Archie

Archer didn’t know what to say. He looked down at the man in the hospital bed in front of him and choked out, “That’s not my father.”

Eight hours ago, his father, Ben, had been unmarred and healthy, driving the old family minivan to his latest art show. And who knew? Maybe Ben was still unmarred and healthy. But the man before Archer, the one dying in the white-sheeted bed in front of him, was not his father.

Archer had never imagined his night going this way, with the one a.m. phone call from the hospital and his mother coming down the stairs, hair tousled with sleep, asking in a voice that made her sound slightly drunk (even though she didn’t drink anymore), “Who is it, Archer?”

He couldn’t reply. There was a block in his throat.

“Archer, honey? Who’s calling at this hour?”

“It’s Dad,” he managed to say. Even though it really wasn’t.

“What?”

Archer couldn’t explain, couldn’t really register the words of the sympathetic yet serious female voice on the other end of the line. He handed the phone to his mother and watched as her expression went slack, her face ashen. There were white globs of sleep in her eyes, dark bags underneath them.

“Mom…” he said softly, and placed a hand on her shoulder. She muttered “OK, we’ll be right there” into the phone and hung up with trembling hands.

When Ben had left the house that evening, kissing his wife goodbye and clapping his son on the shoulder with the warning “Don’t cause trouble while I’m gone,” it had been the same as any other time he’d hustled to an art exhibition. Each one—nearly one every month, sometimes two—proved his futile yet persistent attempt to make it big. Ben was a good artist, but he tried too hard. At least, that’s what Archer and his mother believed.

But Ben wouldn’t hear any of it. He never had. So he went to each art show the moment the announcement appeared in his inbox, thinking this is it. This is the one.

It never was the one.

When he’d gotten the email this time, however, Ben had been even more determined than usual, if that were possible.

“It’s by invitation only,” he’d told his wife and son. “This is a huge honor! Maybe the biggest I’ve received since college!”

He had been nationally recognized in college. Got to travel to New York and everything. You’d think that would be enough for a small-town guy from New England, right? Not for Ben.

“Do you really have to go?” his wife had asked in a tired voice reserved only for times like this, when Ben was being particularly stubborn about his quest for fame.

“Yes.”

After that had followed a brief argument, with his wife rattling off how Ben was barely around, how he should spend more time with his son. To which Ben responded that Archer was in college, he didn’t want his parents to hang out with him anymore, and didn’t his wife have plenty of girlfriends who were always asking her to tea and book clubs and silly things like that that took her away from Archer?

Which inevitably led to a different tiff about which parent did more “silly” things.

His mother was a small-town novelist with a couple of books printed by indie publishers, but she’d been happy to stop at that. She didn’t have the heart for fame, nor had she ever desired it. Archer knew she was insanely talented, and he thought that if anyone deserved clout, it was her. But she was also very wise, and she knew that fame wasn’t for her. Especially if people started digging into her past and found out she had been a teenage alcoholic.

His dad, on the other hand… Ben was a good artist, but Archer couldn’t tell if he thought that because it was actually true or if he just couldn’t tell the difference between good and bad art. He was more like his mother—inclined to the writing side of art rather than the visual side.

While Archer knew he was gifted—how could he not know, with people telling him all his life—he didn’t want fame like his dad. He just wanted to fit in. And he knew being famous would completely ruin the comfortable lifestyle he’d carefully built for himself. 

His mother supported him in whatever path he chose. His father didn’t care what Archer did, but he did have hopes that his son would gain fame—though not before Ben himself, of course.

Archer just wanted to be Archer, a nobody from a town no one had ever heard of in northern New England. The only problem? It was kind of impossible to stay anonymous with two genius parents and one who was constantly chasing more fame.

Maybe that’s why he’d gone to college in California... to try to get away from the fame his father brought upon the family. To try to start over and really, truly be a nobody.

At last, his parents stopped bickering and returned to the main problem.

“It’s a six hour drive, and there’s supposed to be a blizzard that weekend,” said his mother.

“A little snow isn’t going to stop me,” Ben scoffed. He appealed to Archer for support, flashing him a paternal grin. “Nothing can stop me, right, Archie?”

Archer, who couldn’t care less what his father did on the weekends (unless it involved infidelity—that was the only thing he’d never support), rolled his eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his father. In the end, Ben was a decent guy and a good dad, and that’s what mattered. Even if he wasn’t always around to prove how decent and good he was.

“Don’t call me Archie,” he replied. “I’m too old for that.”

How could Archer have known that in a couple of weeks, as he stood in a strange, sterilized hospital room, he’d wish anything to have his father standing in front of him, a smile glazed with the prospect of fame on his lips, calling him Archie?