Seth Baumgartner's Love Manifesto (21 page)

It's the best shot of my life and possibly the farthest anyone has ever hit with a putter. My ball takes two bounces on the concrete walkway, one bounce on the blacktop, and disappears into the brush alongside the driveway.

A collective gasp rises from the crowd, and then a whole bunch of things happen at once. A ruckus breaks out among the spectators, and a handful of board members rush down the steps of the grandstand. My father starts toward me, but my mother calls him over before he has a chance to kill me. Anders and his father start jumping around, high-fiving each other and chest bumping like they've just won the Super Bowl. Veronica runs across the green and throws her arms around Anders's neck, and Mrs. Terry hops in glee. One of the board members screams something at my father about paying for the damages and about how I made a mockery of the tournament. Another starts crossing out my name on the oversized check.

My mother's words echo in my head: “It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's whether at the end of the day people remember who you are.” Somehow, I doubt this is what she was getting at, but I'm pretty sure everyone here will remember me.

“Everything all right, Baumgartner?” It's Mr. Motta. After what I've just done, he's the only one who came to talk to me.

“Actually, it can't get much worse.”

He places a hand on my shoulder. “You know you're going to get a ration of shit over this, don'tcha?”

“I suppose so.”

“And you know I have to fire you, right?”

“Pretty much figured that. Who're you going to get to replace me?”

“Not many youngsters can fold a shirt like you, Seth,
but I think that boy will do fine.” Mr. Motta points to the grandstand, where Dimitri, wearing a green sleeveless sweater and knickers, argyle socks pulled to his knees, and a matching argyle scally cap, is receiving the ten-thousand-dollar check from the board. He looks like something straight off an old-fashioned golf trophy. “What taste in clothing that boy's got. I'll start him back up tomorrow. You can be his first sale.” Mr. Motta points at my putter. The shaft is bent a few inches above the club head. “I'll still honor your employee discount.”

I hold it up. “Is this a red or an orange?”

“Neither,” he says. “The Odyssey Two-Ball is an indigo.”

“What happened?” I point to Anders and his father, who are arguing with Mr. Haversham. They are holding several scorecards between them and bickering over the numbers. “Don't the Terrys win?”

“Nope. Dimitri and his father were the bee's knees today. Came in at two under par. Amazing. You'd have been even with them for the three days cumulative if you had tapped in. Would've gone to a tiebreaker, but this stunt of yours ended things early.” Mr. Motta squints at the darkening clouds. “Good thing, too,” he says. “Looks like it's about to piss down.”

Mr. Motta and Dimitri are going to get along just fine without me.

I poke my toe at the divot I made in the green. The edges are clean, smooth, like someone used an ice-cream scooper instead of a golf club. I look over at my parents
arguing. A few of the board members are speaking with them. One of them is gesturing toward me.

“You ain't kidding,” I say to Mr. Motta. “It's gonna piss down awfully hard.”

Audrey appears out of nowhere. “Jeez, Seth, I like bucking the system and all, but this is ridiculous. Where'd that shot come from?”

“I was thinking about the worst chicken salad sandwich in the history of mankind.” I reach into my pocket and pull out the wax-paper bundle. It unfolds in my hand to reveal the sandwich I took away from Mr. Peepers. After sitting in my pocket for an entire round of golf, it looks more like a soggy mass of dirty socks.

I hold it up. “Down the hatch,” I say.

Audrey steps forward. “No, Seth, don't.”

But I step away and take my first big bite. The taste is excruciating, like touching your tongue to a nine-volt battery. I chew and swallow. I take another bite.

“Seth,” she says. “My sandwiches—”

“Your sandwiches suck,” I say. “They are the worst thing I've ever allowed near my mouth.”

“Then why…?”

I take another bite, and her words trail off. My shoulders hunch and I fight off the convulsions, the wretching, that want to consume me. “Because that's what you do when you care about someone.”

She smiles up at me.

“You mind if I spit this out?” I manage to say.

“Feel free, but you might want to get out of Dodge
first,” she says. “You're going to have to answer to some real hotheads soon.”

I make my way off the green and head up the hill to the parking lot. Audrey trails behind me.

The paper Luz had been holding lies folded in thirds on the ground next to the fence. Raindrops splatter on it, soaking in. I bend down and pick it up, stuff it into my pocket.

“What is that?” Audrey asks.

I step closer. “It's not important right now.” I take Audrey by the shoulders and kiss her. She recoils, probably from the taste of her chicken salad in my mouth, but she tilts her head back to meet me. It crosses my mind that the last time I kissed a girl I kicked her out of my house. The time before that, I got kicked in the nuts.

It's only a brief thought.

Audrey breaks away and looks me in the eyes. “Is this Seth kissing me or Mr. Love Manifesto?”

“You know about that, too?”

“What can I say? My brother's got a big mouth.”

“It's all Seth,” I answer. I kiss her again. “It's all me. So you have to tell me. What's the deal with the sandwiches?”

“It's a long story.” She glances over my shoulder. My father, mother, and several board members are walking toward us. “I don't think we have time.”

Good old instinct tells me to run, but something stronger tells me to stay. “I might be tied to the back of a cart and beaten to death with golf clubs in a few minutes. I have to know.”

Audrey looks up at me. “My grandmother tells me that the way to a guy's heart is through his stomach. She feeds my grandfather like there won't be food for sale at the supermarket tomorrow. I think you can tell more about a guy by making him bad food. It might have taken you a while, but you told me the truth, Seth. That's hot.”

“I'll eat more of it if you want.”

“Hell, no.” Audrey snatches what's left of the sandwich from my hand and hurls it into the woods. She grabs me around the waist, presses her body against mine, and kisses me. Hands down, it's the best kiss I've ever shared with anyone. We kiss as the rain falls down around us. We kiss until we both have to gasp for air through our noses. We kiss until my father spins me around by the shoulder and breaks us apart.

With an index finger in my face, he hollers, “You've got a hell of a lot of explaining to do, young man!”

“T
hey've already decided we're disqualified,” my father says. Before any of the board members could get a hand on me, he ushered me into his car. Now we're driving the streets of Albany. “One stroke away, and you had to blow it.”

I gaze out the window. The clouds have blackened and are pressing down on us. The sky feels thick, heavier than before. It hasn't started raining past a drizzle, not yet at least, but the streets are wet, slick. Even with the Beemer's skid control, my father takes the turn a little too fast. I grip the door handle tight.

“They're calling a special board meeting on Tuesday to decide if there will be any additional repercussions. There's no doubt you'll have to pay for the repairs to the green, but who knows what else they'll do? Seth, what were you thinking?”

I gaze out the window. I want to will myself out of this
car. I want to be anywhere but sitting next to my father right now. I see a parked Prius and I try to will myself into the backseat. I see a McDonald's with an indoor playground and I try to will myself into the tube slide. I see a dentist's office and I try to will myself into the chair with a rusty drill poised over my mouth.

“Look, Seth, this isn't going away by ignoring it, and this isn't one of those situations where you can take a mulligan.”

“I'll pay for the stupid green.”

“It's not the green I'm concerned about. A golf club is a place of tradition. They don't take unsportsmanlike conduct lightly. They hold their parties and their tournaments in high regard, and you just spat in their faces. You just told them to shove their scholarship up their asses.”

My father saw her, yet he's trying to turn this around, to make it about the tournament. “Who is she, Dad?”

“Who's who?”

“I know you saw her,” I say.

I look at my father. He shifts his eyes back to the road. His hands go to ten o'clock and two o'clock on the steering wheel. I wonder if he is willing himself to be anywhere other than with me right now.

I toss the folded-up piece of paper Luz dropped in the golf club parking lot into his lap. It's soggy and stuck together, but he manages to unfold it with one hand as he drives. He reads it.

“Jesus.” My father takes a hard left turn and fishtails into Washington Park. He barely slows at the yield sign.
“How did you find out?”

“What difference does it make?” I say. “Who is she, Dad?” It feels good to be on this side of an argument. The side that feels right. I let the silence lengthen. Every second that passes feels like a tiny victory.

Finally, my father lets out a breath I didn't realize he had been holding in. “Luz was my girlfriend before I met your mother. We dated when I was in college.”

“And what?” I say. “You never stopped? You've been running around behind Mom's back with some other woman for twenty years? How could you expect—”

“Don't be ridiculous,” my father says.

“I'm not. You take her out to lunch, bring her to the flower shop. Who knows what else?”

“She's the mother of my other son.”

He could have fired a cannonball at my stomach and it would have stunned me less.
The mother of his other son?

I let the words jump around in my head until they start to make sense. I think back to the evening I sat in Luz's apartment, to the photo on the wall of the young soldier—of his greenish hazel eyes. They looked nothing like Luz's wide brown eyes. They're my father's eyes. I flip down the sun visor and stare in the mirror. My eyes.

“His name is Miguel,” he says. “He's in the service, and he's going to be redeployed to—”

“Afghanistan,” I cut in. “I know.”

“Been doing your homework, huh?”

“The early worm catches the bird.”

“It looks like he's going back next week. A month
early.” He tosses the paper into my lap. It's a letter from the United States Army.

My father shakes his head. “When Luz had Miguel, I was still in undergrad. I was working two jobs to support the baby on top of a full course load. It was tough. No health insurance, no scholarship, nothing. Your grandparents didn't speak to me for two years.”

With the coming storm, there aren't many cars on the street. My father weaves through the winding roads of Washington Park. He hits the lights perfectly to get across State and Central.

“I wanted to marry Luz,” he says. “I used to joke about how I wanted to make an honest woman out of her, but she didn't want any part of that. She enjoys her freedom. She likes making all the choices, coming and going when she pleases. She had no interest in getting hitched.”

I think about that word:
hitched
. Like a horse to a fence post. Like a boat trailer to a car. Either way, it's something to stop you, something to slow you down.

“We played that game for a while,” my father goes on. “Me living in the dorms. Her in her apartment. She was doing telemarketing back then, working insane hours. She ended up with carpal tunnel syndrome in her wrist. I know it sounds stupid, carpal tunnel syndrome having anything to do with this, but she was terrified of the surgery, anesthesia and all that. She went to some Reiki healer and got better in a few weeks.

“She was amazed by that, and the next thing I knew she was packed up and headed west. She went to some
alternative healing school in Sedona. Arizona. She relocated, took the baby with her. Gone. Off to learn aura cleansing or something. It tore me up. I can't tell you how many times I tried to get out there, but something always got in the way: school, family, whatever. Then your mom came into the picture….”

I wait for him to go on.

“The minute I met her, everything changed. I fell hard for your mother. We shared the same goals. We wanted the same things.”

“When were you planning to tell me about this?” I say.

“That's the trouble. Your mother and Luz never got along. Always snipping at each other every chance they got. After a while, they just started ignoring each other's existence. Your mom was living here with me and Luz was on the other side of the country. I helped support Miguel. I paid child support….”

My father tries to beat the light on Clinton Avenue, but it turns too quickly. He stomps on the brake and we jerk to a stop. “We decided not to tell you when you were young. You know, so you wouldn't be confused. We wanted you to have a traditional family.”

“Dad, I'm seventeen now.”

“As you got older…I don't know. It just became harder and harder.” The light turns green and we continue on Henry Johnson Boulevard. “Maybe it just became easier and easier
not
to tell you.”

It might seem like the same thing, “harder and harder to tell someone something” compared to “easier and
easier not to tell someone something,” but to me it makes perfect sense. I think about Veronica and how I never told her anything that was going on in my head. I think about Audrey and the kiss we just shared. I did lots of things wrong when it came to Veronica; I promise myself not to make the same mistakes with Audrey.

My father fidgets with the buttons on his armrest. “It used to be so important, you know, for people to have a traditional family. One mom, one dad, all that. It wasn't so long ago, but back then it seemed important. Maybe it's because I was younger. Luz only got back to town a few months ago. She wanted to be on the East Coast so it would be more convenient for Miguel when he came home on leave.”

“And you just figured you'd pick up where you left off?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on,” I say. “I saw the two of you at Applebee's. I wasn't born last week, Dad. She was all over you. The way you reached over. The way you touched her.”

“I'm sorry you had to see that. Luz and I never got married, but I still have feelings for her. She still has feelings for me. It's hard to explain.”

I want to say “give it a shot,” but instead I try to let the silence work for me again.

“Your mother and I…with her working nights, me working days…” The light turns green. We continue on through the Arbor Hill neighborhood. “Sometimes it just feels good to have someone lavish attention on you for a
change. You know what I mean?”

“Marriage is about loyalty,” I say. “It's about love.”

I want everything to be black-and-white, no gray. The trouble with gray is that there are so many shades of it that it becomes impossible to draw a line. Black-and-white is simple. I want the world to have defined colors like Roy G. Biv, but there are infinite colors between red and orange, between orange and yellow. There are colors between those colors too. And colors that come before red and after violet that we can't even see.

My father slouches deeper in his seat. He's still talking. “…someone who likes you not because you're the breadwinner, not because you live under the same roof, not because you owe each other anything. I don't expect you to understand any of this.”

The strange thing is that I do understand. Veronica and I are in the same classes. We were study buddies. We live close to each other, and I have a car. It was a relationship that made sense. It was comfortable, convenient. But did I really love her?

My father sits back up. “Nothing is happening between Luz and me. I promise.”

I stare out the window and let the buildings slide by. Each one houses one or more families with their own shades of gray, their own definitions of love, no two exactly alike. The buildings blur past.

“I swear on my life,” he says.

I either have to believe the man sitting next to me or not. Mom will be able to verify everything anyway. No
doubt she'll want to sit me down and explain as soon as I get home.

A few more blocks pass before he goes on. “Miguel is twenty-two. When he was nineteen, he joined the service. He wasn't supposed to be redeployed until September.” He motions toward the soggy paper still lying in my lap.

I don't even know the guy and I feel bad for him. For Luz. For my dad.

My father slams the steering wheel with an open palm. “He should never have enlisted! He should have stayed in school like I told him.”

“Dad,” I say, “he's twenty-two.”

He nods. “We're going to have to move up the going-away party.”

I think about the flowers he ordered, the receipts I found in his briefcase. He changed the summer arrangement to blue and white irises with red tulips. Red tulips. White and blue irises. Red, white, and blue. Delivery date: To Be Determined. Because no one knew exactly when he'd be going back. All the details I used to convince myself my father was a complete and utter scumbag really start to make better sense now that I know his side of things.

I hadn't given any thought as to why we might be driving through this part of town, but when my dad steps down on the emergency brake—when that clicking sound grinds through the silence that has built up—it all becomes clear. We are sitting in the guest parking spot in front of Luz's building. The bank of mailboxes sits off to the side. Luz's Acura is parked to my right, F
OR
S
ALE
sign in the window,
moon roof open. Half of the red taillight is missing, the white lightbulb and silver reflector visible underneath.

Luz sits on her front steps, her face in her hands. Her shoulders heave. She's crying. A guy in his early twenties with short, dark hair stands over her. He looks up at us. My dad might not be cheating on my mom, but he's got a son. A son in the army—a son getting redeployed—with a life of his own and a mother who raised him without having a father around. Everything is different than I imagined, and I don't know what to make of it.

That's when I open the door and throw up. The worst chicken salad in the world is even worse going out through the in door.

“I'm not ready for this yet, Dad,” I say.

“Okay.” He pats my back. “Okay. Just let me go over and make sure Luz is all right.”