Free The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer

stop being so angry all the time, JR. No more tantrums. No more security blankets. No more asking for TV sets and toys your mother can’t afford. You need to take care of your mother. Do you hear?”

    “Yes.”

    “Your mother works so hard, and she’s so tired, and she has no one but you to help her. No one else can do it. She’s counting on you. I’m counting on you.”

    Each time she said the word “you,” it sounded like a drum. My mouth went dry, because I was trying my best, but Grandma was saying that my worst fear, the thing I worried about most, was coming true. I was falling short. Failing my mother. I promised Grandma that I would do more, then asked to be excused and went quickly back down the hall to Uncle Charlie’s room.

     

 

    eight
| M c GRAW

    W HAT ARE YOU DOING? ” MY COUSIN MCGRAW ASKED. He was standing in the middle of the backyard, swinging a bat at an imaginary pitch, making a sound—
koosh—
like the ball connecting. I was sitting on the stoop, the radio in my lap. I was nearly nine and McGraw was seven.

    “Nothing,” I said.

    A few minutes passed.

    “No, really,” he said. “What are you doing?”

    I lowered the volume. “Trying to see if my father is back on the radio.”

    After shooting another pretend pitch into the gap, McGraw adjusted his plastic Mets batting helmet, which he never took off, and said, “What if there was a machine that let you see or hear your father whenever you wanted? How cool would
that
be?”

    McGraw’s father, my Uncle Harry, hardly ever came around, but his absence seemed more pointed than my father’s because Uncle Harry lived just one town over. And his appearances were scarier, because he sometimes hit Aunt Ruth and the cousins. He once poured a bottle of wine over Aunt Ruth’s head in front of McGraw. Another time he pulled Aunt Ruth by her hair along the floor in front of all the cousins. He even slapped me, across my face, which gave me a cold dead feeling deep inside my chest.

    McGraw was my best friend and closest ally in Grandpa’s house, after my mother. I often introduced him as my brother, and I wasn’t lying. I was searching for something truer than the truth. How could McGraw not be my brother, when he led the same life, steered by the same coordinates? Absent father. Weary mother. Shady uncle. Sad grandparents. One-of-a-kind first name that prompted teasing and confusion. Also, as with my name, there was some mystery about the origins of McGraw’s. Aunt Ruth told Grandpa that McGraw’s name was inspired by John McGraw, the legendary baseball manager, but I also overheard her telling my mother that she’d picked the most rugged name she could find, to ensure that McGraw, surrounded by sisters, wouldn’t be a sissy.

    I shared Aunt Ruth’s concern. I too feared that McGraw and I were doomed to sissyhood. When McGraw, who was more easygoing than I, didn’t worry about such things, I forced him to. I initiated McGraw into my neuroses, drilled into his head the notion that we were growing up without the manly arts, like auto repair and hunting, camping and fishing, and especially boxing. For McGraw’s own good I commanded him to help me stuff Uncle Charlie’s golf bag with dishrags and newspapers, and with this makeshift punching bag we taught each other to throw left-right combinations. I dragged McGraw against his will to the duck pond by the railroad tracks, where we cast hooks baited with Wonder Bread into the scummy water. We actually caught something, a speckled fish that looked like Barney Fife, which we brought to Grandpa’s. We put it in the bathtub and forgot about it. When Grandma found it she scolded us severely, which confirmed my paranoia that we were living under a tyranny of the feminine.

    Despite our identical lives McGraw and I were different boys, and our differences seemed to grow out of our relationships with our mothers. McGraw tended to fume at his, whom he called Ruth, while I clung to mine,