Sweet Tooth

Sweet Tooth

by Phillip Norman

Lights out, with a belt looped around his neck and tied to the closet rod behind his head, Ervin thumbs along his cellphone screen to find the picture of mom sitting in “Willie’s Corner” at Texas Roadhouse. Willie like Nelson. He’d taken the photo at her birthday party last week. The table where they sat was plastered with old album covers and tour photos, tucked way at the back of the dining room. Must be where they always stick the liberals.

It’s freezing in his room tonight. Dead of Colorado winter and he hasn’t bothered calling maintenance about a broken vent. As the sixth day of Christmas comes to an end, Ervin can see his small breaths wisping like smoke from a candle just blown out. He hasn’t felt especially festive this year. Mom hates sharing a birthday with Jesus, so they had tried to make the holidays all about her.

To help ring in her 64^th early, when the restaurants were open, he and his brothers had all trekked out to the Denver exurb where they spent their youth. Every time Ervin makes that drive, the subdivisions have multiplied, and the strip malls have become more labyrinthine. After getting lost in endless parking lots, he arrived at dinner pissed off and fifteen minutes late.

In the picture, his mother is smiling big underneath a neon sign with Willie Nelson’s signature headband and pigtails hanging from it. Ervin smiles back, because of how beautiful she looks, and at the idea that the proprietors had scalped the singer then strung the trophy up as a warning to all the other bleeding hearts. When he made that joke over warm rolls and cinnamon butter, mom had laughed then cracked back with her catchphrase, “Boys are disgusting.”

She knew best, having raised four mostly on her own. As disgusting as each might be, they had all grown up to make decent men of themselves. Tim the carpenter, Jason the dentist, Russell the social worker, and Ervin the “oral historian of grassroots politics”. She’s never sure how to explain that last one to her shitty coworkers at the plastic surgery clinic, the only place she could get hired at 60 after her husband finally left and took the health insurance with him.

Ervin has given her the elevator pitch about his career a thousand times, but some of the particulars still aren’t sticking. No one at work listens to her anyways. In Ervin’s opinion, those people only care about the politics that help them explain away their own mediocrity.

In the cold of his closet, he cinches the belt a few notches tighter and begins to kneel.

No matter how pure or interesting his ambitions might be, mom can’t help but fret over how little money he’s making. She also hates that his so-called job makes him the only one of her sons who travels out-of-state for work. Ervin doesn’t love the arrangement either, but also knows how bad things get when he stays put for too long.

Drawing in a ragged breath, feeling the bite of the leather on his neck, he remembers their last phone conversation. Lately she’s been avoiding conflict by asking him about his side gig at the ice cream shop instead. He’s grateful to finally be spared the offers of financial support they both know she can’t afford to make.

Ice cream is their family’s best remedy for a shared history of clinical depression. The night dad made up his mind on leaving, the rest of them had drowned their sorrows in mint chip milkshakes. After talking mom off the ledge, none of the brothers said much of anything because there wasn’t much of anything to say.

At dinner last week, when the waiter came asking about dessert, Ervin asked him if abortions were illegal in that Texas Roadhouse. Everyone else in the family glared at him disapprovingly, sharing his views but not his penchant for wearing them on his sleeve. He had tried to explain his thinking, how, juridically speaking, each franchise might function like a satellite colony of the motherland. No one laughed at that one.

Cellphone trembling in his gone-numb hand, Ervin kneels deeper, starts seeing stars.

The joke was bad and he was wrong to put the waiter in such a weird position. It was just misplaced aggression, and an effort to move things along so he could crawl back down his hole. They did end up ordering dessert. Stale brownies a la mode for each of them, with a pink wax candle stuck in mom’s. The wait staff had sung her a half-assed happy birthday capped off with a rousing yee-haw.

Just everything. That’s what he told his family when he broke down in the restaurant parking lot and they all asked him what was wrong. He didn’t say much more than that. There wasn’t much more to say.

About an hour ago, Ervin had sipped a mint chip milkshake while standing alone in the kitchen he shares with two roommates he barely knows. Savoring each scoop, pulling the spoon slowly across his tongue, he wondered how long it might be before the smell of rot catches their attention. On account of the cold, and because he’s left the window wide open, he might be left in peace for weeks. Then he would end up like Walt Disney, preserved frozen for some brighter tomorrow.

As his throat constricts to the size of a pinhead, the image of a frozen Disney forces a smile across his quivering lips. The sight of mom in Willie’s Corner, happy for once, puts the good kind of tears in his eyes.

Wheezing, he decides to unstring himself. No use anyhow. The belt’s too elastic, he’s too heavy, and the flimsy closet rod was liable to snap if he really tried. 

Before closing the window and collapsing in bed, he texts her the picture he’d taken, with an added caption: 64? More like 34. Sure was nice being home for your birthday this year.