The Easy Way Out Read Free Page A

humming something that sounded a lot like “Put the Blame on Mame.” She had on a severe dark-blue pleated skirt, a starched white shirt, and penny loafers. Her face was heavily made up, and her red hair was even stiffer than usual. She looked a lot like a brilliant, troubled lesbian math teacher I’d had in junior high. She started complimenting Arthur the minute we walked in the door. From the enthusiastic way she hugged him and completely ignored me, I knew she was hiding something. Then I heard my father, Ryan, and Tony shouting at each other in the basement.
    Arthur looked at me over Rita’s shoulder and rolled his eyes. I hadn’t yet taken him for a visit when there wasn’t a battle or a scene of some sort.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked.
    â€œNothing’s going on, Patrick. Why does there always have to be something ‘going on’? A little political discussion, that’s all. You know how your father loves to shoot off his big mouth.”
    My mother grabbed Arthur’s hand, dragged him into the family room, and incoherently started to tell him that she’d rented Yentl the night before and still couldn’t get over the beauty of Barbra Streisand’s Semitic profile. The last time he’d visited, Arthur had been regaled with tales of a wonderful bar mitzvah she’d been to forty years earlier.
    I left them and wandered downstairs.
    Not long after Tony had moved out of his subterranean apartment, Ryan and his wife had separated and my older brother had moved in. The one finished room, next to the garage, was strewn with Tony’s rejects from his basement bachelor-pad days and odds and ends from Ryan’s childhood bedroom. Tony’s round king-sized bed with built-in stereo was covered with twin-bed-sized sheets imprinted with racing cars and tugboats.
    My father, Ryan, and Tony were furiously pacing around in concentric circles, shouting back and forth. Ryan was guzzling from a massive can of Australian ale, and my father, dressed in a powder-blue suit that was too outdated for even O’Neil’s Men’s Shop to think of selling, was sucking on a cigarette.
    I made eye contact with my father, opened my mouth, and was instantly cut off.
    â€œThe last thing we need around here is more input, Patrick, so don’t even ask what’s going on. Where’s that tall friend of yours?”
    My parents, my brothers, and I are all short. The closest we ever come to functioning successfully as a family is in discussing someoneelse’s height in disparaging tones. “Arthur’s upstairs,” I said. “He and Rita are debating the Old Testament.”
    â€œYou treat that guy like dirt,” my father said, “leaving him up there with your mother. She could go on for hours, chewing his ear off.”
    Tony turned to me. “I’ll tell you what’s going on, Patrick. What’s going on is they already told her.”
    â€œYou’re kidding!” I said, appalled. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I was so happy to be taken into someone’s confidence, I jumped at the chance to side with him. “Told who what, by the way?”
    â€œThey told her,” he repeated, his palms pleading to the ceiling.
    â€œThese two and the one upstairs invited Loreen over here for dinner two weeks ago and told her I was going to propose to her.”
    My father and Ryan began shouting in unison, insisting that it had slipped out, that it had been an accident. “He talks as if we planned it,” my father said to me. He turned to Ryan. “Tell your brother what happened. I’m too upset to get into it.”
    Since Ryan had moved back into my parents’ house, he’d gained forty pounds and lost a considerable amount of hair on the top of his head. He was spilling out of a gray jogging suit with a peculiar hooded jacket and matching pants with red stripes down the legs. Ryan had