Shallow Creek

“You better turn off that water before you flood it onto the floor,” his mom warned.

Absently he shut the water off and started washing dishes.  The menial distraction helped avoid the violent outburst he felt searching for an outlet.  The nastier part of him sought to stir up some extra trouble for some reason.

“The whole family, huh?” he said.  “That include Taryn and Serge?”

His mom shot him an uncharacteristic sideways glare.  He tried not to smirk, but did so anyway.  The two continued on in a vacuum for about thirty minutes, his mom piling up more dirty dishes faster than Brendan could clean them.  Additionally aggravating, she kept grabbing the clean ones and reusing them.  The oven timer dinged as Brendan found himself washing the same knife for the third time.

“Oh, shoot,” his mother exclaimed, pulling a huge dish from the oven and setting it onto a small rack on the counter.  “Hun, can you take a break and set the table for six?”

“Six?”

“Yes, six,” his mother said as she darted around, exasperated.  “Blain will sit in a booster seat at the table and Sadie will sit in her highchair next to her momma.”

Brendan perfectly aligned all the silverware and placemats, giving in to the over-the-top attention to detail the Marines had instilled in him for years.  With each completed setting, he dreaded dinner more and more.  His dad liked to make innocent little comments about heavy subjects from time to time, and with his low opinion of Brendan, tonight seemed like a great time to break out the big guns.  All it would take would be one question about Michelle feeling safer with Brendan sleeping on the couch in Grant’s house last night.  Then the old man would sit back and watch the fireworks begin.

Before he knew it, his brother’s family showed up and the charade commenced.  Everything rolled around pretty smoothly as three-year-old Blain repeatedly assaulted his laughing grandpa, and Sadie lay still, cradled in her momma’s loving embrace.  Grant was talking to Brendan about something, but seeing Michelle sitting on the couch with a one-year-old tugging down the front of her shirt, Brendan had a flashback to the brief, yet explicit dream he’d experienced while waking up next to her.  Michelle looked up and caught his stare, and returned it with a harsh glare and a quick head shake.  That brief snippet that kept playing over and over, was that actually a memory?  Part of him wished it was, even if it just proved to incriminate him further.

“So we still on for a beer tonight?” Grant asked him, slapping his shoulder.

Brendan recovered from his daze.  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

Dinner went off without a hitch.  His father made no weird references to the previous night, and Grant happily yapped away about everything under the sun, playing the role of the good son and engaging their parents in all of their favorite subjects.  The meal drew to a close and Brendan volunteered to pick up some of the plates.  He gathered up a short stack of dirty dishes and made his way into the kitchen.

Michelle followed closely behind and dragged him forcefully just out of line of sight from the table next door.

“Get your shit together,” she whispered viciously.  “You want to screw this all up?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You keep looking at me funny.”  When he looked at her in disbelief she added, “Just quit staring at me; it’s weird.”

Contrary to everything he knew about his father, the old man rumbled into the kitchen with a huge stack of plates and precariously balanced silverware.  Michelle smiled sweetly to him as she casually strode back into the dining room.  Brendan watched her go, but then heeded her words and took to scraping the crud off each plate into the open trashcan.

“Son,” his dad said in hushed tones, standing right next to him.  “Nothing had better’ve happened between y’all last night.”

Brendan didn’t answer.

“Just saying, we all know what happened last time you pissed your brother off.”

“She was scared because of the attack and wanted me to stay and sleep on the couch,” Brendan insisted quietly.  “That’s it.”

With that, Darryl Rhodes patted his son on the shoulder and sauntered back out of the kitchen, scooping up an escapee toddler in the process.  The old man really took to the role of grandpa with gusto, displaying all kinds of overt emotions that Brendan had never seen before.

Little Sadie burst into the angry song of tiny infants, drawing a concerned look from her mother.  Michelle tried in vain to console Sadie, but in the end relented and announced that she hated to dine and dash, but the little one hadn’t been sleeping well recently and really should get home.  She started to pack up all the kids’ stuff as Grant came into the kitchen to talk to Brendan.

“Okay, I’ll drop the missus and kids off at home, then I’ll meet you at Trish’s in an hour.  Sound like a plan?”

“Sure,” Brendan said as he opened the dishwasher to find it still jammed full of dirty dishes.