Free Hush Hush by Steven Barthelme Page B

lot. The restaurant was new, looked sort of like Alphaville. “You go on. I’ll get a cab.”
    I looked around the place for someone else, but there was nobody anywhere, just, out there, the empty 4 a.m. streets and the lights and a stupid stoplight pointlessly changing colors, red to green. Outside I got into the car and glanced back through the restaurant windows half expecting Hylo to be gone, turned to vapor. But he was still in there.

Telephone
    It’ll be like this. The phone will ring, at some wrong time, some time the phone never rings, six o’clock in the evening or four a.m., or noon. It’s Ben, my brother. Ben always knows everything first, makes it his business to know things, so it’ll be him. How is he going to sound? Cool? Weeping? That high-serious voice he gets whenever something terrible happens? No, that voice isn’t for truly terrible things, but for those things we treat as terrible, talisman to protect us from the really terrible. The phone rings, it’s Ben. “Tommy,” he says, “I just got a call from Baltimore. It’s Pop—”
    No, that’s not it. It’ll be a message on the answering machine, the rectangular red light blinking when I go into the kitchen in the morning, and I’ll see it and I’ll think it’s something else, someone I want to hear from, something maybe I want to hear, something that I’ve been waiting for, something good. It’ll be Ben, of course, leaving a message. The message will say, “Pop died this morning at—” and then there’ll be some time, he’ll say “5:55 a.m.” the way people do, as if it made any difference. It’ll be some picturesque time, like 5:55 a.m., some time which stays in your brain forever after, not a time you can forget.
    Then the message will continue, Ben sounding like a cop. “Call me. I’m flying over there this afternoon, and if I haven’t heard from you, I’ll call you when I get there. Mom is okay, just crazy. Laura is taking care of her, she’s at Laura’s house.That number is—well, you have Laura’s number …” Then the message will change, his voice will change, he’ll say, “I didn’t know this was going to be this way, I didn’t know …” and he won’t be able to finish the thought. “Call me,” he’ll say.
    I am standing in the kitchen, listening to my brother on the answering machine. I’m half awake. I don’t feel anything. I have to wait for some place where I’m safe enough to feel something. I have been waiting for this message for twenty-five years, since my father was about sixty. This is what it’ll be like. Twenty-five years of waiting wasted. This is it. What is it like? Standing in my kitchen. I will punch the rewind and play the message again. “… at 5:55 a.m.,” my brother says. “I didn’t know this was going to be this way,” he says. It’s over, I will think. As a child, when my mother wasn’t home, I used to listen to sirens, stand looking out the big windows of the front room, looking into the empty carport, waiting for her car to be back in its place, and it always came back.
    As a child, I got to play chess with him. He would lie on his elbow on the kingsize bed and I would sit on a low stool, the wooden chessboard on another stool between us. Sometimes he was in pajamas. Maybe he was letting me win, those times I won. Now, middle-aged, I remember things he said, advice, some of it. He did not say, It’s bad and then it gets worse. Once he took one of his records, with “Unbreakable” printed on the label, and bent the record in half until it broke. “Not unbreakable,” he said, and then he laughed. What kind of person would do that? I think. I like to think that twenty-five years anticipating has immunized me against emptiness, but it isn’t so.
    I wanted my father to be all the things that an ideal man is supposed to be, a hero. He wasn’t far off the mark, really. He got worse as I got older, but my idea of what a hero wasincorporated worse things, too. And