Baby Jay

Jay scampers inside, shutting the door behind him. If Dad’s drunk and Mom’s in a mood, the last thing he needs is to get caught in the crossfire.
Jay’s toes curl into his carpet as Mom walks through the door.
Her heels click. Once. Twice.
At the same time, it sounds like Dad’s beer decides to come back up. He makes a noise that barely sounds human. When its done, he punctuates the episode by exclaiming, “Goddamn.”
Jay envisions the tendons in Mom’s neck bulging like steel rods. Her voice drops to a growl. “Fuck.”
Jay knows better than to manage what’s about to ensue. Wedging into their arguments never adds anything but a third voice.
“Dude, what’s going on? Is that Mom?” Michael whispers.
Jay shushes him.
Mom’s footsteps bang like bullets across the living room floor.
The arguments always start someplace logical, in this case Mom not wanting to come home, yet again, to her drunk, barfing husband. She says they’ve had this “talk” a thousand times. Multiple times this week, even. Didn’t she say he needed to get his act together? Didn’t she shed tears for him? Maybe she hallucinated the whole thing.
Dad says he only meant to have one drink and got a little carried away. Just needs to empty the tank and he’ll be back to normal, right as rain, glowing like sunshine.
Mom doesn’t bite. He always says he’s on the verge of being okay but never is. He’s going to drink more, or get stoned, or do something else that’s stupid.
Here, the veneer of logic dissolves. Dad is a liar and a poor father, and he can’t be trusted with anything, she says.
Dad strikes back with something off topic: remember that time she got lost driving in Riverhead and blamed it on him, because she can never see what’s wrong with herself and projects her problems onto other people? So, actually, she’s the liar, and even if she’s not, she’s a stone cold bitch.
To which Mom reminds him that she’d been following his directions, and he’d lost track of where they were despite taking a simple route. Furthermore, she used to be sympathetic until he kept choosing to do the wrong things. Which is really the big problem with him, deep down. He can choose to be better, but he doesn’t. That’s what makes him such a pig.
Jay shuts his eyes and pictures walls rising from the ground, three-feet thick and made of steel.
“Wow, fuck. I gotta leave. This shit is what killed me,” Michael says.
Jay never mentioned keeping Michael here, but Michael’s insistence on leaving still stings. Michael’s been home twenty minutes and it’s already more than he can handle.
“I can’t take you back,” Jay says. “You’ll fall apart.”
“But I can’t be here, either, you get me?” Michael laughs, a weasel-y sound. “I’ll be itching for smack again if I have to deal with this shit. Won’t be good.”
“I’m here every day, and I don’t need to get high to deal with it.”
“Bro, how are you even alive right now?”