Day 339 - The Picture on the Wall

The Picture on the Wall

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 

Rum 151 with a splash of Coca-Cola and one ice cube. There were conversations throughout the house. No one was in the upstairs hallway. Aaron could stand in silence and hold his drink and if anyone happened to look, he could make it look as though he was meant to be there and that he was doing something.

151… what a silly awful drink. Aaron took a sip. A sip was enough. No one drank 151. Aaron did, but he only sipped it. A benefit to bringing a drink to a party that no one wanted was that no one was going to drink your drink. It would be there whenever you went looking for it. There were drinks and laughter and someone had switched the music from classic rock to some sort of slow smoky jazz. Maybe things had turned sexy in the other room. Maybe Aaron thought, but he didn’t go to see. He was a busy man.

Some said that 151 caught fire too easily and companies tired of being sued. Aaron might have guessed that selling something so close to pure alcohol was just a bad idea in general and that no one needed to drink anything that strong in order to get drunk.

Aaron sipped. He didn’t drink.

He took another sip.

When it was announced that they were going to discontinue manufacturing 151, Aaron had bought a case. Every year he drank one bottle. Slowly. Spread out across the year. In about four years he was going to have to switch to another brand or pay some god-awful premium online. The thought of stopping hadn’t occurred to him.

Aaron had lost his thought. He became distracted. Perhaps because his drink was so strong.

The photos on the wall had caught his attention. He had rarely been upstairs, and never paused to look at the family photos on the wall. How often do you really do that in another person’s house?

Old and faded, black-and-whites in old chipped wooded antique frames. Family members from the past hundred or hundred and fifty years or so.

Frank was German or German-Swede or German-Franco or something like that. One of the many many Germanic tribes that ran all over Europe. He didn’t talk much about his parents or grandparents or any of that. But he kept the photos on the wall.

Aaron had considered taking one of the DNA tests. He wasn’t really sure how they worked or what they would compare him to. He thought he came from Ireland, but like most people he was a mutt of some sort. And if he was a mix, would his DNA look like a mix of Irish and British from the 1920s? Or any number of other mixes from the Midwest to Southwest American thereafter? If he filled out the paperwork and said he was from Indonesia, would the company get confused and think someone from the Pacific had traveled to the UK? Or would they think they needed to reevaluate their whole process? If enough people had lied or filled the paperwork out wrong or claimed a nationality they didn’t have, would the company know? Or would everyone register as the wrong thing?

He thought he was Irish, but he didn’t really want to be wrong. So, he hadn’t sent the test back in. Now he would never know. Now he could be whatever he wanted to be.

Frank had a hard face. Aaron believed he was German. He probably was. The man in the photograph had a similar hard face. Was that Frank’s great-grandfather? Or some great-uncle? There were lots of hard men and hard faces. Aaron was pretty sure he was seeing doubles. In a way they all looked alike.

He took another sip of the 151.

If Frank was lying about being German, if Frank was lying about this being his family, he was doing a bang-up job of it.

Aaron remembered what had made him pause. Some sort of family reunion photograph. Thirty or forty or more of all ages. There in the upper left was Frank. But the photo was old and worn and black and white. The photo was over a hundred years old. But it looked just like him. Frank with that hard face, looking right back at him.

Somewhere in this house there must be a photo album. Somewhere in this house was Frank. Aaron really didn’t want to go looking. He didn’t want to know. He wanted to get out of there, unseen and unheard. He didn’t want anyone to notice him staring at photos and wonder what it was he saw. There would be no explanation. There would be no answers.

He set the glass down. Down the stairs and straight across. The fastest route. The opposite way from the bar and the bottles and his 151. Half a bottle or more remained. But escape was paramount. The rum would be sacrificed. Better the rum than him or some family secret that wasn’t meant to be seen.