Missing Links by Rick Reilly

Author:Rick Reilly [Reilly, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79389-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

With me out of the club and only four days left until The Bet was over, I got itchy. I hated not seeing Madeline during the days. I missed rummaging around the course, boinking in interesting places, having her sidle up to me and say, “Pssst, caddie. Want to get it up and down?”

I had no car, no caddie job, no money and I couldn’t concentrate on these idiotic reviews.

The inside story of the Royal Family as only the sister-in-law of the cousin of the Royal Hairstylist can tell it!

“I know,” Madeline told me. “But we’re still together.”

But that night, waiting outside the club for Madeline to drive out and pick me up, I saw something that changed my mind—my father.

He didn’t see me. He was very enraptured with the way he was pulling out of the Mayflower in his biggest, goldest Cadillac with whitest leather yet. It had personalized license plates: BLUTEES.

For some reason, it fried me, my father inside those gates where I wanted to be, where I deserved to be, where Madeline was, and me outside, waiting like a gardener for his ride.

That whole night I thought about him. I thought about how he had tried to explain Travis. How he had said it was an emergency situation, that Travis would’ve never gone to the psychiatric hospital on his own. That the doctors were considering forcibly taking him themselves. That if he hadn’t tried to do something, he would’ve surely tried to kill himself. The doctors all said he would try soon enough, he’d said. He actually called it a “blessing, when you really examine the situation.”

I held my tongue, but just barely.

Travis changed us all. My mother just sank into a kind of little ball. She stopped going to movies with her friends and stopped working at the hospice. She hardly spoke to my father when he called. She hardly spoke to anybody. Eventually, she fell in love with her therapist and they moved almost as far away as they could from that day, that car, that moment, to nearly the furthest point away from Boston, and started over.

I never spoke to my father after that day, but people told me that he was a little humbled. He no longer tried to coach them on where to park or the proper way to tie a Windsor or assault them with all the little sayings he had on life that were taped to every edge of his bathroom mirror.

And it occurred to me that he and I were the only two that were alone now. Travis was wherever muddy little boys go, someplace with no soap, I hoped. My mother was happy and gone. It was only he and I now, skeletons of that old life. He’d gotten what I guess he deserved. Loneliness. If a man lectures in his home alone, does he make a sound? Me, I’d gotten loneliness, too. Is that what I deserved?

Madeline was asleep when it hit me. How bad could it hurt? How much self-respect could I lose if I just asked him? I didn’t have to be cordial.

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