high school career hollering at each other Nathan turned out alright.

Thank you, United States Marine Corps. You took a kid who might have otherwise been bound for a future smoking weed and pumping gas and paying child support to three different women and molded him into someone with moral character and a sense of civic duty and -

Well now he's sitting in his father's kitchen asking for a moral compass because he isn't sure if he ought to seek legal counsel. He thinks he ought to but he doesn't know. He's only been working as a fucking reporter for a year. In the Corps he didn't have to deal with civilians. It was different.

He looks like he could listen to his father talk about this shit all day. Halfway through his opening argument he rests his chin on the heel of his hand. Around the time he's gone on to some apocryphal statute he's pushed away his plate. No sign of exhaustion in his eyes even though a moment earlier he looked as if he could fall asleep in a sunstrip on the couch.

"'Off the top of your head,'" he says at the end of all that.

Theodore
"I'm full of knowledge," Theodore says, with just a touch of wry. He just talked a lot. He does not sound as if he has talked a lot. His voicebox is in good working condition. Theodore's morality is the kind of morality people acquire when they've lived in the world of darkness for a long time, and they're not terrible people at heart, but the ends justify the means, etcetera.

They've both finished eating by now. Theodore says, "If you're going to stick around, let's go do the laundry."

He doesn't say fucking laundry, but it's offhand. And that's what'll happen: Theodore and Nathan, doing the laundry. Nathan's shirt did not vanish with Eileen, as it turns out, though who knows when she had time to -- don't think about it. And she left behind a pair of panties, pink butterflies on white silk, Victoria Secret. He'll be the lucky one to find them wrapped up in other items of clothing, and there's more laundry to do than you'd think a bachelor who gets a lot of his clothes drycleaned would have, but there you go.

Laundry day.