Who Kissed Charlie Fine?

Chapter 9

That afternoon, they took a ride through Charlie's old neighbourhood. His family's old home looked exactly the same, save for a slight change in exterior colour and several new ornamental mouldings. Charlie felt a little wistful for his youth and for his parents in equal measure. His love for his mother and father was innate but something more akin to gratitude for the safety and care they provided him. They had been pleased with him, proud, but rarely affectionate. He loved them more as people the more he understood them.

His mother was only twenty when she married, without having explored much of life to find what she liked in it. Without an adventurous mind or spirit or partner, her world was very small; a comfortable library full of books she knew all the endings to. Without struggle or ambition, even motherhood seemed anticlimactic. Season after season, she was surrounded by the same people at the same parties talking about the same things and the only way to see anything differently became through the bottom of a glass.

Charlie's father was too concerned with order to ever introduce anything out of the ordinary. He worked tirelessly and never slept more than five hours a night except when on vacation, but even family holidays were repetitively mundane. Every winter they went to the Keys, every summer they rented a cottage in Tobermory. Never did they venture outside the familiar. Charlie doubted it ever occurred to his father that anyone might like to.

His father's mind was ever elsewhere, though not due to discontentment, or so it seemed. He liked routine and had a strong sense of duty to his family, his company and society at large. He might have made a good military man were he not a pacifist, the characteristic which was likely most detrimental to his marriage. Charlie's mother had a temper. It was no surprise where he got his own from. She would often curse her circumstances, without suggesting any realistic arrangement that could make them more palatable, and accuse her husband of imagined insults and cold behaviour, especially when drinking. Ironically, Charlie's father chose not to engage in her arguments, fearful of saying anything hurtful, true or not, that might change things. He likely thought of his patience as an extension of his loyalty. Unfortunately, Charlie's mother took it as indifference, adding to her deep sense of purposelessness.

His mother had passed eleven years earlier of complications due to alcohol and prescriptive drugs, his father, three years after that due to an aneurism. Charlie missed them, but his real grief was that they could not have been happier while they lived.

He had sold the home to a couple by the last name of Stirkens. As Martin and Charlie chanced a closer look by walking right up to the front gate, they noticed a welcoming sign of engraved brass. No doubt it was meant to say, 'Stirkens' Manor', but thanks to some aggressively ornate cursive where the Rs and Ns appeared interchangeable, on first glance the sign read, 'Stinkers' Moron'. Disillusioned or distracted, Charlie's parents would have laughed at that.

After dinner at a quaint trattoria in a little strip near city hall, Charlie and Martin stopped off at the liquor store and then went back to Sterling's for the night.

"Tomorrow I want to visit Claire," Charlie announced.

"Not me, I'm on vacation," Martin said, slurping a lagar.

"Why would I bring you? She's not going to want to talk about her missing father in front of a total stranger."

"What am I supposed to do then?"

"Why don't you look up the town online. Pick any attraction you want to see and that's what we'll do when I'm done at the farm."

"I'm nearing my data limit. I'll have to go to the pub for WiFi."

"Fine. I'll drop you off first."

"They won't let me use their WiFi if I don't order something so..."