JEREMY BROYLES

SOMEHOW, I’M THE ASSHOLE         

The conversation that ended things, though that end was slow to arrive, started with her saying “I’ve decided we need to have a child together” and concluded with her calling me an asshole. I hadn’t meant to hurt her, but I couldn’t lie to her either. “You’d be such a good father though,” she’d said to me. I told her even if I believed that, it didn’t matter. “We’ll name him Oliver, and you can call him Ollie,” she’d said. In her version of the story of the three of us, she knew everything about our yet-to-be child, including his sex at birth. She’d obviously been telling herself this story for some time now, but this was my first time being brought into the narrative. What was I supposed to do? I told her how sorry I was I couldn’t be what she wanted me to be. I told her it was all right if she needed to go because she was still young enough to find someone who could give her what she wanted. I told her the truth and that I loved her, and, somehow, I’m the asshole.

#          #          #

It’s one of those deep red Midwest states. It doesn’t matter which; I’m not one to point fingers. A group of devout Christians, such as they are, is protesting outside a grocery store—I assume because the nearest family-planning health clinic is hundreds of miles away and gas isn’t cheap, after all. A man, probably not terribly different from me, leads them in sing-songy chants while flourishing his homemade sign reading “Roe is wrong, God is right.” I refrain from pointing out his comma splice. He’s in his thirties, like me. White, like me. Socially economically comfortable, like me. But he’s angry. I can see the strain in the cords of his neck muscles as he shouts. The occasional strand of saliva spins free of his wide mouth lined with straight, white teeth.

I’m arrogant enough to believe I know his entire story, so I tell it to myself. He’s a right-wing, trickle-down, conservative cliché. He wants all pregnancies, regardless of how they came to be, to turn into children. But that doesn’t make him pro-life; it makes him only pro-birth. Because he also wants all those dangerous brown people in the Middle East neatly removed by coordinated drone strikes or messily removed by American-made ICBMs. He is not particular. After all, let God sort them out. And he wants all those freeloading brown people stateside shipped back to where they belong right after they finish building those walls meant to keep them out for good. And he wants all businesses, public and private, to prevent women from accessing birth control. And he wants to know, once and for all, who is and is not a woman in the first place so that we all use the correct public restroom just like God intended.

He and his zealous little flock, forgetting they’re at a Hy-Vee and not Planned Parenthood, berate every one of us like we were each a hunched fifteen-year-old girl here, not to find a plant-based ranch dressing for our homemade salad, but instead to make an impossible decision that will become as much a part of her as a zygote growing in a womb. I wonder about her right now—faceless but no doubt afraid—and the sex education classes she didn’t get and all the contraceptive options she didn’t have. I wonder if any of the protestors would help her pay for diapers or formula or daycare or doctor’s visits if they thought it would change her mind. I wonder about the boy who impregnated her and if these protestors are interested in calling him a murderer too. I wonder how this grown man, probably not terribly different from me, can feel righteous about doing the Lord’s good work.

I wonder, so I ask them.

And the devout Christians, such as they are, fix their thousand-yard salvation stares on me. And together, as one, they spit and snarl and scream like God’s little lambs. I’m a baby-killer and I’m woefully outnumbered, and, somehow, I’m the asshole.

#          #          #

I am living back home. Even my younger brother has taken a leave of absence from work to stay in an RV in the front yard. Our mother is fifty-six years old, and she is dying of an especially rare, cruel kind of cancer. In fact, she will be dead in two weeks. Her ruined body, shriveled and starved, will be carted out on a stretcher by two men despite the fact that one of them could have stuffed her in a pillowcase and slung her over his shoulder. That, however, will be then. Today’s routine consists of sneaking glances into my mother’s bedroom to verify the rise and fall of her breathing, though only one side of her chest moves anymore, while coordinating with a hospice nurse the ungodly doses of pain medication that would kill anyone else. While placing a potpourri of candy-colored pills into a crammed day-of-the-week drug sorter, I receive a call from him—the estranged. It has been nearly fifteen years since he left our family for, amongst other things, meth and gambling addictions. He and I have barely spoken in the interim, and I’m confident the last two words I said to him were “fuck” and “you.” But here he is now telling me he’ll be stopping by tomorrow because he has some things he needs to say to my mother. He just wanted to let me know. This phone call, then, is a courtesy.

I return that courtesy in kind.

I tell him that for the last three-and-a-half years, I have looked on in horror as my mother grew sicker and sicker while I could do nothing to help. All the precious intelligence I purport to possess has, in the face of malignant metastatic mesothelioma, counted for precisely dick. I have watched both the disease and the poisonous treatments—offered in desperation to slow what cannot be stopped, could never be stopped—take piece after piece of my mother. Her hair is gone. Her gums have receded. She lost her appetite and then her ability to eat altogether. Ice chips now make her vomit. She can’t walk or attend to her bathroom needs. Luckily, those needs are rare what with her no longer eating. She loses her memories too. I remember that early morning I rushed into her room to try and calm her back into bed while she screamed over and over “Let me go!” and slashed at my neck and chest with overgrown fingernails until candy stripes of blood trickled down my skin to the elastic waistband of my boxers. But she can no longer speak, so that problem won’t repeat. I have watched it all, I tell him, because I have been here. For the last fifteen years—the depression years and the recovery years and the forgiveness years and the cautiously optimistic years and, yes, the cancer years too—I have been here because she is all that matters.

And you, I tell him, you do not.

You had those same fifteen years to say what needed to be said, to ask forgiveness or explain your incomprehensible choices and their catastrophic consequences. Fifteen years, and you failed. You’re not coming here for her. You’re coming here for you. Your opportunity for redemption shrinks with each rogue cell in her body that replicates and divides. What panic must be stirred in you to call me like this. No wonder your voice sounded more pitched than I remember. Rehearsing your little speech didn’t make it any easier once I answered the phone, did it? I will admit this small suffering of yours makes me smile. But while I have your attention, allow me to explain something. You will not see my mother. You will not talk to her. You will not hold her disappearing hand and await her squeeze of recognition in response to your touch. She is not going to die alone, but it will not be you at her side.

And the digital silence between us grows long and cold as his chemically compromised brain formulates what response it can. And this man, faithless and flawed, the one who abandoned every promise he made, he informs me that, somehow, I’m the asshole.

And maybe he’s right. Maybe they all are. Who am I to disagree? Isn’t that just what an asshole would do? But in three weeks I will step into an auditorium I’ve never visited before. And after a man I’ve never met before hands me a box that, impossibly, holds all that remains of my mother, I will stand at the front of that gaping room crowded with the people she loved and left behind. For forty-five minutes, I will try to make them understand what I have known all along—she was the best of us. And if I am, in fact and practice, an asshole, then I am the very asshole she raised me to be. I can live with that just fine.

__________

JEREMY BROYLES IS AN ARIZONA NATIVE, ORIGINALLY FROM THE COTTONWOOD-JEROME-SEDONA HIGH DESERT. HE EARNED HIS B.A. FROM DOANE COLLEGE, NOW UNIVERSITY, IN 2001, HIS M.A. FROM NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY IN 2008, AND HIS MFA IN FICTION FROM WICHITA STATE UNIVERSITY IN 2011. HIS STORIES HAVE APPEARED IN THE MACGUFFIN, SANTA CLARA REVIEW, ROCK AND A HARD PLACE MAGAZINE, PEMBROKE MAGAZINE, RED ROCK REVIEW, PIGEON REVIEW, SUBURBIA JOURNAL, AND RECKON REVIEW AMONGST MANY OTHERS. HIS NOVEL FLAT WATER WILL BE PUBLISHED IN 2023 BY MAIN STREET RAG PRESS. HE IS AN AGING RIDER OF BICYCLES, A TALENTLESS SURFER OF WAVES, AND A HAPPILY MEDIOCRE PLAYER OF GUITARS.