Free The Edge of Never by J. A. Redmerski Page B

announcement. He pulls the buds from his ears and looks up at me, waiting for me to put words to the gesture.
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    ANDREW
    A few days earlier…
     

7
     
     
     
     
    I GOT A CALL from my brother in Wyoming today. He said our old man wasn’t going to be around much longer. He’d already spent the last six months in and out of the hospital.
    “If you’re gonna see him,” Aidan said on the other end of the phone, “you better come now.”
    I do hear Aidan. I do. But all I can really comprehend right about now is that my dad is about to fucking die. “Don’t you ever dare cry for me,” he’d said to my brothers and me last year when they diagnosed him with a rare form of brain cancer. “I’ll cut you right out of my will, boy.”
    I hated him for that, for telling me in so many words that if I cried for him, the one man in my life that I would die for, that I’d be a pussy for it. I don’t care about the will. Whatever he leaves me I’ll just let it sit. Maybe I’ll give it to Mom.
    Dad was always a hardass growing up. He drilled the shit outta me and my brothers, but I like to think we turned out decent (and that was probably the plan behind the drilling). Aidan, the oldest, owns a successful bar and restaurant in Chicago and is married to a Pediatrician.  Asher, the youngest, is in college and has his sights set on a career at Google.
    Me? I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve secretly done a few modeling gigs for several high profile agencies, but I only did it because I fell on hard times last year. Right after I found out about my dad. I couldn’t cry, so I let it all out on my 1969 Chevy Camaro. Destroyed it with a baseball bat. Dad and I rebuilt that car from the ground up together. It was our ‘father-son’ project that began just before I graduated. I figured if he isn’t going to be around, then neither should the car.
    So yeah, modeling.
    Hell no, I never went looking for a gig. I don’t care about that kind of shit. I just happened to be at Aidan’s bar when a couple of scouts found me getting shitfaced. I guess it didn’t matter that I was…well, shitfaced, because they slipped me their card, offered me a generous sum of money just to show up at their building in New York and after three weeks of staring at that Camaro and regretting what I’d done to it, I decided, why not? That one check just for showing up could cover some of the body work. And I did show up. And despite the money I made from the few ads I shot being enough to fix the car, I turned down the fifty-thousand-dollar contract I’d been offered by LL Elite because, like I said, prancing around in my underwear for a living just isn’t my thing. Hell, I felt dirty for accepting the few gigs I did accept. So, I did what any red meat-eating, beer-drinking guy would do and I tried to make myself look more man and less pansy by getting a few tattoos and a job as a mechanic.
    Not the kind of future my old man wanted for me, but unlike my brothers, I learned a long time ago that it’s my future and my life and I can’t make myself live the way someone else wants me to live. I dropped out of college after I realized that I was studying something I didn’t give a shit about.
    What is it with people and their willingness to follow?
    Not me. I want one thing in life. It’s not money or fame or a Photoshopped dick on a billboard in Times Square or a college education that may or may not benefit me later. I’m not sure what it is that I want, but I feel it deep in the pit of my stomach. It’s there sitting dormant. I’ll know it when I see it.
    “A bus ?” Aidan says, unbelieving.
    “Yes,” I say. “I’ll take a bus there. I need to think.”
    “Andrew, Dad might not make it,” he says and I can hear the restraint in his voice. “Seriously, bro.”
    “I’ll be there when I get there.”
    I run my thumb over the end call button.
    I think a small part of me hopes that he dies before