The only reason I really came back was because my dad died. I can’t think of another reason for me to have gone back there. I think, if he hadn’t died for another twenty years, I wouldn’t’ve gone back there for twenty years.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not because I don’t love my parents or anything. Shit, they were probably the best parents a guy like me deserved. I just don’t like the hometown. It’s a little dead-end suburb. There used to be a big factory there that pumped money into the little burg like no one’s business. But then it went outta work, moved to some place like Indonesia or something. When I was young, I remember my dad working there.

He worked there until I was eleven. After that, he never really got on the ball. For one, my mom had to start working. She was a secretary at some law office or something like that and always had to get hit on by the old man. My dad’d always get drunk and say he was gonna go over their houses and beat the living shit out of them, but he never did. My mom’d tell him to calm down, tell him to sit down. He never did anything about their comments about how nice her skirt was and how nicer it’d be if it was even shorter.

My dad never really recovered. He worked at a bar for a while, but he was fired when the boss found out he was drinking a bit on the job. He worked at my uncle’s construction job for a bit, but that fell apart when he screwed his back up royally when picking up some heavy bit of metal or something. After that my dad took the job he stayed in for the rest of his life, which was sitting on the armchair in the living room and watching sports. Normally, he’d have a can of beer between his legs, warm as shit.

That’s where he died, actually. A baseball game on the television, a can of beer warming at his crotch, and a sleepy smile on his face. They didn’t notice he was dead until the game was over, and they think he may have died before the second inning. My mom said he died in happiness, but that’s bullshit. If I died like that, I don’t think I could face god. I could never die with stained sweatpants, a dirty jersey, and a beer.

I don’t think they’d let me in heaven if I died like that, to tell the truth. But my dad was a good enough guy. I’m sure Saint Peter’ll let him go on through.

My life was pretty compact. At the time, I had no real girlfriend, my apartment just had the rent paid off for the next two months (I won a bit of money betting on my dad’s favorite baseball team, his last gift to me), I was still working at the dive-bar where I only worked the dead-end night shift, and it was really, really easy to get off for a long time. Shit, they wouldn’t’ve even noticed if I didn’t show up without telling them beforehand.

I just go in my car, and I drove. It didn’t take me long, what with the way I drive and the fact that the roadways to the little dead-end town weren’t exactly jammed with people dying to get in. There were people dying to get out, but most of them never had a chance of getting out.

The sign that welcomed me was rickety, and it had some graffiti on it. Welcome was covered with cocks and stuff. I think there may have been someone’s name on it. Someone’s tag or something. The kids that did that probably hate the town more than anything.

And they’ll end up becoming the members of the town. Damned fixtures. The nice man that owns the store, the guy who owns the bar, the police chief, the fireman who saved a bunch of kids one time and gets his picture in the paper. They’d never leave, and they still didn’t know it.

It took me a bit, but I nearly remembered everything. I passed a few places I remember being the goddamned monoliths of my childhood. Some were rundown and covered with weeds, but some were still-standing, just as I remembered them.

I got to my house pretty quick. Quicker than I thought. The grass looked like it hadn’t been cut in a week or so, and the chain link fence was rusted like insanity. The tree in the front yard was dead, and the dog the chain link fence had been made for had been dead ten years and counting. It’d never be taken down though.

God knows I wouldn’t do it, and neither would my brothers.

I walked through the door after nearly getting killed by the damn sharp edges of the gate. It wasn’t locked, because my mom never was much for locking doors. She forgot. It was a wonder we were never robbed. My mom was there, and she was doing a good job of not crying. My two brothers, both older, sat on either side of her on the old, overstuffed couch. No one was sitting on the armchair, even though it looked pretty damn overcrowded on the couch.

So I sat on the chair and said hi. And that apparently set her off. Jimmy, the eldest, stood up and called me an ass. Evan, the middle, sort of pet her hair and let her cry into his stained tee-shirt. Evan still lived with the parents, parent now, and Jimmy was married. He was a pharmacist (the pharmacist) and was married. I stood up, and I was about to ask him what his problem was, but his wife came in, holding a baby in her arm. She was alright looking, and I was about to say hi.

Jimmy told me to leave. I had been there only a few seconds. It was like a goddamned record. So I said bye and made a really big show of slamming the door. And that probably made my mom feel even worse, so then I immediately felt like even more shit for doing that to her. I got back in my car, and I had enough gas for it to not be a bother, so I went to the old bar my dad used to work at. It was sort of the neighborhood joint.

It was smoky, because non-smoking bans don’t exist in small towns. There were a few cops there, and most of the cops were smoking. I sat at one of the empty stools, and I ordered a rum and coke. When it got to me, I took a longer sip than necessary. There was a ton of ice in it, but I was too tired to complain. The rum was also a bit off, and the coke was a bit too syrupy. But I didn’t care. I just watched the game.

It took me a really long time to realize that someone was next to me. I took a real song sip of the glass, because I could see out of the corner of my eye that it was a girl. And when it comes to women, it doesn’t do well to act overeager. So I took a sip, but then I turned. She was blonde, blue-eyes. She was pretty pale, and she wasn’t exactly overdeveloped, but she was pretty. She had a scar on her cheek that she tried to cover up with makeup, but she did a real shit job ‘cause I still saw it.

After staring a bit at the scar, something started to tug at the back of my mind sorta weird. So I tilted my head and just smiled, like I was real excited to see her. I knew I knew her. The face was familiar, but nothing was following the face.

“Hey,” was all she said. And a lot of shit followed that hey. A lot of baggage. A lot of pain and a lot of joy.

Her name was Vivian, except I called her Vivi, because her full name always sounded a bit too floofy for me. She was my longest girlfriend. She was the one I had during most of my high school years. A cheerleader, not exactly the head, but that didn’t matter. Vivi was the prettiest girl that would even think to look at me, so I stayed by her. I never cheated, but it wasn’t like I could’ve. All of the other girls were either too ugly or wouldn’t even bother saying hi to me.

And I smiled, and I reached out to hug her. She was thin and boney. Underneath the ratty shirt, I didn’t feel much. There was a lot of bone. Her spine was thin and spiky, and her heart was beating like I was someone that really mattered. She told me that she was sorry about my dad and was happy to see me. I didn’t really answer that, because the fact that he was dead hadn’t really hit me yet.

I let her go after a bit, and we just smiled. I never really wanted to break up with her, and I don’t think she did either. But she wanted to go to a college pretty far away, because she was smart. I couldn’t go with her, because I was a dumbass and not very smart. It wasn’t really a break-up. We just agreed to see other people or something, but that’s basically a break-up. I didn’t want to deal with a long-distance thing, and neither did she. A few months later, a buddy and I went to the city and bought cheap apartments. I never really looked back at the old life, and truth be told, I hadn’t thought of her in a while.

I kissed her a few times after I had a few more rum and cokes, and she let me. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes, and I never remembered her smoking. I had heard what happened to her, but never connected it to much more. She had gotten into drugs, flunked out of the bigtime college, tried to kill herself, so her parents made her go to this rehab place and brought her back to stay at their house. I hadn’t seen her in years, and I honestly stopped thinking about her.

But it was like I never even left. We kissed and kissed and drank, like the old days. Except, we were both legal-aged, and it wasn’t warm natty lights in the woods. It was honest-to-god alcohol, and there was ice involved. It didn’t take long for me to start getting a bit too into her, and the bartender kindly told me to get my drunk ass outta there and to stop hanging on Vivi. Apparently it was her dad. So that didn’t exactly put me in the good books.

I was drunk, but I got into the car. We drove to her house, and she unlocked the door. We ran, giggling like damned teenagers into her room. I don’t remember if we had sex, but I woke up nude. So the answer was probably yes, even though I had gotten a crapload of alcohol in me.

I left without waking her up, but I did give her a little kiss on the cheek. I looked at her for a bit, and I brushed my hand through her hair. It was pretty easy to get dressed quietly, and I left before her dad could beat my ass or something. No one was up, which was good. I was gonna visit her after the funeral, because I didn’t think she’d go. The after-party was at the bar, as a gift from her dad to my mom, but they wouldn’t go to the funeral. My dad always hated him. I wanted to get back in touch with her. I remembered loving her and wanted to do it again,

I got to my old house in just enough time to see everyone leaving. I managed to miss the wake, which was the day before, but I had some time to go to the funeral. They were all pretty mad at me, but I didn’t care. I brought my stuff outta the trunk, and I managed to get dressed in the living room in about ten minutes.

It was getting pretty damned urgent. I drove really fast, but I managed to get there in time. I sat at the back of the church, because I didn’t want to go up too far and make an ass of myself. The church was moderately filled, and there was an American flag on my dad’s casket, ‘cause of the time he was in Vietnam. There was incense everywhere, and it was sort of pretty to smell.

I think it was meant to please god, but once my mom told me it showed his soul as ascending to heaven. It showed that he was light, free from sin, and allowed to go to heaven. I had a hard time believing that shit back then, but it was sort of nice to think of.

And then a weird thought came into my head. Who would eat dad’s sins? A week before, I read in some book how in some cultures, there’s something called a sin-eater. Before someone dies, they symbolically (even though they think it’s literal and shit) eat a dude’s sins so that he can get into heaven. And no one had done that to my dad. I had some crazy panic in my chest, thumping like shit, but I didn’t know why.

People in my family are sort of cursed with shit luck. There’s always something bad happening to us. Jimmy and Evan sort of dodged it, but my dad never did. And neither did his grandpa, who ended up shooting himself after losing the house in a poker game. And my great-grandpa ended up dying in some freak accident in the mines where he worked.

As soon as the service ended, I suddenly got the idea that someone in my family had been a sin-eater. But, there’s the question. It’s one no one ever cares about.

Who eats the goddamned sins of a sin-eater? And the answer came as soon as the question. The descendants. The sin and the bad luck and the excess shit slid down the line until it stopped, until it dissipated.

I got in my car. My mom and brothers wouldn’t look at me, but I followed the procession to the graveyard. It was cold, and the sun was setting as they dropped him into the grave. We were all invited to a party at Vivi’s dad’s bar, so we went. There was always an after-party in Irish and German funerals. It was probably the most important bit. You had a party like they were there.

I was the last person there. Everyone was grouped out in the front, talking, and some were crying. I parked, got outta my car, and asked where the party was. A few people turned to me and shot me some glares like I just shit on a cross and killed a baby with it.

Someone eventually told me what happened. Vivian killed herself. She walked to the doctor’s office, which was the tallest goddamned building the city and she jumped off. She fell feet-first, so she was alive when help arrived, which was pretty quick because it was at the damned hospital. But she died pretty quickly after that. They said everything was smashed.

Except, I don’t like to think it happened like that.

In my head, she made a warm bath. In my head, she slid in as the water ran, and she cleanly slit her wrists, maybe while she was humming one of those songs we listened to on the nights we spent making out in my car.

Even though she committed suicide, I thought she was probably in heaven with my father. Because, I would eat her sins. If god sent her to hell, I would never forgive him. I told him. I went to the church, and I told him. I promised him, if it came down to it, I’d go to hell for her and to end the sin that went down my line. It’d end with me.

I stayed for her funeral. I left right after.