Mr. Langtry selected a machete from the shelf and looked back at
me. “Call me Denis,” he said. “Please, I’m
asking you. You don’t have to call me Dad, just Denis.”
His eyes turned back to examine the blade he held between us, and
his never-trimmed eyebrows flared like two cats tensing to fight.
He placed the machete into the shopping cart and said, “It
would be doing your mother and me a great favor.”
We continued to make our way through the hardware store’s
overgrown aisles, looking for tools to fix up the backyard for the
upcoming wedding, a hopeless task.
Seeing Mr. Langtry not wearing a suit was still a shock to me,
but the man’s endless supply of Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda
shorts seemed to convey everyone’s longing to flee this
landlocked Colorado town, to run for the ocean.
Technically, my mom and Mr. Langtry were not supposed to
fraternize. The first time they met, I was a high school freshman,
and Mr. Langtry called her to discuss my behavior in his class,
World History 1. But they didn’t start dating until three
years later when they met again in a court-ordered counseling
group. I had just started my senior year and my mom had just gotten
her third DUI. In addition to the AA meetings, they made her go to
a biweekly counseling group where they gave her Breathalyzers and
bad coffee. Apparently people kicking addictions tend to fall in
love easier, so they had a no-fraternizing-outside-of-group policy
““ which she and Mr. Langtry broke.
I wish I had known Mr. Langtry was a drunk at the time I was in
his class. But back then he was just a boring man who wore a suit
everyday and delivered lectures by rote. He did occasionally lose
his cool, though. During the lecture on Puritanism, Darren, the kid
who sat next to me, took a carton of Marlboros from his backpack
and passed it around. We all lit up, and in no time the classroom
was as smoky as one of my mom’s AA meetings. Mr. Langtry
exploded, screaming at everyone, the mood-ring of his face turning
bright red. Moments like that were rare little bursts of excitement
in World History 1, which generally bored me to the point of
engraving various sexual positions onto my desktop with a pocket
knife. By the time Mr. Langtry was lecturing on the history of
colonialism, my desk was a stick-figure Kama Sutra starring myself
and Lorrie Kenison, the girl who sat in front of me, and
that’s when Mr. Langtry was forced to take a meeting with my
mom.
In my high school, students were discouraged from calling
teachers by their first names and teachers were discouraged from
fraternizing with students’ parents. But by the time my mom
said yes to Mr. Langtry’s marriage proposal, I had just
graduated from high school, and they had just graduated from their
biweekly counseling group ““ all three of us receiving
something to hang on our walls for our efforts ““ so perhaps I
should have just started calling him Denis like they wanted. But,
still, it was just too weird.
And now the botanical garden of Mr. Langtry’s Hawaiian
shirts was growing at an alarming rate in my mom’s bedroom
closet, and I had been conscripted to help him fix up the backyard
for their wedding.
My real father wasn’t around. As the story goes, after
everything else had failed, he started his own driving school. He
filled out the appropriate forms, got a license from the city, and
turned the basement of First Episcopal Church into a classroom one
day a week. He got the idea to bolt seatbelts onto the desks in
order to teach his students to buckle up whenever they got into a
car. He employed Perry ““ a ten-year-old neighborhood kid
““ at a quarter a seatbelt, to hop the junkyard fence and
pilfer them from old cars. Perry got $5.25 and a tetanus shot.
Nearly every 15-year-old in the neighborhood buckled up in that
church basement on Saturday afternoons, all of them eager to take
my dad’s hatchback out for the final road test at the end of
the eight-week course. But before they could reach that milestone,
a votive candle upstairs fell, igniting one of the curtains. My mom
was reading one of her mysteries in the back pew when it happened,
and she saw the flames grow up the curtain like an inverted
waterfall. A minute later, Father Dan was screaming to evacuate
because Hellfire was coming. Some of those seatbelts Perry found
were so old that the buckles were caked in rust. Seventy-five
cents’ worth never let go.
My father was convicted on three counts of manslaughter, and I
was conceived in a desperate, hurried conjugal visit on my
parents’ fifth wedding anniversary. At some point while I was
in the womb, she divorced him.
Mr. Langtry suggested having the wedding at First Episcopal (now
informally known as Second Episcopal) but my mom refused to ever go
back into that building, even though he explained that,
technically, she had never been in that building; she had only been
in the old building ““ pre-fire, pre-rebuilding, pre-divorce,
pre-Mr. Langtry. But she still refused, so the wedding was going to
be a backyard affair, an informal, justice-of-the-peace thing. The
backyard, however, had been taken over by 20 years’ worth of
discarded junk: stationary bikes and mobile bikes, Ab-Masters and
Amway boxes, even a CPR dummy, his mouth open in a silent scream.
Everything was overgrown with weeds, which Mr. Langtry would hack
through with his newly bought machete, neglecting to pull them out
by the roots. In his Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, chopping
through weeds until he was smeared with grass-stains, Mr. Langtry
looked like a backyard explorer ““ while I just carried that
junk into the garage, overwhelmed by all my mom’s forgotten
investments.
Allardice is a fourth-year English student.