Kyle’s Story 3: Problems with Similes and Smiles

His parents step away from the front desk, his dad is sliding his platinum card back inside his alligator skin wallet. The two saunter over toward Kyle. They are grim-faced, conjoined in a tacit silence. His dad, like a walking tree, hovers above him, seemingly casting a shadow over the entire lobby. His dad’s eyes are a bit bloodshot. Perhaps he’d been crying. Or taking the pills again. Kyle knows his dad takes pills, injections sometimes, too.

His dad nods his heavy stone of a head. Kyle nods back in assent and rises, feeling airless, as if his lungs were punctured. Terror seizes him. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

It’s time. It’s time to go to the house. He’s been dreading this moment. He’d thought of going to a relative’s. He’d thought of staying with a friend. He’d thought of running away. He’d thought of so many ways to escape this moment. He’d wanted to escape the house, the ghosts, even before he’d stepped foot inside.

But now, they move. They walk. Bodies in motion. Right foot, left foot. Their bodies in lockstep. A bellboy is pushing a golden cart with the family’s bags. The bellboy, a short late-middle-aged man of possible Arab descent, is smiling his own version of the hotel’s plastic, toothy smile. The bellboy looks like he’s hurting his lips, stretching his mouth that wide. The beaming bellboy is making forced, painful small talk about the weather, emphatically proclaiming that it’d cooled down, that fall was here.

They cross through the swivel door, are thrown into the front of the hotel. The bellboy was right. Fall had arrived. The sky was dark, looked like a bruise. The bellboy sniffs the cool air, then confidently asserts that it’ll rain on and off all day.

It had cooled down outside considerably, to 50 something degrees, and the crisp, soft fall air tickled at Kyle’s skin. Jim tips the bellboy a folded 20 as the bellboy readies to load the family’s bags into their car.

The valet drives the car up, parks and jumps out. The valet is all smiles too. The valet is a very young and very large black man, nearly his dad’s size. The valet recognizes Jim Everett, “OH my GAWD! Jim Everett!”, and the two have a short word. The valet plays high school football and snaps a selfie with Jim. Jim tips him well, slips him a folded $50 bill, and claps him on the shoulder, offers words of encouragement.

Kyle has a brief moment of jealousy, knowing his dad never spoke to him like that. He could see that young man, that valet, being the type of kid his dad wanted. A stud athlete, vivacious, strong and handsome. Not a scrawny computer nerd, a freak like him.

The jealousy abates, however, when Kyle thinks of his dad limping around. When he flashes back to the times he saw his dad, hunched over, recovering from a surgery. His dad’s Frankenstein face contorting in agonizing pain.

Those are the moments the NFL doesn’t show. The surgeries. The injections. The pills. The tears and blood and scars and middle-aged men walking like old geezers. Kyle thinks of the valet, how handsome he is, his electric, high-voltage smile and his young body like that of a Grecian God, the valet so full of life. Kyle’s jealousy morphs to pity.

Then the fear returns. He and his parents sit into the leather seats, buckle up. His dad, ever the aggressive driver, throttles the gas pedal, and their heads whip back as they plow ahead, into traffic, his dad cranking Korn, that annoying nu metal shit that Kyle can’t stand.

Kyle defensively blasts meditation music in his earbuds, hoping to calm himself, settle his anxiety.

They will arrive at the house in approximately 40 minutes, the white flashing text on the dashboard GPS says. The digits on the GPS begin to slide off the dashboard, falling off the screen, slimy, like the trail of a slug. Kyle’s lower jaw trembles. His teeth chatter. His eyes go glassy and his vision becomes a milky blur. He shuts his eyelids, breathes deeply, tastes the leather smell of his seat.

40 minutes. 40 minutes, he laments.