The Last Supper #1

THE OLIVE GARDEN ON ROUTE 46 wasn't anyone's first choice, but it was the only place that could seat fourteen on a Saturday night without a reservation. My sister Cheryl had called ahead, begged, probably cried—crying was Cheryl's superpower—and somehow convinced the hostess to push three tables together near the back, away from the families celebrating birthdays and the couples on cheap dates who didn't need to witness whatever the hell we were about to become.

I got there forty minutes early because I couldn't stand being in the apartment anymore. Denise had spent the morning not talking to me, which was worse than the screaming. The screaming I could handle. The screaming was at least honest. But the silence—moving around each other in our two-bedroom like strangers sharing a hostel, her eyes sliding past mine like I was furniture—that was the thing that made me want to put my fist through the drywall.

So I left. Told her I'd meet her there. She didn't respond, just kept folding laundry that didn't need folding, her hands working the fabric like she was trying to strangle it.

The bar was mostly empty. A guy in a Jets jersey nursing a Bud Light. A woman my mother's age picking at a salad like it had personally offended her. I took a stool at the end and called over the bartender. He was a thick-necked guy in his fifties with forearms that suggested a past life loading trucks or beating deadbeats. He poured me a Jack and Coke without being asked. "First one's on the house," he said.

"I'm that obvious?"

"Brother, you look like you're about to shit yourself. Either your wife just left you or you're about to go away. And you still got the ring on."

I looked at my left hand. The platinum band my Denise had slipped onto my finger eleven years ago, back when I was still the kind of man who deserved such things. Now I was thirty-three years old. Tomorrow morning, I was going to to jail to begin serving an sentence for embezzlement.

"Eighteen months," I said.

"Minimum security?"

“Yup.”

I'd taken the money from Kellerman Plumbing & Heating over the course of two years, moving money in increments small enough that nobody noticed until they did.

Forty-seven grand. Not even enough to pay off the house. Not enough to send my kid to college or buy Denise the SUV she'd been wanting or take a vacation somewhere warm. Most of it went to keeping us afloat, covering the mortgage when the hours dried up, paying for Maddie's braces, fixing the transmission on the Civic after it died in the middle of the Parkway during rush hour. The rest went to my mother's medical bills after Medicare told us to go fuck ourselves, in more or less those words.

I'd told myself it was borrowing. That I'd pay it back when things turned around. That Kellerman owed me anyway, after fifteen years of busting my ass as their head bookkeeper while they promoted younger guys with business degrees who couldn't tell a balance sheet from a cocktail napkin. I'd told myself a lot of things. None of them had held up in court.

The butch bartender refilled my glass without asking. "My cousin did three years at Lewisburg. Said the worst part wasn't the food or the guards or even the other guys. It was not being able to take a piss without someone watching."

"That's very comforting. Thank you."

"I'm just saying. The small shit adds up." He wiped down the bar, though it was already spotless. "You got family coming tonight?"

"Some."

"That's good. That's real good. Most guys, they just disappear. One day they're at the office, next day they're gone like they never existed. At least you're doing it right."

I wasn't sure what doing it right meant. My mother had suggested we cancel the dinner entirely; too morbid, she said, like a wake for someone who isn't dead yet. But Cheryl had insisted. Closure, she called it. A chance to say goodbye properly before the long silence began.

The thing about crime that nobody tells you is that the waiting is worse than the going to prison. For the past three months, ever since the sentencing, I'd been living in a kind of limbo, going through the motions of normal life while knowing it was all about to end. I still went to work, not at Kellerman, obviously; they'd fired me the day of my arrest—but at a warehouse in Edison, loading boxes for nine bucks an hour, taking whatever shifts they'd give me. I still came home to Denise and Maddie, still ate dinner at the same table, still watched the same TV shows and took out the same trash. But none of it felt real anymore. It was all just marking time, killing hours, waiting for the clock to run out.

Eighteen months. It didn't sound like much. People got longer sentences for selling weed. But eighteen months was Maddie's entire freshman year of high school, plus the summer before and after. Eighteen months was three Christmases, two birthdays, countless soccer games and school plays and ordinary Tuesday nights that I'd never get back. Eighteen months was enough time for my wife to realize she'd be better off without me, for my daughter to forget the sound of my voice, for everything I'd built to crumble into dust.

Not that there was much left to crumble. The house was already underwater, the savings account down to four figures, the retirement fund cashed out years ago to cover my mother's first round of chemo. We'd been treading water for so long that drowning almost felt like a relief.

Almost.

The bartender set down a small plate of olives I hadn't ordered. "You want some advice?"

"Would it matter if I said no?"

"Eat something. You're gonna need your strength."

I looked at the olives. They were not the good kind, fat and glistening with oil, probably stuffed with some shit garlic. Three months ago I wouldn't have noticed them. Now every bite felt like a countdown.

I ate one. It tasted like nothing

The door opened behind me and I felt the cold February air cut through the warmth of the bar. I didn't turn around. There was still thirty minutes before anyone was supposed to arrive, and I wasn't ready. I wasn't close to ready.

My brother Danny was two years younger than me but looked older—the construction work had aged him, given him the leathery skin and permanent squint of a man who'd spent his life in the sun. He spotted me at the bar and headed over, not smiling, which was fine because I wasn't in a smiling mood either.

"You're early," he said.

"So are you."

He sat down next to me and signaled the bartender. "Budweiser. Whatever's cold."

He poured it and Danny drank half in one pull, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Ma's already on her way," he said. "Cheryl's picking her up."

"Great."

"She cried all morning. Ma, I mean. Cheryl said she's been crying since Wednesday."

"That's nice."

Danny looked at me with something I couldn't quite read. Not pity, exactly—Danny wasn't the pitying kind. More like assessment. Like he was trying to figure out what I needed and whether he could give it.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Define 'okay.'"

"Able to get through tonight without losing your shit."

I considered the question. The honest answer was no, I wasn't okay, hadn't been okay in months, might never be okay again. But honest answers weren't what tonight required.

"I'll manage," I said.

"You better. Ma's in bad shape."

"When have I ever made a scene?"

Danny laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You want a list? How about the time you threw Uncle Frank toupee in the pool at Lisa's wedding?"

"He was being an asshole."

"He's always an asshole. That's just Frank."

"I was twenty-two. I was drunk."

"And tonight?"

I looked at my third Jack and Coke, now down to ice and backwash. "Tonight I'm sober."

"Keep it that way." Danny finished his beer and stood up. "I'm going to go check on the table. Make sure everything's set up."

"Danny."

He paused.

"Thanks. For coming. For helping Cheryl organize this whole thing. I know you've got your own shit going on—"

"Stop." He held up a hand. "You're my brother. This is what we do."

He walked away before I could respond, which was probably intentional. Danny and I had never been good at talking about feelings. We communicated in actions—showing up, fixing things, buying each other beers when the world went sideways. Words were for other people.

I ordered a water and forced myself to drink it slowly. The room was starting to fill up, families streaming in from the cold, shaking snow off their coats and complaining about the weather. January in New Jersey was always miserable, but this year had been particularly brutal—three storms in two weeks, ice on everything, the kind of relentless gray that made you wonder why anyone chose to live here at all.

Maddie loved the snow. Used to, anyway, back when she was young enough to think sledding and snowmen were the peak of her life. Now she was thirteen and thought everything was stupid, especially her father. Especially now.

We hadn't talked about what was happening. Not really. Denise had tried to explain it to her using words like “mistake”, "consequence" and "responsibility," but I could tell from the way Maddie looked at me afterward that none of it had landed. She didn't see a man who'd made a bad decision for understandable reasons. She saw a criminal. A fraud. A father she couldn't trust.

She wasn't wrong.

The door opened again. This time it was Denise, alone, her winter coat pulled tight against the cold. She scanned the room until she found me at the bar.

She looked tired. We all looked tired these days, but on Denise it showed in ways that made my chest ache. Her hair, which she used to keep perfect, was pulled back in a careless ponytail. Her makeup was minimal, applied quickly, without the care she used to take. She was still beautiful—would always be beautiful, to me—but she looked like a woman who'd stopped trying, who'd reached some internal limit and decided that survival was enough.

"You're here," she said, stopping a few feet away.

"Where else would I be?"

"I don't know. Running. Hiding. Pretending this wasn't happening."

"Is that what you think I'd do?"

She sat down on the stool Danny had vacated, but angled away from me, her body language a wall.

"I don't know what you'd do anymore, Mike. I used to think I did. I used to think I knew everything about you. But you lied to me for two years. Two years of looking me in the face and lying, so forgive me if I'm not confident in my ability to predict your behavior."

"I never lied to you."

"Please." She laughed, a bitter sound that scraped against my eardrums. "You're going to prison and you never lied to me? That's your position?"

"I didn't lie. I just didn't tell you."

"And what's the difference?"

She was right, and we both knew it. The distinction between lying and omitting was the kind of bullshit rationalization I'd been telling myself for years, the kind of moral gymnastics that let me look in the mirror every morning and convince myself I was still a decent person.

"Denise—"

"Don't." She held up a hand. "I'm not here to fight with you. I'm here because Maddie needs to see us together. She needs to know we can—" She stopped, pressed her lips together. "Look. We're going to sit at that table with your family. We're going to eat breadsticks and act like everything's fine. And tomorrow you leave and I figure out how to keep our life from falling apart while you're gone." She met his eyes. "That's it. That's all I've got."

She was crying. I hadn't noticed it start, but tears were sliding down her cheeks now, quiet and unstoppable.

I wanted to reach for her. To pull her close and tell her it would be okay, that we'd get through this, that our love was stronger than any fuckup I'd made. But I couldn't move. Because the truth was, I didn't know if any of that was true. And I'd done enough lying to last a lifetime.

"I'm sorry," I said. It felt pathetically inadequate.

"I know you are." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "That's the worst part. I know you didn't mean for any of this to happen. But it happened anyway, and sorry doesn't pay the bills. Sorry doesn't explain to Maddie why Daddy's not coming home for Christmas." She shook her head. "It's just a word. You know? It's just a fucking word and I'm so tired of hearing it."

The bartender came over, saw Denise's face, and quickly retreated.

"I'm going to fix it," I said. "When I get out—"

"When you get out, you're going to have a felony conviction. You're going to be almost forty years old with no job, no prospects and a criminal record. How are you going to fix that?"

"I'll find a way."

"You've been finding a way for fifteen years. Finding a way to make ends meet, finding a way to cover the shortfall, finding a way to keep everything together with duct tape and prayers. And look where it got us."

She stood up, smoothing her coat, reassembling herself into something presentable.

"I'm going to find Maddie. She's coming with your mother. I want to talk to her before we sit down, make sure she's okay."

"Is she?"

"Is she what?"

"Okay?”

Denise looked at me with an expression I couldn't decipher. "She's thirteen. Nothing's okay when you're thirteen. Especially not when you a father going to prison and—" She shook her head. "Just get through tonight without making it worse. Can you do that?"

"I can try."

"Try hard." She walked away, her heels clicking on the tile floor, and disappeared into the growing crowd.

The bartender came back, tentatively, and I shook my head.

"Just the check," I said.

"It's taken care of."

"What?"

"The guy who was here before. Your brother? He covered your tab."

Of course he did. Danny, who made half what I used to make, who had three kids of his own and a mortgage he was barely keeping up with, who'd probably skipped his own beers this week to pay for mine.

I left a ten-dollar tip—money I couldn't afford—and headed toward the back of the restaurant, toward the table where my last supper was about to begin.