Seeds of Tomorrow

44

Krist had pretty much left Rocco alone the remainder of the day, occasionally cracking his bedroom door to chuck a Gatorade in his direction, well, at him, and tell him that he should probably fucking drink something.

To say he was disappointed in his son and himself as a parent was an understatement. It wasn't so much that he was angry Rocco had experimented with drugs per se but meth was something that his family had struggled with. His own father was an addict. Krist was. Brad had been. Mark was on the way to becoming one if he wasn't already. And then on his birth mother's side, she and Fernando and a plethora of addicts and drunks.

Towards the end of the evening, he knew he would have to talk to Rocco and share some difficult truths with his son.

Rocco was lying in bed on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling. He looked greasy, his face shining with oil, "neck and chest covered in hickeys.

Have fun explaining that to poor Evie, Krist thought to himself.

"Aye, can we talk?"

Rocco grunted, avoiding his father's gaze. Krist wasn't really going to give him the option, instead, he took a seat in his gaming chair, wheeling himself next to Rocco's bedside. He handed his phone to him.

"What's this?" Rocco asked, studying the screen. It was Krist's old Facebook, three profiles ago. Rocco had never seen it because Krist's lame ass had set his name as his initials: K M S (K'llmyslf)", it was the profile he used when he was actively using.

"Old Facebook, way before you were born," Krist told him.

Rocco stared with an eyebrow cocked at just the first few pictures, seeing his father for the first time in his gaunt, methed-out glory posing in front of a mirror with one of Fernando's handguns, another of him and Lainey strung the fuck out posing in what they viewed as a...tweaker power couple phone...the photo of the massive tattoo Lainey had gotten on her pubic mound that read Krist's name.

"You looked like Mark...but like...more..."

"Strung out?" Krist volunteered.

"Yeah, I was going to say ghoulish but that works too."

"Same thing," he agreed, "Take a look at it, all of it. That's where you are going to go end up if you keep this shit up."

Rocco scrolled through his page, reading the paranoid comments, the ugly public arguments, and accusations he and Lainey had shot back and forth, pictures that showed visible track marks, and the apartment that Krist had destroyed in one of his many psychoses.

"Who is Lainey?" Rocco asked.

Krist was surprised that he'd never heard of her.

"The girl I was with before...and I guess after your mom. We were together on and off for a couple years until I found out about you..."

"She was like you were?"

Krist nodded, "Yup...it ended up killing her too. A few years later but that's what did her in," he said solemnly.

Krist took the phone from his son, studying the picture of him and Lainey, arms around each other. They'd been clean there, well she had, but he'd been sneaking dope behind her back.