Peanut Butter Balls and the Unanswered Letter
“Peanut Butter Balls and the Unanswered Letter” - finalist for the 2023 Rash Awards and published in Broad River Review, December 2023 and forthcoming in After Hours, March 2024.
I can’t offer anything, not talent, not beauty. I’m just a moderately alive mass. Most people call me a humbug if that gives any sense. One thing is always a constant. I have a mouthful of peanut butter pretzel balls.
#
It’s the middle of the night. I can’t sleep. I’m on the pot when I hear the phone ring. I pull up my underwear and hobble to the phone. Still chewing away.
“Hello?” I say.
“I’m sorry to call you, but…” Girl. Young-ish. Raspy voice. Just a scam.
“Who is this?” Silence.
“Who is this? We’ve had these calls before. You can’t just play this with me.”
“It’s Nancy. It’s about John.” It’s my son’s wife. We don’t talk. Not in a while, anyhow. I don’t say anything. “Listen. John’s been hurt. Bad. He was hit by a car while riding his bike. He was changing lanes. You need to fly to L.A. right now…. Are you there?”
#
Molly never wakes easy. When she hears what I’m telling her, the wailing begins. Thankfully we live in the middle of nowhere.
“We’ve got to go. You can cry in the car. But we have to go right now.”
“What happened? How did this happen?” She sits up in bed, starts praying.
“You can pray in the car. Let’s go.”
She dresses slowly, fumbling her buttons. Her mind in a shambles. She pushes her clothes into a bag. I swipe for flights on my phone. She’s finally ready. She goes to the dresser and pauses, staring down into a drawer of jewelry.
“Molly!” She ignores me and fishes around in the box. She pulls out a bracelet John gave her for Christmas years ago.
#
A few hours later, Molly and I sit on a runway waiting. I slip my hand into the bag at my feet and take another handful of peanut butter pretzels. The taste spills all through me. My brain floods with peanut butter. I’m happy, I really am when I eat these stupid things. Okay, I am probably not that happy with my life, but I do like peanut butter pretzel balls a whole lot.
I keep them with me at all times. I reach down and take a handful. That’s the worst I do. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I eat, though. Boy, do I eat. That is how I get to sleep. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
#
I look out the little window at the night above the clouds. All the stars lay right there with nothing between me and them. It makes me feel a little bit like a kid again.
Back then, I would lie awake in my room staring at the glow in the dark planets glued to the ceiling. They made me afraid because I was so small compared to them. Same thing with the idea of God. Or the way people talk about America sweeping three-thousand miles east to west. I never understood why a person like me was allowed to keep on living. What does it matter if I live or die? So insignificant compared to everything out there. And why should I be allowed to keep on living when my son could die?
#
I love my kids. My daughter – she’s fine. Lives off in another state with her husband. They’re what most people call perfect. Have half a dozen kids, go to church, work hard but always seem happy to see us when we visit. Then there’s my oldest, John. He’s always been a burr in my side.
Last time he stayed with us, he told me his son was scared of me. His wife was scared of me. Scared of me? All I did was tell the kid no. Throwing the train around the Christmas tree. Doing whatever he pleased. No discipline, no rules. That’s not how I raised my kid to raise his kid. No rules, no discipline.
Maybe I was a little loud, but a man can’t change his ways. I am what I am. That’s what I told him. And he brought up some incident with his wife, I don’t even remember. Yelling at her for not answering the phone? I didn’t yell. She’s just oversensitive. Women blow everything out of proportion. If you are in the house and the phone rings, you answer it. That’s just common sense. And if I raise my voice, it’s not yelling. I’m just trying to be heard all the way upstairs where God knows what that woman is doing all day. I work all day. What does she do?
“I don’t change,” I said to him. He blinked as if I slapped him in the face. He stared at me like he was waiting for me to change right there in front of him.
“I – don't – change,” I repeated. We don’t see them much anymore.
#
We land with a thump. The whole plane bounces. That wakes up Molly real fast. We trolley long enough for me to finish the tub of pretzels. I feel fat, real fat. And happy. Fat and happy, as they say.
Everything is a rush in the city. Molly doesn’t see any of it. I feel like a country mouse. On a train. In a cab. Costs a fortune. Then there is the hospital, like a maze leading us to a piece of cheese.
#
There he is. Tubes going in and out of his face, which looks like a purple muffin. Nancy sits beside him in tears. My wife walks over and touches her back. Nancy looks up at Molly the way you look when a stranger touches your shoulder in a store. Complete alarm. Then her face softens, like gravity caving in on her. She reaches up and hugs Molly. Tears drip down her face.
My grandson lies on the recliner with his head in his arms. His long girlish hair hanging down. What is that? Pink? When he sees his mother hugging his grandmother, he jumps up as if from a dream and stumbles over to join in on the hug. He always did love Nana.
I stand watching from behind. My attention drifts back to my son. I can’t believe I’m seeing him like this. He’s usually such a prick. Now look at him, laid out, eyes closed, so fragile and wrong.
I must be having déjà vu. When he was born, he came out purple. Couldn’t breathe. They put the tubes in him then too. They kept him in an incubator for three days. They said he might not make it.
The doctors are saying the same thing now. They always say the same thing.
#
We wait three days. Three nights. We get some sleep in a hotel in shifts. Cold silence lingers between Nancy and me. Molly and Nancy seem to be getting along, and the kid too. The three of them whisper and sit around a puzzle, waiting. Chit-chat about nothing. At least I have my pretzels. What would I do without pretzels and peanut butter? Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
#
He’s coughing somehow, body lurching up, but I can barely make out his face. The tubes go in and out, pumping him full of fluid. His eyes open. He stares at me, silent and blinking.
I reach out my hand and take his hand. He looks up like a little boy. Purple muffin boy. His eyes open like a deer about to be hit by a car, his eyes red as if he had any moisture he might cry. I begin to cry. I haven’t touched his hand like this, actually held his hand like a father holds a son’s, in over ten years.
#
He doesn’t say anything for a long time, a few hours. He sleeps a little, then wakes again, and seems to be trying to say something. I lean down and listen. I wait a while. Finally, he makes it to the point where he can create words. They come out one at a time.
“Do – you – remem – ber – let – ter – I – wrote?”
I freeze. There was only ever one letter. A class assignment in fifth grade. He had to write a letter to someone and mail it through the post office, so he wrote me a letter. It was supposed to go to a stranger. Someone you can’t talk to every day. He sent it to me, his own father. He addressed, stamped, and mailed it to his own house. It said I never played with him. It said I never talked to him. It said I was always working, and he knew it was for him and his sister and my mom, but all they wanted was time with me. It asked me why.
I nod. “Yes, I remember.”
“Answer – it.” He coughs. He keeps on looking at me.
#
The doctor comes in and asks what happened. I tell her. What do I care? She just shakes her head and says that was too much for him. She points at the vitals. She quietly picks up the chart and starts flipping, looking something up on her phone, then disappears into the hall. She returns with a nurse who slips by me and attends to my son.
John pushes his head forward and whispers. The nurse looks at me and away. The nurse reports to the doctor. The doctor turns to me, says it will be a long recovery. She recommends now that we know he will live and that nothing critical was damaged that we can come back to visit in a month when talking wouldn’t take so much out of him.
She’s asking me to leave, I get it. John’s asking me to leave.
Nancy smiles and turns this into the goodbye moment. Relief slides over me. Molly tries to convince the doctor we can stay, but she is absolute. Our grandson grabs Molly and starts to cry. Nancy slides her arms around Molly and the kid. They remain frozen beside the bed. I touch John’s face. My fingers feel like wooden clubs rubbing against his soft grey cheeks.
Before we go, I reach out to Nancy. I put my arms around her. I mean it with all I can muster. I give her an awkward tug toward me. I feel like I’m hugging one of those bronze bears at the park.
#
We sit down on the plane. I take another handful of pretzels and turn to face Molly. Chewing, I offer her some. She looks out the window.
Too many years made me like I am. I told my son I don’t change. But I’ve changed. Last time I went back to my childhood home, to Connecticut, it was for my high school reunion. Everyone was rich except me. My school was one of the preppiest schools in the county. Only the best went in, only the best came out. The rest of them went on and graduated from prestigious universities, then married the right girls from the right families. Me? I didn’t want any part of that. I moved to Maine, married a farm girl, got my plumber’s license. When we met, Molly had long blond hair that went all the way down her back. It drove me crazy. Her hair isn’t like it was. Now it looks like a mushroom top.
When we had the kids. I thought what all Dads think, This is the beginning. Then the babies come home, and you find yourself on a big turning wheel that never ends, playing the hamster in the middle. Run, run, run. I ended up fat with an empty house, more bills, and a wife so nervous all the time she can’t think straight. The worst part is the way my son turned out. I did my best, but he’s like those kids I went to high school with. I tried to raise him better than that, but he still went off to college, got a fancy girl, got a big job in the city. The problem is: I changed, but the kid who came out of me looks just like what I came from.
Hamsters end up in the same spot they start when the wheel stops. Another mouthful of pretzels. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
#
In the truck again, off the plane, back in Maine, Molly and I drive eighty miles per hour on the highway. I can’t stop thinking about the letter. How do you answer that question? No one can. Life gets busy. You make plans. The plans fall down. You end up with regret, a big hole inside you. You try to fill the hole with pretzels and peanut butter.
The winter snow swirls up around the truck. Molly looks at me. I push back her hair, take her hand and kiss it. Just me and her quietly looking at everything around us. It makes me feel small.
Molly pulls her hand away and picks up the little tub of peanut butter pretzel balls where I always keep it wedged between the seats. She pops open the container, releasing the smell. She holds the tub out for me to take some. My stomach burns for them. My mouth fills with saliva. I speed up to switch lanes. I roll down my window and take the entire tub out of Molly’s hands and cast it out into the air.