Free Good Kids: A Novel by Benjamin Nugent

parking lot, Steven knelt beside the Subaru’s tires, out of sight.
    “Dad,” I said. I pointed. We could see the cook, and Steven’s truck. Steven stood, brushed dust off his jeans.
    My father cursed. The waitress slid out of the booth and went behind the counter.
    My father pushed down on my shoulders. “You do not move,” he said.
    He jogged out the door, down the three concrete steps to the parking lot. He could have stayed inside, I thought, and called the police. That’s what Mom would have done. But he believed in giving these people a chance to hurt him. The way he went through war books—that was part of it.
    The door sighed shut behind him. The waitress and I were alone inside, watching. My father and Steven shouted a little while, before they reached for each other. Later, for professional reasons, I would spend a lot of time in bars, and realize in retrospect that this verbose buildup to fighting meant that both my father and Steven were inept brawlers. If one of them had been any good, he would have tried to be the first to pop the other in the face, no prelude. That or tackled the other guy, straddled him, punched his head. There would have been no throat clearing. But at the time I thought they were talking and shoving because conversation was a necessary part of the process, that they were working themselves into a godlike furor. My father twisted Steven’s shirt and yelled in his face undaunted. But the cook walked around my father and took one of his arms in both of his hands. Steven did the same with the other arm. They leaned him against the back of the Subaru, gripping him by the elbow and the shoulder on each side. My father writhed against the hood; they labored to hold him down, two hands on each of his arms.
    The waitress touched my elbow and pointed outside with her chin. I looked around to see what I could use. I took a serratedsteak knife off a dirty plate on the counter. It looked funny in my hand; it made my wrist look even thinner than it was. She hoisted a coffeepot off the Bunn Pour-O-Matic. It was the decaf pot, with a smudged orange lip.
    “Take this.” She pushed it toward me across the counter. “It’ll hurt. It hurts my fingers all the time.”
    I put down the knife and picked up the coffeepot. My father didn’t want my help, but he was going to get it. As soon as I had the pot in my hand, I became aware that my body was carrying a white energy that purled in my lungs and brain and turned from fear to determination to fear and back and forth, like a kid was playing with a light switch. My arm trembled. The coffee sloshed as I walked out of the train car into the parking lot, not too fast, careful not to let any of the coffee spill over the lip and burn my fingers. Approaching these men at a steady pace with the coffeepot stable in my hand, I felt uncomfortably like a waitress.
    Steven and the cook let my dad go and backed away when they saw me coming with something in my hand. When Steven took in that it was a pot of decaf, he sneered with relief.
    “I’ll burn you,” I said.
    “What are you going to do?” my father called to Steven. “Beat a kid?”
    “I’m going to take that from you,” Steven said to me, “unless you pour it out.”
    “I’m not doing that.”
    Steven stepped forward, and reached for the pot. I walked backward, and drew the pot close to me, like a football, but Steven got both his hands on it, and we were twisting together, and then my hands were empty and Steven was emptying the pot onto the ground, calmly, as if pouring water on a rosebush.
    Three men had come out of the diner, and the one in front, who was shouting obscenities, looked like he might be the manager, a tan and wiry man in metallic math-nerd glasses. I could tell the dishwashers were dishwashers because they were only barely older than I was, one of them in a Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion T-shirt, the other in a Celtics jersey.
    The manager was still shouting something. There