Inside looking out: Grudge match

Billy plopped himself down on a bar stool. He started a conversation with a guy named Jason who was sitting next to him. Two beers later, their talk got personal.

“So you tell me you’re not speaking to your mother?” Billy asked.

“Nope. I’m done with her,” Jason said. “She’s never been there for me and I’m not gonna be there for her.”

“Must be a really good reason.”

“Oh, there’s more than one. I’ve lost count through the years. Not wasting any more of my time with her.”

“I understand how you feel,” said Billy. “My father was never there for me. He was too miserable. His miserable marriage to my mother ended when she died and then his miserable life got worse working miserable jobs. Blah. Blah. Blah. Not once was he happy for what I did. When I graduated college and I got a great job, he said, ‘Good for you. Now I can finally retire and you can pay my bills.’

“You know,” Billy continued. “He handed me $20 on my birthday when I was 15 and he gave me $20 for each of my next 25 birthdays. He didn’t fool me. He had money for cigarettes and a case of beer every week.”

“My mother always treated me like a child,” said Jason. “When I’d go there, she gave me the same chores to do when I was a kid. Clean the windows. Cut the lawn. Change the water in her fish tank. Then she’d forget to feed the fish and she’d called me a week later to come over and scoop out the dead ones. When I got there, she wanted to know what took me so long. I lived an hour away for crying out loud.”

“So dead fish was the reason you don’t want to see her again?”

“Like I said, there’s plenty more, but the really big one was she told me I wasn’t supposed to be born.”

“What?”

“I was a mistake baby. My two sisters were 10 and five years older than me and my parents had decided that two were enough. My father worked three jobs after I was born just to pay the bills, and after he got sick and died, my mother had to get welfare and food stamps. I couldn’t help but feel she was blaming me for Dad dying. She’d invite me for dinner, but how could I eat anything, thinking she never wanted me to be alive?”

“I get it. My father never came to my baseball games,” said Billy. “He never took me anywhere. He was a stranger to me. I half-expected him to say, ‘Who are YOU?’ whenever he walked past me in the hallway. The last time I went for a visit, he didn’t lift his head to see that I was there. The silence between us was killing me. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“And so you left?” Jason asked.

“Yup, but before I closed the door, I looked back at him still sitting at the kitchen table with his head down. I knew he was thinking I should feel sorry for him. No freakin’ way. He meant nothing to me. I got up and said, ‘I was never your son and you were never my father. Let’s leave it at that.’ ”

“Funny, that’s how I kind of ended it, too,” Jason said. “Before I walked out of my mother’s house for the last time, I told her, ‘You’re only my mother by birthright, you’re not my mom.’ ”

“What did she say to that?”

“She cried. To be honest, I was kind of good with it.”

“It is what is,” Billy said.

“So be it,” Jason said.

Billy took another sip of his beer. “If you ever decide you want to make peace with your mother, you have the next 80 years to do it.”

“Eighty years? She’s 70,” Jason laughed. “Don’t think either one of us will be around when she turns 150, and by the way, making peace is a two-way street.”

“Exactly,” said Billy. “You think you’ll go to her funeral when she dies?”

“I suppose I’ll have to show my face,” said Jason. “Are you gonna go to your father’s?”

“He died last year the day before my birthday,” said Billy. “The neighbor found him slumped over at the kitchen table.”

“Did you go to his funeral?”

“I went to show my face. Not many came. I wasn’t surprised.”

“And you hadn’t spoken to him since the day you left?”

“Nope, but while he was lying there in the casket, I tried so hard to feel something for him, anything at all. It was like I was at a funeral for someone I didn’t know.”

“I guess you closed that book for good.”

“After I left the cemetery that day, I stopped at his house to figure out what needed to be done to get the place ready to sell. There was an envelope left on the kitchen table right by where he always sat. I opened it. There was a note inside that said, ‘Happy birthday, son, Love, Dad.’ Behind the note was a 20-dollar bill.”

“Huh,” said Jason, lifting his bottle to his mouth.

“Funny isn’t it,” said Billy. “Now I’m gonna miss his damn 20 bucks.”

A moment of silence paused their conversation while Billy drank some beer and wiped the corner of his eye.

Billy asked the bartender for his check. He looked over at Jason. “Hey, can I give you some advice?”

“You already did,” said Jason as he threw a 20-dollar bill on the bar to pay for their beers. “I’m going to call my mother tomorrow and ask if I can come over and clean her windows.”

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.