Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood Page A

cleaned up again, got my sorry backside over to AA for a couple of months. I was waiting to get my license back from the friggin’ State of Maine Department of Motor Vehicles. I’d even wangled my old job back.” He glanced at me. “I’m an electrician by trade.” He cupped the cigarette in his pink-raw palm and looked at it. “And I really wanted to see my daughter. She had a brand-new baby and said she’d see me. I hadn’t set eyes on her in years.”
    “How many?”
    “Eight, nine. Seven, I don’t know. I was a shitcan of a father. But I don’t know, the new baby softened her up some, I guess. Her candy-ass husband said forget it, but she’s a good kid, that Elaine, she figured to give me one last shot no matter what he said.” He sucked on the last of the cigarette and threw it to the ground where it landed with a hiss. “I never paid a cent in child support. I treated her mother like dirt.” He looked at me. “That’s who I am, and still, she said she’d see me, give me one more chance. She’s a good kid, that Elaine. I’m one lucky goddamn bastard.”
    He didn’t look lucky, though; he did not resemble a lucky man.
    “The thing is,” he said, lighting up again, “and I’m just telling you this so you know I didn’t leave you there and go on my goddamn merry way, I never got to Elaine’s that night. I mean, I left the goddamn scene , so to speak, because I didn’t want to fuck up —screw up, sorry—I didn’t want to screw up the big reunion. The first time in ten, twelve years she says she’ll see me,but I don’t want to get there all shook up and she says what’s wrong and I say nothing and she says I know there’s something wrong and I say well I just left some poor kid dying on the side of the road in the pouring rain. So I didn’t go. Too ashamed.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Instead I drove back home and drank myself blind for a coupla months. Then I checked myself in for the old get-better, same goddamn twenty-eight days. Went for the VA counseling, the AA , the whole goddamn alphabet, except I didn’t get my job back this time. I’m down at Barber Foods, which is rock goddamn bottom on the ladder of gainful employment in this town, let me tell you, me and a buncha Cambodians deboning chickens, nobody to talk to and nothing to look at but a conveyor belt splattered with chicken guts.” He took a drag and exhaled loudly. “And I got to thinking how goddamn great it might be if somebody I saved said thank you.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    He was waiting.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “You’re welcome.”
    I looked him over, his decaying boots, his secondhand coat too warm for the day. “Lucky you had a cell phone,” I said.
    “I stole it off a job,” he admitted. “It was sitting there in this lady’s open purse, right out there on the kitchen counter. I was running wire in this gigantic goddamn kitchen, all slate this and copper that and a monster Jenn-Air and the whole jeezly shebang, and me with no phone at the time because the last time they cut me off it cost upwards of three hundred bucks to get the phone put back in, and I really wanted to call my daughter because of the new baby, which I found out about through her aunt who also never talks to me but ran into me in a 7-Eleven and spilled the beans. I figured there’s no time like the present, so I took the phone out of the lady’s purse and called, then stuck around for the rest of the day while she asked this one and thatone where was her phone, did she leave it at Nancy’s, maybe it was in the car, did Jeff forget to lock the car again. When I finished the wiring I waved good-bye and struck out for Dixfield, phone in the glove box, and it even rings once or twice but of course I don’t answer it, knowing it’s them calling themselves, thinking to trap a bonehead like me with their superior wits and ingenuity, but I figure I’ll use it just for the meanwhile, Elaine’s kind of squirrelly about saying yes,