Free Round Rock by Michelle Huneven Page A

I
like
it,” Lewis said. “But yeah, I do a lot of writing.”
    “Tell you what. You write something for me, you can have a couple hours on the computer. But I don’t want you over here all the time hiding out with the damn thing.”
    “I was thinking you need some help with your correspondence.”
    “No,” said Red. “I’d like your drinking history.”
    “My
what
?”
    Red wanted a narrative about how Lewis’s family drank, how Lewis drank, and whatever trouble alcohol or drugs had caused him—arrests, humiliations, jobs and friendships jeopardized or lost, all of it. “I don’t want the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,”
Red said. “But try to be thorough.”
    Lewis assumed Red needed text for another brochure and was certain he’d only disappoint him. Next to the stories told at the Blue House AA meetings—including Red’s own impressive saga, whichhad achieved the status of legend—Lewis’s drinking career had the dramatic content of skimmed milk. A guy named Oscar had come out of a blackout with his arms torn up and bleeding only to find his beloved cat drowned in the bathtub. Chuck had woken up married to a woman he didn’t recognize. Lawrence had been stabbed in a kidney while shooting dope in a West Hollywood alley. Lewis could count maybe half a dozen blackouts, total, and he’d always woken up at home and in bed, safe and sound and—regrettably—alone. “I don’t know if I can provide what you’re looking for,” he told Red.
    “I’m not looking for any one thing,” Red said. “Just tell the truth. Can you do that?”
    The truth, thought Lewis, was just what would make ’em snore.
    A FTER Lewis left, Red Ray locked the door and slit open a letter from his ex-wife. A note, really; half a sheet of heavy, ivory stationery, the message typed and brief. Evidently, Joe wanted to go out for track. The meets were on Saturdays, which meant he couldn’t come down to Red’s for three months, four if the team made the state finals: “You could come up here and see him run.” She signed off “Best wishes” and typed her name, initialing it with a large, loopy “Y” in bleeding blue ink.
    Old fears arose, tireless as waves. Was this another ploy to disenfranchise him? Or was Joe trying to avoid him? Was Yvette exacting punishment for yet another perceived failure in parenting?
    Not that Red was a terrific father even by his own standards. He ached for Joe, yearned to spend more time with him, yet often felt awkward, shy, almost afraid around the boy. At fifteen, Joe was going through such rapid physical and emotional changes, Red worried he’d embarrass or appall his son, miscalculating him from one visit to the next. And then there was the steady bass beat of dread that Red would unconsciously emulate his own intemperate, well-meaning father, who, through no effort or guile, had managed to harm everyone in his path.
    Red shared with his father the same name, John Robert Ray, which neither ever used. John Senior went by “Jack.” He was a tall, lean man who had both the gift of gab and “the failing.” He would gauge the needs of others with uncanny accuracy and then promise to fulfill them—which, of course, he never did. In a few short years ofmarriage, he gambled away the farmhouse in Azusa and a modest sum of money his wife had inherited from her father. Red distantly remembered a series of shabby motel rooms made huge, almost infinite with waiting, always waiting for his father to return from the bars.
    His parents separated when Red was five, and his mother took a teaching job in Glendale. Red was left behind, to be shuttled among his aunts and grandmother. He saw his father with increasing infrequency. At one point, Jack was enlisted to move Red from his aunt Maude’s house in Redlands to his grandma Iris’s house in Pomona.
    “We’ll make a day of it,” Jack told Red over the phone. “Get you moved, then pay a visit to the water gardens. Sound good to you, son?”
    Red, seven