Type 88

Part 3 - Action, Chapter 6

6

Forty-One Days until the Deadline

Jeff pulled into the parking lot of the Drive-In Diner, a greasy spoon with four booths that was positioned off the highway leading out of town. It had a large patio where high school kids came to smoke and eat ice cream.

Parents were reluctant to let their children come to places like this now. Civil unrest had sprung up in urban areas, and people felt it was a matter of time before it spread to smaller communities. The Drive-In was the last stop before entering the urban fray, the border between order and chaos. The city instituted a mandatory curfew in the area, to last indefinitely. The Drive-In shut its doors at eight.

The curfew didn't stop teenagers from eating their ice cream or smoking. They just did it in the urban areas that the parents were worried about in the first place. Some things didn't change.

Jeff shut off his car. It rained heavily, obscuring his view into the windows of the diner. The parking lot was almost empty. The few cars parked there were likely abandoned altogether. Jeff didn't recognize any of them.

He got out of his car and hurried into the diner. A woman guardedly watched Jeff from behind the register. Jeff ordered a coffee. After a moment, the woman lowered her head and retreated to the back.

Jeff surveyed the restaurant and saw his ex-wife in the far booth, watching him with the same gaze as the woman at the counter.

The woman brought Jeff his coffee. The smell of the beans cut through the stale air, awakening the creatures that lined the insides of the walls. Jeff paid the woman without asking the price and sat down at the booth with his ex-wife.

The two of them used to bring Benny here for pizza and ice cream, seating him at the head of the table in a high chair.

"Hi, Jeff," she said.

"Hi, Laura," he said.

Laura's brown freckles faded into her face at this age, making her seem more mature when she balanced her playful personality with calculated confidence. Her brown hair framed this presence perfectly.

Jeff grabbed his coffee with both hands and stared into it. Laura, like Benny, escaped him. He didn't understand how to talk to either of them. With Laura, this had worsened over time. The mystery was what Jeff initially fell in love with. It was the constant, insurmountable force that guided his love for her. Now it intimidated him. He had no idea how to pierce its opaque walls. He didn't want to—he didn't know what he'd feel behind it.

The steam rose off the coffee, warming his face. When they were still married, Jeff used to look in a bottle at Mike's Tavern for an ersatz emotion to bring home. At least that gave him a direction to head in. The coffee today did not.

"How's Scott?" he asked, not looking up.

"He's doing better," she said. "He was almost back to work before the broadcast. They extended his workman's comp until the deadline."

"They actually took that into account?" Jeff said. He forgot about his intimidation and looked up for the first time.

She was watching Jeff the way she always had, searching his face with a mix of determination, independence, and antagonism. She used to love him like that, with a ferocity that Jeff naïvely mistook for contempt. She probably still loved him that way, but the thread connecting the two had frayed long ago.

Laura ignored his pithy comment about Scott and moved the conversation forward. "Jeff, I want to take Benny to the Hills in Amherst."

Jeff sipped his coffee.

"Scott and I are going in two weeks," she continued. "I think you should consider coming too."

"Laura, stop," he said. Reacting to her was easy.

"Benny's scared," she said. "The last thing he needs right now is to be around those drunks, listening to Tim's dick jokes. He doesn't need to be numb. He needs his family."

Jeff opened his mouth to respond, but she cut him off. She was an expert in conversational momentum.

"I know this hasn't been your lifestyle, but it's ours, and we're still family," she said. "Benny is your son. The Hills is a place to settle down and prepare for—"

"Prepare for what, Laura?" Jeff interrupted her this time. "You're right—he needs his family. He needs home. That's more stable than sitting around a circle with a bunch of bible thumpers, praying to some fucking voice. How is that preparing? That's pretending," he said.

"What if this is the end, Jeff?" Laura said. "What if this is it? Do you want your last days on Earth to be rotting in that fucking shop or that fucking bar? If it's the end, we can embrace it—together. Don't you want to be with your son the day the Lord arrives?" She gave Jeff that look again. "And sure, if you're right, and he doesn't come, and this all blows over, your family will be stronger in faith for it. What's the problem with that?"

Jeff looked back into his coffee. The steam was gone.

"I'm taking Benny," Laura said. "You can stay, I don't care. But you're not gonna brainwash our kid into thinking nothing's wrong, that nothing's changed." She got up.

"I'm going to give Benny the shop," Jeff said. "If he stays to take it, it's his."

Laura's eyes narrowed. "You're gonna do that to him? You're gonna force him to make that choice? Step outside that place for one fucking second. Look around, Jeff! It's time to be a fucking father!"

Jeff looked out the window. The rain had stopped, and fog now swallowed up most of the neighborhood. Another opaque wall.

She thought the right thing to do was to indoctrinate the kid with religious bullshit. Coddle him to the end. Then she had the audacity to say he was doing the brainwashing—that he was numbing Benny's mind.

"I'm telling him tomorrow," Jeff said.

"Benny's life is different now," Laura said. Her voice had calmed. He hated when she pitied him.

"Things are the same as they always were," Jeff said. "I didn't raise him to drop everything and go join some fucking cult when he gets anxious."

"You're right, Jeff," Laura said. "You didn't raise him like that. How exactly did you raise him?" She watched him for a few seconds. She started to say something else, but instead turned and walked out of the diner.

Jeff finished his coffee, watching out the window as the fog edged closer.