Bock Time of the Virus and Risky Journey

Two Novellas
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-2403-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 238 Seiten

When Char quarrels with her conservative dad, he sends her to the big city for a year with her bi-racial cousins. Char experiences the perspective of a black family from the classrooms to the dinner table. When the lethal Coronavirus breaks out, people begin to wear face masks, school is closed, and the family is locked down. With tensions on the rise, Char returns home. How will her dad receive her? How is the virus impacting the extended family?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bock, Peter

Leseproben

1

It was the spring of the pandemic of COVID-19. I remember it because it was the year my cousins, the Sturgis’s, came to Idaho to bring Char home. They stayed a week at the McCall Hotel before their hospital stay. The hotel was empty because the town didn’t want the virus here, and Dad and Mom weren’t working and schools were closed.

I was a 14-year-old kid living an everyday life in the boondocks with my 17-year-old sister rebelling and getting my dad stressed.

I have 20-20 hindsight now, but my small town didn’t know what lay ahead when the virus hit nor did the whole shebang of a country. We ignored a story in the news about an outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan, China, until it leapfrogged into South Korea, Italy, and Spain. That was happening while I watched my sister rebel in a remote town in the mountains. The virus leaped from human body to human body across the world, and we didn’t know it for weeks. We were living our everyday lives, unaware of the danger coming our way.

It’s early winter and my father and Char are shouting at each other again. Mom says it’s because Char is seventeen, and sex and male stubbornness are the culprits.

Char is three years older, and I’ll be next in their gunsights so I’m paying close attention. Things might be even worse for me as a male. The drill for kids, male or female, is you rebel against your parents because they aren’t running things so well. They vote for a president who upsets “the norms.” Cable news channels and Fox duel over the president every night. I’ve been growing up with it for years—hoax, fake news...all of it. I side with my older sister against the president, but she is bossy—which gets Dad bossy and loud. He likes the president. By the way, his name is also Donald. Dad says the president is shaking America awake. “Watch out!” Char shrieks at him and then gets real crazy. She wears black clothes and black eyeliner and scowls.

Let me lay it out for you in the right order.

Mom is flipping pancakes, and the smell of bacon makes me hungry. Char thinks Mom is passive. Dad has his coffee and sits opposite Char. The way his eyebrows knit, I know a storm is twisting our way.

“I’m taking you out of school and sending you to live with your Aunt Rose and Uncle Joe in Oregon’s big city.” Dad threatened exile two weeks ago when he came home and found Ricky in Char’s room, and she had her shirt and bra off. There’s more to it, but I didn’t ask. Instantly, she’s an unwed teen mom—in his mind.

When Mom brings the stack of cakes to the table, her eyes have red rims so I missed the drama. Char’s eyes are flashing, and she’s in fight mode.

“Maybe my sister can do something with you,” Dad says.

Aunt Rose, calm as a Buddhist monk meditating at a moon reflecting pool, is Dad’s sister and lives five hundred miles away in Portland. Aunt Rose did the unmentionable. She married a black man. How could a brother and sister be so different? My mom married a white supremacist and a Trumpster.

My parents don’t communicate like Aunt Rose and Uncle Joe. She has this way of listening where you know she isn’t going to jump all over you. Who knows what parents are thinking—till you get it out of them.

I like visiting my cousins in the Portland which seems like France or someplace exotic compared to our home in rural McCall, Idaho, so I say, “I wanna go, too.”

I’d enjoy going to school where Uncle Joe teaches and Aunt Rose is a counselor. (They got twelve high schools there.) Mandy and Gene, my cousins, live in harmony with their dad and mom—the perfect family, although Dad doesn’t think so. I’ll tell you about that later.

I worship my sis one day and hate her the next. You’ll see why.

“I’d love you to go with me, Pipsqueak, but you’re the model boy child who worships his father.”

Dad is glaring at Char. “We talked to Aunt Rose and Uncle Joe last night,, and they’ll give you a fresh start—with an accent on fresh.” Mom looks like she’s going to cry again.

Thankfully, Dad doesn’t recite all Char’s shortcomings as he has a thousand times before. We eat in silence. Then Mom says, “It’s for the school year and, if it doesn’t work out, we’ll bring you back home.” Dad is annoyed at Mom’s weakness.

That’s Mom, the pleaser, trying to make everyone happy, but she can be a pill about Char not playing sports. “I want you to be a modern young woman, not a powder-puff or a couch cabbage.”

Dad turns and says to Char, “We love you, but we can’t accept your behavior. You can do your growing up with your liberal cousins—out of my sight.” He told her once she looked like a grunge from Seattle. He shuts down on her backtalk.

Last night, Char broke his rule about home by ten, but he doesn’t storm and lecture this time. Dad is in the living room with his newspaper. His forehead is wrinkled with worry, and he looks older with his receding hairline and his frumpy drawstring sweat pants. He gets up and stops Char from racing upstairs, “Charlotte, your mother and I are having a talk with you in the morning.”

Things are rocky all summer and, to be honest, for the last year. Something is up, Char tells me. Dad has a new tactic since he is calm for once. Was my sunny, problem-solving mom going on the offense? Were they switching good-cop/bad-cop roles? Char texts her social media friends in the late afternoon, and Ricky picks her up after dinner. He drives her home by twelve, which his father allows on weekends. Char thinks Dad is a butt about curfews. She thinks he’s trying to turn her into an obedient robot. Dad is a few years older than our friends’ fathers and tone deaf to teenagers. Char says the male animal raises its voice when it gets excited. A loud voice doesn’t make what it’s saying any truer. At least he isn’t slamming doors yet. One thing about Dad—he doesn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Fudge sticks, I wish he would, and then I could curse. Sometimes, I want to curse. Char lets it rip when she gets mad! Which makes his face get redder.

“I guess I’m leaving next week,” Char says, hoping it hurts Mom and me.

“Dad says you’re leaving Monday,” Mom says.

“I need time to tell Janice and Ricky. And there’s Mr. Simpson.” She’s pleading.

Dad enters the room. “Sooner. Your mother can drive you on Friday with your trunk and your suitcase. I’ll fly in Saturday. Your mother and I will drive back on Sunday.”

Char tells me about her good-bye with Janice, who can’t believe it’s happening so fast. Janice knows everything Char does—like her being out late, driving around in cars, wasting money, spending hours on social media, listening to music he hates. Mom doesn’t like her messy room, her refusal to go to church, and watching R-rated cable channels.

“I can’t believe this. You’re my best friend, bff,” Janice says. They were both crying. “All the times you were grounded. All the times your allowance was taken away. It was harsh.”

Char tells her what a faithful friend she’s been.

When they were younger, Janice invited Char over to watch R-rated movies we weren’t allowed to see. They used to dance and lip-synch together with Janice’s mom and dad as their audience. “I’ll message you every day. I want to know what city life is like and that you’re okay,” Janice says.

“I’m on my way to stardom,” Char announces. “In couple of years I’ll be doing a cable show in Portland about a girl whose parents sent her packing, who made good being an artist in the city.”

All the while, I feel this gulping in my throat I can’t control. When I was little, Char was my guide to small town life in Idaho. There are the shops by the lake, the ice rink, the skateboard facility by the school, the Payette River where we catch crawdads and the ice cream parlor. This little town is all I know.

Dad, the manager of the big hotel on the lake, is a big frog in a little pond. He knows the Boise people who come here on weekends and summer vacations. The town likes to complain about the city people choking the town with traffic and filling the restaurants, but they like the money the city people bring in, and they like all the jobs at the hotel. Dad’s job means he has to be nice to people all day, so he comes home and takes his bad feelings out on Char. He doesn’t drink much, but he unloads his feelings when he gets home. He likes to say the president doesn’t drink at all. So far, I’m not in the line of fire. Char can’t do anything right. Anyway, that’s what Sis says. Me? I’m caught in between.

She goes to see Ricky to say good-bye and comes home early.

“What a prick,” she says to me. “The first thing he said was, ‘Your father’s right. You’re failing biology. You’re not on the swim team, and you spend three hours a day on your phone.’” Ricky is the quarterback, shooting guard on the basketball team and throws the javelin in the spring. That’s the way it is in a small town. No one languishes on the bench unless she’s a total klutz or a girlie girl.

“What am I supposed to do for a girlfriend while you’re gone?” Ricky asks. “Did you think of that?”

“It was all about him.” She tells me she could see Margo Krugman move in on him with those huge knockers. School jocks are never lonely wallflowers.

It is shocking, Char says, how easily these roots are pulling up. At least Janice and she cry over it.

Char wants to see the Johnsons, who had been friends of...