PHILLIP PANTUSO is a senior at the University of Texas, Austin, and “Everything You Hold Dear” is his first published story. He hopes to attend an MFA program in the near future and make fiction-writing his work as well as his play. He’d like you to note that he did not vote for George W. Bush, like most of his state did.



YOU ARE late coming home, again. You will always remember that even though your curfew was 1:00 am, you rolled in that morning at 2:33, your hair disheveled, your shoes untied, one of the buttons on your button-fly jeans undone. This has become a habit, but now you’re 18, and you’ll be leaving for college in three months, and your girlfriend will be leaving for a different college in three months, so you kick petty things like “rules” aside, and instead embrace poetic things, like love, freedom, and drinking. That’s why, at 2:33 in the morning, you stumble in, smelling of love, freedom and drinking. Only there’s your dad, who is never up this late; he’s a hard-ass, set in his ways, and you still fear him.
You open the kitchen door, and there he is. He’s standing with his back against the counter. He doesn’t see you at first, and you hope maybe you can sneak back out. But it is too late. He calls you over.
At first you are scared; you didn’t spray any cologne and you ran out of peppermints in your glove compartment. You are sure he can smell the sweat on your body and the alcohol on your breath, even though it was just a Smirnoff Ice, and you are positive he doesn’t like your girlfriend anyway. You were brought up a good Catholic boy, attended mass every Sunday, were taught to respect your elders and always put the welfare of your family first. But you’ve rejected all that. You have sex out of wedlock; sometimes you don’t wear condoms; sometimes you even have the audacity to stay the entire night at your girlfriend’s place. You don’t always say yes sir, are a declared agnostic, and have even been arrested once, trying to steal from a Wal-Mart. Your father hates all this about you, has even told you so, though you could never believe that he didn’t love you, somewhere deep down, yes. For reasons you don’t yet understand, you forgive him for many things.
But something is different in this picture; he’s in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, but the lights are off, and he’s still dressed, and he’s standing right where you can see him, rather than ambushing you after you’ve snuck back through the living room and into your room. You feel strangely aware of this still moment, like someone has hit the pause button, then a swell of foreboding fills the kitchen like an aquarium, and you are suddenly drowning.
He asks you where you’ve been, and you tell him. Even at 18, you cannot lie to your father, because you have been scarred by all the times you tried to lie in the past, and failed spectacularly. You say, ‘I was at Julia’s.’
It comes out as a little squeak the first time, and you have to clear your throat and try again. You apologize. He nods, not approvingly or disapprovingly, just knowingly, and you think, Oh shit, this is it, I’ve really done it this time. You feel that you are losing your grip on everything you hold dear, and for a moment the Catholic in you kicks in, and you wonder, was it worth it? Have I shamed myself in my father’s eyes?
He nods and puts his hand to his chin, which currently sports the goatee you’ll always associate with the flecks of spittle that would get stuck in it when he’d yell. It is clean tonight, though, and he continues nodding absent-mindedly, then suddenly, in a voice you only somewhat recognize, says that you two should have a talk. You turn cold. Yes, you know the voice, it’s one of many voices your father has. There’s his I’m-tired-of-telling-you voice, his I’m-not-repeating-this-again voice, his social conventions voice, his salesman voice, his prayer voice, his I-love-you voice, the voice he uses around friends, the voice he uses with your mother, the voice he uses with his mother, and this voice, his This Is Serious Voice. This one is actually the most terrifying, because he rarely uses it. You only associate his This Is Serious Voice with heavy things, like your grandmother’s stroke. You never know how to react to this voice, so you divert your eyes here, and feel embarrassed. You are always flustered and confused by this voice, and you stammer in an attempt to change the subject. To delay the voice. But he looks right at you, through you, and says:
‘Listen.’
So you take a deep breath; you know something bad is coming; you can feel the water rising; you’re flailing around and little bubbles are rising to the surface before viciously bursting and your lungs are burning with the lack of oxygen and you’re wondering where’s mom and then suddenly he says that he and your mother had another huge fight and she packed up her things and went to her mother’s but not twenty minutes later the phone rang and it was the hospital saying come, quick, your wife has been injured. She was probably crying, he says, not giving the road her undivided attention. He’s here because the doctors think she will be okay, and he wanted to be there when you came home, to pull you with his strong arms into his bag-like embrace, and dutifully escort you to the hospital.
For some reason, on the way, all you can think about is, what did it look like? And what does she look like? The fear that you might not even recognize your own mother seeps into your consciousness. Was it a head-on collision? Did she see it coming? You have only seen car wrecks in movies, and all you can think about is crunching metal, windows popping out and tinkling down to the pavement. Maybe there was a minor explosion shortly afterward; but, you notice there is no soundtrack. The vision in your mind is horribly quiet; you don’t even hear sobs or the sound of a motor humming; then suddenly this tranquility, this salvation, is broken apart, and then there’s an awful screeching that screams in, a sound like God stomping on aluminum cans, and your mother’s body takes on an unrecognizable shape, for a split second, before it is pushed from the frame.
The rest of the night is just a blur; hospital lights like photon halos; bare walls; strange voices; no smells; murmured words; icy hands.
For your parents, the wreck erases whatever else happened that night. Just like that, those hours are gone, and everything is as it was. Your mother comes home three days later with a shattered wrist and a broken fibula, but nothing more. You and your father are both there. You leave for college 3 months later, and they are both there. They are both there when you come home for the first three weekends because you don’t know anybody yet and your roommate has already stolen your entire stock of Easy-Mac. The labels on your Christmas presents say, Love Mom and Dad. The fact remains that your dad sometimes treats your mother like shit, and your mother in turn lashes out emotionally. To the day they die you will wonder if they’re happy, and if not, where it all went wrong, and if this is somehow your fault; if they could do it over again, would they do it over again; if, somehow, your growing up had anything to do with it; but you know these questions are more complicated than that.