Free Monday Mornings: A Novel by Sanjay Gupta

beginning to worry that Nick had given up on him. George was not always faithful about driving out to spend the day with his son. If he had too much to drink, or hooked up with a nurse or a barfly, George would blow it off. He’d call and tell Nick something had come up at the hospital. “No problem,” Nick would say. George put his conscience at ease by telling himself the last thing an eighth grader wanted to do was hang out with his father, although he knew that was a lie.
    George had almost never seen his own father, who worked in the local meatpacking plant. He’d moved up to the day shift by the time George was in grade school but would often pick up extra shifts at night and on weekends to help make ends meet. The work was so bone-wearying, George’s father would arrive home from the plant, sit in the one nice chair in the house, and light a cigarette. With the cigarette burning between his lips, he would massage the knuckles on his right hand. Although George didn’t know this until later, his father would grip the same heavy saw for hours as one dangling carcass after another reached him on what could only be described as an assembly line. The fingers on his hand would lock around the saw by the end of the shift, and he’d have to pry them loose with his other hand. Gato still thought of his father as he held a scalpel in the OR and peered down into the muscle he was incising. Maybe he and his father weren’t that different after all.
    Peering through the beveled glass, George could see his son in the living room, propped up on the enormous sectional couch playing some sort of handheld video game. Nick looked up, caught his father’s eye, and then returned to the video game. The little shit , Villanueva thought as his respiration ratcheted up a notch.
    “Nick,” he said, and then, “C’mon.”
    George gave a sharp rap on the glass and gave Nick a palms-up sorry-about-last-week-but-things-happen gesture. George had missed their day the previous weekend. He had spent the night with a nurse who worked in the NICU. She was a big woman, but who was he to cast stones?
    Nick didn’t look up. The Big Cat could feel the blood rushing to his head.
    “Nick!” Villanueva said. “Open the door. I’m sorry about last week. Hospital emergency. Nick, I said I’m sorry. C’mon.”
    Nothing.
    “Nick! Open the damn door!”
    Villanueva’s nostrils flared. His face reddened. He ripped off his sunglasses and mopped the sweat from his face with a bare hand. He was considering the best way to apply his considerable force to the problem of getting into the house and pulling his son off the couch when Nick rose slowly from the overstuffed furniture and ambled toward the foyer. Nick opened the door, a rush of air-conditioning greeting Villanueva. Nick’s eyes were blank as he looked at his father. George resisted the urge to throttle the kid.
    “Hey, Nick. How ya doing?” Villanueva said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.
    “Hi, Dad,” Nick said. His voice was flat. He was medium height and slight, in that awkward half-grown, fully self-conscious stage. George himself had skipped this phase, morphing from husky elementary school kid to man-child in a burst of hormone-fueled growth in sixth and seventh grades.
    “Sorry about last week, Nick. Hey, I got Lions tickets for today.”
    Nick looked down at his feet.
    “Great seats, Nick.”
    “I dunno.”
    When Villanueva was a kid, he would have killed to go to a Lions game with his father. There was no money, and his father always seemed so tired. The first Lions game his father saw was the first game of the season of the Big Cat’s rookie year, and by then the smoking had already fried his lungs. He showed up at the game with his mother and an oxygen tank in tow.
    Standing face-to-face with his own son, George pulled the cloth from the shoulder of his Hawaiian shirt and wiped his brow. Seemed awfully hot for an October day.
    “All right, fuck it. Pardon my