AFTER THE FINALE by Anthony Varallo
The grandfather doesn’t want to take the grandchildren to see the fireworks, but they keep begging him, and he ends up giving in, the way he always does. When will he stop giving in? The grandchildren pile into the grandfather’s Jeep, which exudes the smell of damp tools. The grandchildren neglect seatbelts. They flip the tops of the ashtrays and roll the windows up and down. “Drive fast,” they say, “or we’ll miss everything.” They are ugly grandchildren. The grandfather doesn’t keep a picture.
The drive takes longer than it should. When they arrive at the stadium parking lot, the fireworks are already ending. A furious sky of red and pink blooms across the windshield.
“It’s the finale,” the grandfather tells them.
“It’s not the finale,” one grandchild says, the one who has a habit of rolling his nose pickings into little pills. He kicks the grandfather’s seat.
“Yeah, it’s not,” the other grandchild says, the one whose sneakers can mutate into roller skates.
The grandfather rolls his window down. This is the stadium he used to come to as a kid, with his dad, his father sometimes letting him drink a beer on the sly. The air is thick with sulfur. Between explosions, the grandfather can hear the closing measures of the 1812 Overture. People clap and whistle. The show ends.
“We missed it,” Pills sighs.
“The Fourth of July,” Sneakers says. His voice verges on tears.
The grandfather turns to face them. “Least we saw a little,” he says, resenting the false cheer in his voice. Why is he always wishing to act cheery? That evening, he’d let the grandchildren eat raspberry sherbet straight out of the carton.
“You didn’t drive fast enough,” Pills says.
“You’re a slowpoke,” Sneakers explains.
Sometimes, after the ballgame, his father would take him to a bar near the stadium. The Extra Inning. His father would let him sit on a barstool and order him as many Roy Rogers as he wanted while his father played pool under the smoky pool lamp, whose glass shade showed a salmon leaping from a waterfall. He’d drink Roy Roger after sickly-sweet Roy Roger, which the bartender, Squinny, had fitted out with an extra maraschino cherry, just for him. Maraschino cherries were the best part about a Roy Roger.
“We didn’t even see the whole finale,” Pills says, but the grandfather doesn’t say anything. Instead he pulls the Jeep out of the stadium parking lot, where traffic is already bumper-to-bumper. They ride behind a pick up truck with five teens juddering in the back. An SUV tails him, honks when the grandfather allows a station wagon to pull ahead.
“We’ll never get home,” Pills sighs.
“There is no home for us anymore,” Sneakers says in a dramatic British accent, which cracks the two of them up. “We shan’t be going home at all,” they laugh. “We simply shan’t.”
One night, at The Extra Inning, a woman had sat next to the grandfather, a friend, his father explained. Darla. She’d sat with the two of them while his father waited for his turn at pool. She wore a green dress and stirred her drink with a tiny plastic stick. She asked the grandfather questions about school, about girls he liked. Tiger, she kept calling him. She’d had to lean into him to hear his embarrassed answers, affording a sudden glimpse of her bra, just visible beneath the neckline of her dress. He’d felt her breath against his cheek. Tiger. From time to time his father would stop by, give him a little punch on the shoulder. “She sweet talkin’ you?” his father would say, then line up his next shot. Whenever his father lined up a shot, he always measured the angle with the tip of his cue. He’d crouch down, measuring, then chalk the cue like it was something he was trying to ignite.
Now, the grandfather catches a glimpse of the stadium in his rear view mirror, a fantastic, flipped chandelier. The grandchildren press their faces to the windows. “Ah see mahself,” Sneakers says. Pills laughs. “Me, too.” They kiss the glass, giggle. The grandfather thinks about telling them to stop, but doesn’t. This is his second night in a row looking after the grandchildren while their mother goes on a date with a man she met at a bowling alley. Since his daughter’s divorce, the grandfather has been watching the grandkids when she can’t find a sitter, or won’t pay for one. “Do you know how much they get nowadays?” she’d asked him, spooning macaroni and cheese onto the grandchildren’s plates. He’d guessed low, to please her. “Jesus, Dad,” she’d sighed, “who’d do anything for that?”
The night Darla sat next to him, the grandfather watched his father lose to a local, a man everyone called Farmer. Farmer wore the thickest glasses the grandfather had ever seen, which caught the light from the pool lamp, and slid down his nose whenever he’d completed his shot. He never spoke, never watched his opponent’s shot, a technique that maddened his father, and made him take foolish shots, unlikely combinations, commit rookie errors. Afterwards, he’d sat next to Darla and put his elbows to the bar, while Squinny drew him a Pabst Blue Ribbon. Darla said things the grandfather couldn’t hear. She inscribed tiny circles on his father’s back. The grandfather felt his face grow warm. “Hey,” his father said, after a few beers, “you wanna see Darla do a little trick?”
“I’m not doing the trick, Frank,” Darla said.
“The little one,” his father said. “Do the little trick.”
“Not the little trick.”
“Aw, the kid will love it,” his father said. “Tell her you’ll love it.”
“I’ll love it,” the grandfather said, dutifully. Darla looked at him like someone she felt sorry for, and then pointed to his Roy Roger. “I’ll need a cherry.”
“Give her a cherry,” his father said. The grandfather complied.
“I haven’t done this in a while,” Darla said, sticking the cherry in her mouth, “so it might not come out right.” She held up a finger, as if to say wait, and chewed the cherry for what seemed too long a time.
“You’ll love this,” his father said.
Darla moved her tongue inside her cheeks, covered her mouth with one hand, and then extended her tongue, where the cherry stem lay tied into a knot. “Ta-da,” she said.
“Wow,” the grandfather said. The stem was tightly tied.
His father gave him a look he would not forget, a look around which all of these other memories – Darla, Squinny, Farmer, the Roy Rogers, the pool lamp – gloomily lingered. “Isn’t that something?” his father said.
* * *
By the time they arrive home, the grandchildren have fallen asleep. The grandfather must carry Sneakers, while Pills wakes up enough to climb upstairs and crawl into bed without changing out of his clothes. They sleep in the guest bedroom, two to a bed, where a sewing dummy presides. The grandfather has been meaning to get rid of the dummy since his wife died, but has never gotten around to it. He knows he never will, the way he’s starting to know things like that now. The dummy’s head still wears the eyelashes his daughter inked when she was a kid. Downstairs, he hears her return. Keys tossed onto the kitchen table. A beer unburdened of its cap.
“Did you get their shoes?” the daughter asks, when the grandfather enters the kitchen.
He tells her he did. “But I wasn’t sure about the socks.”
“Socks are nothing,” she says. “Don’t worry about socks.” They sit at the table and drink beer, although the grandfather knows he shouldn’t drink so late at night. He’s going to regret it, he can tell, as he is not asking his daughter about her date, but what should he ask?
“All my life, I’ve been happiest in a kitchen,” she says, after a while. “Even when I was little. Sometimes I used to sneak downstairs when you and Mom were sleeping, just to sit in the kitchen. I wouldn’t even fix a snack. I was never hungry. I’d just sit at the table for a few minutes and really get into the idea of being in the kitchen, you know?” She takes a sip of beer. “Then I’d feel dumb and sneak back upstairs.”
“Hmm,” the grandfather says, not wanting to contradict his daughter’s version of herself, which, in most of her recollections, seems to be of a solitary girl, horribly alone and isolated, far removed from the one he remembers hosting sleepovers and starring in school musicals. “We never knew.”
“I always hoped you’d find me sitting there,” she says. “Like you’d come in and be amazed or angry or confused or whatever you’d be.”
“Not angry,” the grandfather says, sensing this is the wrong tack. Outside, the grandfather can hear a few fireworks, probably neighbors shooting bottle rockets. He wonders if he should wake the grandkids.
“One time I sat here for a really long time. It was probably only twenty minutes or something, but it felt like hours. I kept thinking you were about to come in. Like it was going to happen any minute, but it didn’t. Nothing happened. I sat in the kitchen and listened to the clock tick. After a while, I turned off the lights and went upstairs.”
Don’t say sorry, the grandfather thinks. Outside, another firework, this one louder, closer.
“But, know what? Before I went to bed I stopped in front of your door. Remember the way you and Mom always kept the door propped open with that funny little doorstop, that little poodle thing?”
“Beagle.”
“Right – the beagle! Anyway, I remember looking into your room, but not really wanting to look into it, either. I remember reaching down and moving the beagle. Couldn’t believe how heavy it was.”
“How heavy it was,” the grandfather says.
“And the door just slammed – wham! I had no idea it would slam,” she says, takes a long sip of beer. “I ran to my room as fast as I could.”
“So that was you?” the grandfather says, chancing a joke, but his daughter looks at him in a way that lets him know he’s disappointed her. Again. When will he stop disappointing his daughter? They drink another beer, make small talk for a while, until his daughter announces she’s going to bed.
“Good night,” the grandfather says.
“Good night.”
The grandfather decides he should rinse their empty bottles, but finds himself unable to leave the kitchen table. Like his daughter. He can understand why she snuck downstairs as a kid, why she hoped someone would discover her. And, because he understands, he knows that he will never tell her that her memory of the slammed door is wrong. For he hadn’t been asleep when she pulled the beagle away; he’d been looking right at her. He’d seen her. And he’d always thought she’d seen him, too, as the door closed not with a slam, but with a slow sigh, the doorway a narrowing aperture that diminished and diminished until he could no longer see her and she could no longer see him.
Anthony Varallo is the author of Out Loud (University of Pittsburgh Press) and This Day in History (University of Iowa Press). His stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Epoch, and Harvard Review.