Faron Samford

Breaking Point

 He reached over and popped open the worn Styrofoam cooler and fumbled around the mixture of near freezing water and ice until his hand finally grasped what it was looking for.  He pulled the beer out and peered down into the cooler, closing one eye to try and bring the contents of the cooler into focus.

“Only one beer left, they better hurry.” He announced to nobody in particular.

He actually announced it to nobody at all because he was the only one still up. His father had been the last one helping him assault the cooler and he’d given way to exhaustion about a half-hour before and gone to bed. Sitting there alone on the screened porch in what was, he was convinced was one of the most uncomfortable chairs God had allowed to be created, he popped the cap off the bottle and took a long satisfying drink of Heineken.

Like a scratched DVD, the day’s events skipped through his mind in clips, some clear, some as if they were a dream. He saw his mother, looking strangely beautiful in her new black dress, sitting in stunned silence. His father was sitting beside her, trying to comfort her while fighting back tears of his own. At the image of his father in tears, he took another long drink. It was like seeing John Wayne cry. It just didn’t happen. Next to his father was his nephew. At four years old, he didn’t really understand what was going on. He just realized that everyone was sitting here very quietly while the man at the microphone was talking and kept looking around every time he would hear his dad’s name spoken.

Another long drink.

Then they were outside the church, standing before the flag-draped casket as it lay there while a last call went over the radio to an officer that would not be answering. The twenty-one gun salute sounded. Three explosions of noise wrenching sobs from deep inside him as the finality of it all sank in. In each of these scenes, the same empty space next to him made his sorrow that much deeper.

He turned the beer up until the last drop slid down his throat and he placed the empty bottle with the rest of them on the table. Cleaning up could wait for tomorrow. He fished the last one out of the cooler, popped the cap and stumbled to edge of the porch to take a leak and create some room for this last beer to go.

Headlights shot hammers into his head as the black Taurus finally pulled in the driveway. The door opened and she stepped out, looking at him with a contemptuous gaze and said, “You’re drunk.”

“And you’re late,” he responded, as he finished eliminating what felt like at least the last three beers into flowerbed below.

She glared back at him as he started finishing the beer he’d opened and fell back into his chair. She walked up on the porch and took the beer from him and threw it in the trash. “Get in the car. Are we still going to David’s?”

“Hell yeah we’re going over there, he actually showed up today” came the more than a little slurred reply.

He got in the car with only a minor stumble or two and they made the drive in silence, other than his occasional hiccup. They could both feel the tension building but neither were ready to unleash it. She sat there defiantly, almost daring him to bring it up, as he stewed in his anger at her absence that day.

Luckily, David lived close, and within 5 minutes they were there and had managed to avoid explosion that was sure to have happened if they’d had much longer to sit in there together. He got out of the car and headed to the garage where David and Alexandra, his girlfriend, were playing pool and waiting for them. David met him the driveway and handed him a fresh beer as Anna just glared and went in the house to talk to Alexandra.

“It was a beautiful service. Your brother definitely was given a first-class sendoff.” David said as he racked the balls to start a game.

“Yeah. It was beautiful, but heart-wrenching. The twenty-one gun salute was vicious man. Thanks for coming and bringing your family, it meant a lot to me that ya’ll were there. I needed the support with Anna AWOL.” He was calming as he talked to David. He was getting into his normal routine now. Drinking beer and playing pool was almost a nightly ritual. A good sense of normalcy after the day he’d just gone through. 

After a couple of games and a couple more beers, he had actually kinda managed to relax a little when David went inside to check on the girls. As he sat there by himself for a moment, looking around the empty garage, he started to feel a little uneasy and laid back on the pool table. As he lay there and watched the fluorescent lights above the pool table appear to rotate slowly one direction, then back again, the sound of the door opening snapped his daze a little and he sat up. This took more than a little bit of concentrated effort.

He looked over to see Anna standing there. Only something was different about her. Gone was the defiant anger she’d had plastered on her face earlier. It had been replaced by a nervous look and a bit of a quivering lip. Sobering a little at the sight of her, he asked “what’s up?”

Expecting to hear an apology, he was startled when she calmly said, “You’re drunk and being a complete ass. This is not the guy that I want to be with. I think maybe that it’s better if from now on we didn’t…”

Sheer rage surged through him as he cut her off and through clenched teeth said “If you finish that sentence, walk out of that fucking door right now and let it hit you in the ass on the way out. You say you want to marry me someday and have my child and then on the day in my life that I need you the most, you’re nowhere to be found. I should have told you to go to hell when you pulled up in the driveway eight hours after you were supposed to be there. And don’t you ever even think about calling or even so much as speaking to me again.”

His words hit her like a truck and she instantly broke into tears and started rambling sobbing apologies for not being there that day, for being angry that he had been drinking when she should have been more understanding, and for trying to break up with him merely a few hours after his brother’s funeral.

As usual, the sight of her crying drained every bit of anger out of him and he was left feeling horrible for what he had said. He took her in his arms and said, “I’m sorry for unleashing on you like that. It’s been building all day and with the emotion of everything and the hurt of you not being there, I couldn’t help it.”

They stood there embracing for several minutes, both feeling the comfort of being in each other’s arms again after such a bitter day of resentment and anger between them. But they also both felt sadness because they knew that some wounds could heal, but would always leave a scar. He’d never be able to put behind him that she hadn’t been there for him and the hate that had been in his eyes when he yelled at her would always haunt her. They both knew that in their selfishness, something had started to unravel that day and they would never get it back.

And a couple of years later, as he slowly walked back to the car after returning the diamond ring that he knew he couldn’t give her, he felt the pain of this first wound. He smiled a sad smile and turned the car out of the parking lot headed towards Best Buy, thinking to himself that the fifteen-hundred dollars he’d just had refunded was going to buy an awfully nice high-definition television to replace her with.