InsaneJournal

Russ: narrative
Who: Russ C & Nathan S
What: Parenting~
When: Uber-recently



He hadn’t figured this shit was easy. He hadn’t figured this shit was hard. He hadn’t given a whole bunch of thought to it beyond the middle-of-the-night dark where no one gave a shit if you thought yourself into cold sweat and when it was late enough he couldn’t skip the whole fucking thing and go to a bar.

No bars. The beer that had bled condensation on a sticky table he wasn’t real sure he was going back to, that was the last one. He went sober the way he remembered his mom doing it, back when he’d been young enough she’d given it a shot. Tipped out bottles circling gold into the drain, the smell of hops and yeast over bleach and the fridge fucking empty without a marshal of brown glass standing over the shriveled fucking lemon and the sad looking bacon wrapped in paper. But it was that, or it was drinking out hotels and anonymity and he thought about it just long enough to remember that icing daubed all over the kid’s hand. No bars, no beer and he worked a double the day before: clean sweat stinging his eyes and the hiss of the paint gun in his hand and no one came the fuck near him. Maybe the teenager had gotten mouthy, maybe sober just soaked off him in waves the way a bad bender did.

From the second Marina left, a cloud of incense-soaked perfume and icy schadenfraude lingering in his hallway, the kid charged past him into the living room, the saggy couch in front of a TV that didn’t, to Nathan’s disappointment, flick over to the same array of cartoons. The look in the kid’s eyes was jarring: it was basic as fuck, cartoons on TV and food in the fridge, but Russ couldn’t shake the feeling that disappointment was cuing up to make its grand entrance. But the kid dragged his backpack, like he was used to waiting places that didn’t even bother to have good cartoons, and he set up soldiers in a line to storm-crawl the corridor, front-door to kitchen. And yeah, it felt fucking dumb, hands on knees like the kid was going to look at him any second with that withering eyebrow-curl of his mom’s but Nathan shoved a soldier in his hand and it was OK.

He found some black and white shit on a channel that was more snow and static than show, and the kid settled in with his backpack between his knees, his trucks clutched like they were precious cargo and cheese-on-toast cradled protectively in the corner of his arm on a plate bigger than his head.

He watched him from the doorway. Russ remembered six the way he remembered seven and eight, like beads on a snapped necklace to scatter and bounce under floorboards. He remembered his mom, the smell of cheap shampoo under booze and he remembered fights in the dust of the schoolyard but he didn’t remember young. And Nathan was. He watched the light from the TV-set flicker over his face, cherub-round and that thick thatch of curls and Ford’s blue eyes trusting-wide.

“You want to see?” He held out a chubby hand, glistening with the smears of toast and butter, and Russ slid down onto the couch, knees sagging out underneath him and the cushions sinking under his weight. Maybe Nathan was young and that was it. Maybe Marina had been better at this shit than he’d ever expected, but Nathan slid onto his knee with a heavy weight that smelled like cheese and baby soap and crayons and leaned back against him like being hugged was something as normal as breathing in his world.

Yeah. Not hard. Not easy. He didn’t move, even when Nathan passed the fuck out, bored of black and white cartoons and Russ watched it into static.