The Apple Falls Far This Time

Robert is about to hit the maintenance portion of the evening when he sees himself at the end of the bar.

Maintenance is not an easy time of night. Gone is the hope of the first drink, when bitterness slides down his throat and a small buzz sets off in his brain and he thinks, this is the day it works. Coupled with the impression of liveliness that the bar imparts and the neon-light promise of a night well spent, Robert feels almost happy at first, in his usual spot in his usual bar.
After a couple more drinks, that hope is popped like a bubble. Now it’s down to the maintenance of the buzz, which, though it's not as inspiring and bombastic as he wished, at least creates a nice white noise in his skull and swallows up the darker thoughts. For now.

Robert, who knows how to recognize the stages of an alcoholic night, expects maintenance to be a couple hours of monotony preceding the bliss of a blackout. He has already handed over his keys, and thus his opportunity to turn the night into something different, to the wary bartender. He expects the night to be dissolved by the alcohol and half-remembered in the morning.

What he doesn't expect is a child of about eight, decked out in blue footie pajamas and perched on the edge of a bar stool, swinging his legs above the dirty bar floor. 

Robert sees the child for the first time when the socialite crowd of flitting 20-year-olds begins to disperse, long after the bells hung at the top of the steeple down the street chime for midnight.

The child seems almost too clear against the late night blur, sitting alone, spotlighted by the bare lights. It’s his incongruity that makes him stand out, at first. A bar is an adult world, where the youngest expected member is a seventeen year old with a fake I.D. But though the little boy has the body of someone too young for a bar, he has the expression of a hardened regular.
The second thing that strikes Robert about the boy is his likeliness. The boy’s eyes are slightly lighter than Robert’s, a golden amber as opposed to deep brown, but he cannot shake the feeling that comparing this boy to a photograph of Robert from his childhood would show an uncanny familiarity.

"'Scuse me." With a slightly unsteady hand, Robert beckons to the bartender, who sidles over, looking bored. He glances at Robert's empty glass and then his tired eyes.

“Sorry, I have to cut you off. Do you want some water?”

"No, it's not about a drink. This is a weird-- s'there a kid sitting over there?"

"Over there? Yeah, that's the bar owner's kid. I don't know why he's down here this late." The bartender walks over to the kid and bends down, talking to him in a patronizing voice Robert can almost hear. The bartender points upstairs and the kid shakes his
head, glaring. Robert looks away, but when the bartender returns to his post at the middle of the bar the kid is still there.

“‘Scuse me,” Robert murmurs, glancing at the kid, and suddenly it’s like glancing into his past.  “Are you real?”

The little boy slowly, almost drunkenly, turns his head. Robert wonders with a jolt of fear if that is real alcohol in the kid’s glass.

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“Some’a these nights I dunno."

The boy looks at him with a barely concealed malice in his brown eyes. “You talk funny.”

Robert, embarrassed by his slurring, casts his gaze away from the innocent child's. "It's been a long night."

"You sound like my dad. When he's mean."

Robert and the boy, his face stony in the low lighting, stare at each other. Robert, who feels so much empathy for this boy, this fragment of his own childhood, cannot help but feel sorrow welling up in his chest. He wonders if the kid is downstairs because his father, upstairs, is on a rampage. Robert can remember the long nights of terror, trying to escape a man who seems to be everywhere at once. The look on the boy’s face as he turns back to his drink says “I’ll never be like him.” Robert once had that resolve.

“Hey, kid.” The boy looks up from watching the bubbles rise in his soda. His brown eyes suddenly look so familiar, darker, terribly like his own, down to the sadness and fatigue. “What’s your name?”

“Bobby.”

There are always moments that crumble people. They tear down the walls of denial and pride that are painstakingly built over the years. These moments reveal the mirrors that exist inside every person that have grown cloudy with the passage of time. Robert looks into his mirror, cracked though it is, and through his drunken haze sees the face of his father, etched with lines and adorned with cruel, glittering eyes. He looks up at Bobby in horror.

"I'm so sorry, Bobby." He is whispering again and his voice cracks in the middle of his childhood nickname. The sensation of hot tears in his eyes is a novelty. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to end up like this. I know you’re disappointed in me. I’m disappointed in me, too. All these years, I turned to drinking because I was so worried I was going to be just like him that it crippled everything I tried to do. But look what happened, Bobby. Look at me. I ended up every bit my father’s son.”

Miraculously, as he tries not to sob, Robert sees a gradual change sweep over Bobby’s face, so childlike and expressive.

“You’re not like my father after all,” he says softly. “I never saw him get sad. He would’ve gotten angry.”
Robert only looks up when Bobby’s small hand reaches for his. “Take me home.”

On legs that try to betray him with every movement, Robert rises from his seat as Bobby jumps down from his, landing on a sticky floor that roils around Robert like an angry sea. Together they make their way to the door, Bobby’s hand tightening around his every time Robert sways, creating an anchor. Opening the doors, Robert is greeted by a rush of cool, refreshing night air, clearing his head of some of the cobwebs it accrued over the evening.

Robert reaches the street and looks down to ask Bobby if he thinks he is going to be okay. But his hand is empty and Robert is alone, standing on his own under the starless sky. His heart beating fast and clear, Robert whirls around, nearly loses his balance, and walks back into the bar.

“There was a kid with me jus’ now, where’d he go?” He broadcasts the question to the remaining people in the bar, but no one answers save for the bartender.

“Bobby? He went upstairs hours ago, when I told him to go to sleep.”

Maintenance always started with that first drink. But forgiveness starts with small hand in his, tightening every time he sways, leading him away from the neon lights and towards the beginning of a new life.