The Unbroken Circle

Chapter 6

Chapter 6Rocco arrived half an hour after I finished my one way conversation with him on the phone.

He sounded depressed. Maybe it was about me leaving Milton that had him in a funk. I knew I would have a hard time saying goodbye to him.

Being late for a planned family dinner was like condemning me to the proverbial doghouse for a week. Asking Rocco to join us made things worse. I felt my parents’ eyes on us when we entered the dining room together.

Rocco arrived in jean shorts that had gone out of style in the eighties, and rosy sunglasses, even though he was indoors and the sun had dipped below the distant Adirondack Mountains an hour earlier.

He ambled into the room at my side, barefoot, with a baseball cap turned backward over his head of ink-black curls. Our hands swept across each other’s sweaty palms. I noticed the black buttons on his grey polo stretched tightly against his hulking chest. Tufts of dark, bushy hair poked out from his V-neck collar.

I felt the awkward stares from my parents at either end of the table. I pulled out Rocco’s chair out of good-nature chivalry. My father cleared his throat and turned his gaze to Mom who looked at me, then back at Dad, for a reaction.

“If I had known that we were going to have company, I would have grilled more steaks,” my mother said.

I unfolded the swan-shaped napkin in front of me and laid it out on my lap, turning to Rocco and flashing him a toothy grin. I winked at him.

He nodded, following my gestures with a small smile and quick nod.

“You and Dad aren’t the only ones I’m leaving behind for college,” I said, staring up at my mother who was judging me with her stern stare.

I noticed my parents staring at Rocco curiously, as my mother scooped buttery, red-skinned potatoes onto each of our plates.

My parents had not always approved of my friendship with Rocco, but with Rocco’s life-changing incident with the police they had been more understanding of our friendship. I had faith he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, contrary to the small college town rumor mill.

We were friends and nothing more, I told my mother, who inquired about our too close bond. Although the intimate kiss Rocco and I shared together had aroused suspicion, even with me, it might be something much bigger than friendship.

It was my business, I told Rocco, nobody else’s, not even my parents. Especially them!

Rocco leaned into me. “Should I take my hat off?”

“You don’t have to,” I answered.

“As a matter of fact—” my mother started to say, glancing our way.

I glared at her as if to say, Leave him alone.

Then, as if the night couldn’t take another embarrassing detour, I caught my father out the corner of my eye burying his face into his “Father of the Year” mug, inhaling deeply, and moaning. At first, I thought he was falling asleep at the table. Grumbling the way he did when he was starting to drift off. No. He was just being a big weirdo.

Coffee sniffer!

Like an old woman and her cache of crazy cats, my father was a stuck-up coffee sniffer. He loved the skunk-like smells of the strong-brewed ground beans.

I turned to my mother for support, to tell her to tell Dad to stop being a weirdo in front of company. But it was futile. She shot Rocco a hard stare for his poor manners.

Rolling my eyes, I tossed her an equally determined stare.

Then an idea shifted the dinner table affair into a bad version of a Shakespearian play. I deliberately knocked over my water glass with the edge of my dinner plate. A river of water pooled around the green bean casserole and wicker basket of warm whole wheat biscuits. The liquid was absorbed into the blue-and-white checkered tablecloth.

My father lifted his face from the steaming cup of coffee, looking around the room as if I had interrupted his private meditations, and my mother dropped the soup ladle into the lobster bisque bowl, grunting and turning up her nose like she did when reprimanding one of her students.

My mother disassembled her swan-like napkin and dabbed at the blob-shaped circle of water growing outward from the center of the table, muttering scholarly phrases from her Greek mythology class about bearing gifts, reaping good fortunes, and developing unexpected mood swings.

Then, my father did something none of us saw coming. “You remind me of my younger years,” he said to Rocco, reaching across the dish of buttery red-skinned potatoes and setting his hand firmly on Rocco’s left arm. Gently massaging the hard muscles.

I cringed for Rocco who sat calmly, lapping water from my mother’s best china as if he were a llama in a petting zoo.

“Dad?” I said. “Do you mind?”

“How do you get your arms so…big?”

I looked to Mom, who looked similarly uncomfortable and annoyed as I was.

“Mickey,” my mother yelled across the table, her fork hovering mid-stance, as a malicious grin lifted the corners of her puckered mouth.

My dad shrugged. “I’m just saying, he reminds me of my youth.”

“You never looked like that,” my mother said, daintily eating a forkful of potatoes and swallowing them down with her favorite glass of Riesling.

“I had muscles back in the day,” my father announced, slapping the loose flesh between both of his wimpy arms.

“Back in the day you were reed-thin like a toothpick,” she said.

“I was on the high school wrestling team,” Dad retorted.

“For a week, if I remember,” Mom shot back. “It was short lived when your opponent, Jeff Sabers, body slammed you and you were wheeled out on a gurney before the end of the first round. I remember it like yesterday, dear.”

Dad looked away from Mom and glared down at his dinner plate, reaching for his sharp knife and slicing into his bloody rare T-bone with vengeance.

Why do parents have to be so embarrassing? I wondered, sitting up in my chair and turning to Rocco, grinning. “Would you like a warm bun?” I asked, handing him the basket of a dozen golden brown biscuits.