Odd One Out

By Quinton Skinner

Written by a seasoned writer, Odd One Out will appeal to a broad audience

An alternately funny and warm novel that plays out like a mystery

A perfect fit for contemporary trade sales that will be look perfect next Tom Perotta or David Nichols on the fiction table

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prospect Park Books
• Release date: Apr 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781938849961

Quinton Skinner

Quinton Skinner is the author of the novels Amnesia Nights and 14 Degrees Below Zero, as well as the nonfiction books Do I Look Like a Daddy to You? A Survival Guide for First-Time Fathers and VH1 Behind the Music: Casualties of Rock. He has written nationally for publications including Variety, Glamour, American Theatre, and in the Twin Cities for all three of its major newspapers. He is currently the senior editor of Minnesota Monthly magazine.

Book preview

PART I

1

BEING TOLD THAT OUR NUMBERS HAD DWINDLED

IT STARTED WHEN MY FATHER WOKE US ALL IN THE MIDDLE of the night—at least it seemed like the middle of the night; I was a child. For all I know it was ten p.m.

Jesus! he shrieked, holding a piece of stationery in his shaking hand. "She’s left me! She’s left you, too! This is . . . it’s . . . abominable!"

I was used to watching my father tremble while searching for the right adjective. But this moment seemed to foretell something uniquely ominous, and I sensed that something real was unfolding that eclipsed his usual talent for hysteria.

Even then I knew right away that the fuss had to do with the mystery that took place between men and women. It was tied away into the afternoons when Mom and Dad would park us in front of the TV and instruct us not to come into their room because there was a matter they had to discuss. It had to do with the years to come, when I would make girls cry, wishing they wouldn’t, wishing I hadn’t.

Get your things! my father shouted in the white hallway of our two-story home. Get your shit! Grab what matters! We have to go!

He was wearing brown wool slacks and a green shirt untucked; his ample black hair was displayed in its usual Einsteinian disarray. A couple of hours before he had dispensed us to our beds while ostensibly waiting for our mother to return home from a night out with her female friends, a group that included the mothers of some of my classmates.

Daddy? my little brother Daniel said, emerging sleep-faced into the hall with his long uncut head of hair forming a halo around his face.

Danny, my father barked, we’re leaving. Get your Pokémon cards, or whatever the fuck it is, and pack your bag.

Daniel unleashed an expression of benign confusion while fondling his penis through his pajamas. I reached out for the supercharged form of my dad, feeling that somehow I should be responsible for calming him.

Daddy? said my big sister Sam, emerging from her room, a kingdom to which she had recently, triumphantly, staked her claim, leaving me and Daniel to the brutal negotiations of a small, shared space. What’s going on?

What’s going on? my father repeated, as if asking some other, invisible adult in the room. "What’s going on is that . . . your mother . . . your mother . . . she’s, well, she’s . . . left me."

Sam fixed her thirteen-year-old gaze on my father and slipped into a familiar, skeptical pose with her eyes drawn down. Dad, be calm, she said with dripping disdain. What time is it? Where’s Mom?

"Not here, my father said, raking his hand through his hair, waving the piece of paper as though it were a death certificate (which, in a way, it was, though I never actually read it and don’t know what it contained). She’s not here, Sam. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, honey. She’s not coming back."

My father never was able to hide the fact that Sam represented a unique and revered position in his life. His relationship with my mother was, even to my own unschooled eyes, fraught with misplaced conflict, but he always maintained a consistent deference to my sister’s authority and instincts. He spoke to her now as an ally, a confidante, and I remember that in that moment his fleeting collusion with me broke to pieces now that Sam was there.

For her part, Sam looked surprisingly taken aback. With her sandy brown flip-do, big eyes, and porcelain features, she tended to reign over the household like exotic royalty, ceding power only to my mother in some unspoken parliamentarian agreement. Her feet came together and her back stiffened; just a few years before, her thumb would have snuck up toward the corner of her mouth.

Dad, she said quietly. Maybe you didn’t understand what she meant.

The Burns household was one that had, for as long as I could remember, maintained a heartening level of daily resolution, while simmering just below the surface were all sorts of matters that were simply not to be discussed—at least not in front of us children. My father was unspeakably brilliant, as far as I was concerned (and the hands-off treatment with which my mother largely dealt with him seemed to confirm his exalted status), though he often seemed preoccupied with the question of why the larger world didn’t share this opinion. He wrote for magazines and newspapers in Minneapolis—the only home I’d known. We had, in fact, lived in the same house my entire life, which gave us kids a sense of solidity and privilege, though a trip to Davanni’s Pizza was a big deal and our cable TV came and went like the passage of the seasons. I know now that he must have earned disgracefully little money, considering his age and the range of his education and interests, but he and my mother did such a crackerjack job of keeping this information from me and my siblings that we considered him not only our resident genius but the driving engine of our five-person world.

However, it seemed that our numbers had dwindled.

I don’t understand what she means, my father said, dropping to his knees, sort of holding out the letter for Sam to look, but maintaining enough good sense not to let her actually see it. He turned grave. "I think I do. I really think I do. Your mother has decided that life with me is intolerable. That’s the precise word she used, Sam. Do you know what that word means?"

Sam was standing right next to Dad, and his comment allowed her to return to her comfortable disdain.

Yes, I know what that word means. She paused and adjusted the waistband of her pajamas. It means she thinks you suck.

My father’s face flattened, then he frowned deeply, and then he showed us something like a smile.

Yes, that’s precisely what she’s saying, he allowed. And now the cogent question, I suppose, is whether or not she’s right.

Daddy! Daniel called out from the bathroom, where the door was partway ajar and the light from inside made me realize we were all conferring in semidarkness.

You don’t suck, Sam said, moving a little closer to him.

My father took this in, nodding slightly, then looked over at me.

Daddy! Daniel said again. He was only six, just finished with kindergarten, a magician of chaos and charm who filled me with resentful jealousy and unlimited irritation.

Dad was still looking at me. My position felt tenuous; Daniel was calling from the toilet with some undoubtedly exotic disaster, Sam had just firmly weighed in with Dad’s non-suckitude, and the Big Guy was looking for an Amen. The stark lines of his face held angles of peril and slopes of disapproval. His eyes bored into mine, and he started to move that damned letter back and forth just below my eye level in an urgent tic.

I love you, Dad, I said to him, and I profoundly meant it. I felt worshipful in his presence, and thrillingly frightened, like a startled ancient peasant quaking gleefully in the presence of a king.

Dad was kind of tearing up, I remember now, firmly nodding as though securing my support had been precisely the factor that he required in order to move forward.

Daddy! Daniel said, now starting to sound more than a little defeated.

Dad, Sam pronounced, we really better check on him.

Daniel’s toilet crisis was indeed urgent and pungent; it took what seemed like a week’s supply of toilet paper and wet wipes before a warm bath could take care of the rest. Sam hung in there and administered an on-the-spot lesson in back-door hygiene. She must have learned this from someone, one of our parents, maybe both. We had long run a de facto nudist colony in our house, although Sam was on the verge of puberty and had recently dropped out.

Dad was on his knees drying Daniel. The letter lay on the floor out in the hall, and Sam and I both eyed it.

Read it, she commanded. Tell me what it says.

No way! I whispered with an anxious glance back at the open bathroom door. Dad was whistling, a sure sign his nervousness was building.

Chickenshit, Sam said.

She could call me whatever she liked, but even at ten I knew that there were vast swaths of life that were best left untouched by me. That is a wisdom I could stand to re-learn, come to think of it. Whatever was in that letter was in the private language between my mother and father, a glossolalia that encompassed all the factors beyond my control and that led, in my mind, to the inevitable specter that I constantly fought to keep at bay: death—my mother’s, my father’s, my sister’s, my own. Daniel, oddly enough, was somehow exempt. He always seemed untouchable by fate.

It’s all so fucking relative, Dad said, out in the hall again, with Daniel in his arms.

Don’t swear so much, Sam said.

Pardon me, Duchess, Dad replied. Desperate times call for profanity. But back to my original point: how relative it all is. You say I don’t suck, for which I thank you, by the way. But in your mother’s eyes, I obviously do. It’s not that I didn’t suspect it. But it comes as a shock to have it presented to me in such glaring and dramatic terms.

Dad, Daniel’s going to get cold, I said.

Oh, right. Dad looked down at the naked six-year-old in his arms. Daniel was small for his age; he could have easily passed for two years younger. Let’s get you dressed. Then we have to get back to packing. I want us on the road within half an hour.

He started throwing open dresser drawers in the room I shared with my little brother. Kevin, he barked at me. Make yourself useful. Pack a bag for yourself. We’re each going to need a week’s worth of clean clothes. And toss some books in. We’re going to be spending a lot of time in the car.

Dad, don’t be crazy, Sam said from the doorway. Her voice sounded defiant but I could see her beginning to chew her lower lip. Dad stared her down for a good thirty seconds, until she stalked off. A moment later I heard the door to her room slam behind her.

She says it’s intolerable, Dad quoted. What a statement to make. Not, ‘Glenn, there are some things you need to work on.’ Or, ‘Glenn, maybe we need to reconsider our domestic arrangements.’ Or, ‘Glenn, duck fast, because I’m about to throw something at your head.’

Daniel and I were staring at him. Dad wasn’t looking at either of us, and as was not infrequently the case, I felt as though I were eavesdropping on him.

No! he said, holding a pint-size Batman shirt up to Daniel without putting it on him. Instead it’s, it’s . . .

Dad crab-walked out to the hall, where he found the letter from Mom on the floor. As he unfolded it, I saw big water stains where Daniel had dripped on it. Or else they were from some earlier bout of tears, though that didn’t seem likely. I had never seen Dad really let go and cry, not even when his mother died.

"I really feel that the situation with you has become intolerable, and I no longer hold out hope for improvement, Dad read aloud. My brother and I avoided each other’s eyes; Daniel slowly slipped on his shirt. I know this is happening very suddenly but if I don’t do this now, I will almost certainly lose my nerve. I know the children will be in good hands with you until we sort out the immediate future. For the moment, I need to get away from you. Please don’t come looking for—"

He broke off in mid-sentence, looking up at us uncomfortably. I heard the sound of drawers sliding in Sam’s room, as well as a couple of heavy thuds, which meant that she was throwing things around angrily. I would have worried about her but it was pretty much standard procedure for Sam to be throwing things around angrily. For once I wasn’t in the line of fire.

Are we going to find Mom? I asked. Because that letter seems to pretty clearly spell out that—

Tut! Tut! Tut! Dad barked, his finger to his lips. I’ll be in charge of tactics, thanks very much. Like I said, it’s all relative. Your mother left in haste because she knew it was the wrong thing to do. By the time we get to her, I’m willing to lay big money that she will already be regretting the whole thing. We’ll collect her in the old Subaru, have a big laugh about it, and get a pizza. Bang! Back to old times.

How do you know where she is? I asked.

There’s only one place she would have gone, Dad said, folding his arms triumphantly and squinting like a cop on TV.

Aunt Beth’s house? Daniel asked.

We wouldn’t need a week’s worth of clothes if we were going to Aunt Beth’s, dumbass, I said.

My father flashed me a look of silent reproach over my word choice, though Daniel wasn’t fazed in the slightest, probably because he saw my point. Aunt Beth, my mother’s sister, lived a twenty-minute drive away, in Plymouth. Dad called it the place where you needed to take your Soma every day, a reference that I didn’t understand until years later and which he never bothered to explain to me.

"Not Aunt Alayne’s! Sam blurted from the doorway, startling us three boys. She had balled-up clothes clutched in each fist. Dad! We have to go to school!"

We were indeed in the meaty part of the school year, and Aunt Alayne’s house as a destination had the distinct disadvantage of being in Southern California.

I’ve thought of that, Dad said. I’ll call the school from the road and say there’s been an emergency. I’ll have your teachers email me your assignments and you can work on the road. Anyway, we’re not going to stop much. I can have us there in a couple of days, then a couple days back.

Sam looked at my father as though he had just sprouted wings or informed her that he was, in reality, a woman. For me, the prospect of missing a week of fourth grade was at worst a value-neutral proposition. Now that I thought about it, I wouldn’t mind at all a week away from Ms. Salveson’s high-strung attentions (she was just a year or two out of college, and from her behavior to date, she regarded the year we were spending in her care as the most crucial and formative of our young lives). Daniel was in first grade, already at least a year ahead of his classmates academically, so he could pretty much fall into a well for six months and not miss much. Sam, however, I understand now, was swimming in the cusp-of-puberty waters of middle school. I saw the look of horror in her eyes, and understood that being absent for a week, over a family emergency, no less, entailed the prospect of being branded weird, unfit, and might well result in losing precious points in her social standing.

Dad, if you have to go, leave us with Aunt Beth, Sam said, speaking very slowly in that hypnotic mode she employed when trying to talk Dad off the ledge. They have three cars and she doesn’t work. She can drive us to school. If you explain things to her, she might even come stay here with us until you get back.

Not an option, my father said.

Dad!

Sam, that is not an option. Dad left the room, nudging past Sam and moving down the hall to his own. He lurched into the closet and produced a soft-sided suitcase. The three of us followed him; I turned on the overhead light so he could see what he was doing.

Dad, listen to me, Sam pleaded. I really don’t want to—

First of all, I would like to leave your Aunt Beth out of this, if it’s at all possible. Dad indiscriminately snatched a handful of balled-up socks from a dresser drawer and tossed them into the suitcase. They were all different colors; Dad had a thing about never wearing plain white sweat socks, even when he was exercising.

Why? Sam demanded.

You will have to accept the reality that there are things going on here which you do not know about, and which you would not understand, Dad said, slowly and precisely.

How do you know? Sam shouted. How do you know if you don’t try me? Maybe I would understand perfectly well—

You children are not going to be privy to the intimate details of my personal life. With that, Dad started to take out shirts from the closet; he threw them into the suitcase while they were still on their hangers.

Dad, this is all pretty personal, I said. You have to admit.

Yes, and it’s more than you should have to deal with, and I’ll probably be apologizing to you for this for the rest of my life. He was throwing jeans and corduroys on top of the shirts and socks. "If I could completely shelter you from this, I would, believe me. I’m tempted to assign the lion’s share of the blame to your mother, what with her abandoning us and all, but she’s not here to defend herself."

You, Daniel said, in his high-pitched voice.

Pardon? Dad said, looking down at him.

"She didn’t abandon us," Daniel corrected; in his child’s accent, the word sounded something like a-dan-dun. "She abandoned you."

Dad stared at Daniel for a while, with a look on his face as though someone had slapped him with a damp fish. A few moments later a smile curled the corners of his lips and he affectionately ran his hands through Daniel’s hair.

That’s my boy, Danny, my father said. "Be precise. Always be precise."

"How about if we be precise here instead of in LA?" Sam asked, putting as much ice water into her tone as she could manage, though still visibly spooked and—I thought—aware that she was fighting a battle already lost.

We followed Dad down the hall, where he busily started to fill up a little leather bag with his razor and toothbrush. Sam stood in the doorway breathing heavily and theatrically, as though she would somehow respire Dad into changing his mind.

He looked up. Stop staring, he said. And get your shit together. We’re losing time.

The battle was lost. In truth, I wasn’t all that broken up about the prospect of a car trip. True, I would be stuck with Daniel in the backseat most of the time, and I would have to deal with Dad without the mitigating influence of Mom. But I was still at a point at which Dad also represented a good deal of dangerous fun. And I was also getting the picture that we, the children, were an integral part of Dad’s desperate bid to keep the family together. It hadn’t really occurred to me until then, what with all the panic, that there was a very concrete possibility that our lives had changed irrevocably. The realization gave the moment a gossamer, liquid quality, as I felt my reality oozing outside of its usually sturdy frame.

The important thing is that we stick together, Dad was saying, from seemingly someplace far away. A strange feeling had started in my gut and radiated upward. The light fixture in the bathroom danced a little, and silvery shards of crystal light began to emanate from its center.

If we can just stay together, we can restore the balance, Dad said. Some day this will be something we’ll all laugh about together. Along with your mother.

I reached out and put my hand against the door frame. For no reason at all I was thinking about my daily school lunch, and how my mother had started to half-fill my water bottle at my request, so that my backpack wouldn’t be quite as heavy. It was just the sort of thing I could never count on Dad to remember.

My dad was calling my name. Kevin? He sounded as though he was calling from the bottom of a well. Or was I the one at the bottom? That would certainly explain the way my field of vision was narrowing into a circle of visible things (the toilet, the magazine rack beside it) while deep, rich blackness closed in from all sides.

Glenn, I said, and it took a moment to realize that I had said it. I never, ever, called either of my parents by their first name.

Someone was holding onto me, probably Sam. There was a rush of voices, and I heard Daniel shriek and, I thought, run back down the hall to our room. That was probably a good idea, I thought. It was certainly for the best that he not be around to see what was going to happen next.

I was on the floor. I saw my father’s brown eyes widen in horror as he stood over me, and felt intensely sorry to be adding to his troubles. Childhood emergencies were not something he handled with particular aplomb, as demonstrated by Daniel’s potty accident. It occurred to me that Daniel must have panicked when Dad woke us up, that must have been why he had shit all over himself. I also felt intensely sorry for, and protective of, my little brother. No one should have to be so frightened that it makes them shit. No one.

And that was about it. I started to panic along with Sam and Dad over what was happening to me, and then it didn’t seem to matter anymore. I effortlessly cut the cord that connected me to the world of things and people, and began to drift with the most enveloping and welcoming feeling of bliss. That’s about all I remember.

2

SOMEHOW LIKE BEING BACKSTAGE IN LIFE’S DRAMA

I HAVE TO GIVE DAD CREDIT: HE RECOVERED QUICKLY FROM my episode, efficiently dispatching the puke I’d spewed all over myself. Fortunately I didn’t remember doing so, having a family-famed aversion to throwing up. He got me cleaned up, and even packed for me. He had the presence of mind to bring my copy of Total Baseball, which contained stats for everyone who had ever played the game, and with which I could have entertained myself for a thousand years in Limbo.

The evidence that I had vomited was abundant in the crust around my molars—Dad’s rallying me, unconscious, into the car had included brushing my teeth for me—and the rest I pieced together from a backseat conversation that went something like this:

ME: What happened? Where are we?

DANIEL (Staring into the lit screen of a handheld car-racing videogame that Dad had bought on impulse while paying for gas at the SuperAmerica by our house): In the car, stupid.

ME: I can see that. Are we going to California?

DANIEL: I hope we go without you.

ME: You’re a little shit, you know that?

DANIEL: So? You’re a big shit, then.

ME: Daniel. Seriously. What happened to me?

DANIEL: You fell over and puked all over yourself. You smell gross.