Coke for Life
Your father says, “I have a surprise for you” and asks you to come to the living room. There, your mom and older brother Jim sit patiently waiting, fingers tapping on their knees, as your father stands eagerly in front of the chaise sectional. He gleams like goldenrod, his cheeks red like a rooster’s comb, his silver hair a special web. You nestle into the crux of the fog grey couch as your father pulls a shining piece of translucent plastic from his back pocket. It glimmers brighter than he does—a streamer of red and white with curlicue letters you don’t have to see to know. He crisps the wrapper between his hands so everyone can read what it says. He smiles. “We won Coke for Life.”
A two-litre bottle arrives every Monday before any of you have woken up. It sits on the front stoop alongside the morning paper in all its bulbous glory. You’re not sure which arrives first, but your father always places the bottle directly into the fridge where a fine frost forms on its hull like a ship before launch. It feels like Christmas comes every week. When the bottle stands on the shelf, chummed up to the orange juice and bagged milk, you look at the letters on its side and see the other kids were right––it does look like Santa.
You smile with meat in your teeth.
Wednesday dinners become ceremonial feasts, toasts with chalices of caramel-coloured fizzy drink, bubbles as brimming and light as you are. Chicken glistening with canola oil sits in buckets the same colour as the lucky label on the crotch mahogany table. Fingers are licked amidst the flicker of candle fire, and coy burps are taken into the palms of greasy hands. You can’t remember the last time you spent dinner with your family, let alone used the dining room and bone china reserved for special occasions. You smile with meat in your teeth.
The bottles start piling up, so you decide to throw a pool party. It is your birthday, after all, and children have been asking for months whether they can come over and have some of the Coke. To them, it tastes better than anything they’ve ever drank. The burn is clearer, the bubbles purer. “It’s better when it’s free,” they say, then tell the younger kids on the playground the same thing. You get more invitations to hang out than ever before, and the attention feels good. You always come home to find your brother lounging with friends on the poolside’s travertine patio, several bottles of half-cold Coke half drank, as they talk next to the still water. Jim smiles with his wire-frame glasses glistening in the sun. ‘Coke for Life’ has changed more than one.
Even after the party, unopened bottles continue to pile up. Your father empties a closet on the main floor and installs shelves six rows high. “It’s like a pantry,” he says, though soon all the jars of preserved jams and ground spices make way for more bottles. “They’re nice to hold onto,” says your mother, “especially when we have company.” And the closet becomes a spectacle for dinner guests like a hung Matisse or Bolero. It’s a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities, with every bottle neatly shelved in a row. They become parting gifts for family friends before the door is locked at the end of the night.
The room becomes a balancing act as your father tries to stack each new bottle in an unseen spot. Some of the bottles at the bottom explode from sustained pressure and stain the wood with sticky residue. Your mom spends a whole afternoon emptying the pantry so she can clean the floorboards below. “Enough is enough,” she says, wiping the sweat from her brow. “We don’t need any more Coke for life.”
Your father gets around to calling the Coke helpline found on the back of the wrapper. His office is full of files stuffed with insurance claims and notes on what each kid weighs. You hear him shouting from behind the oak door as he speaks to a representative. “What do you mean I can’t cancel it? We’re the ones who won the damn thing in the first place!” He hesitates a moment. “Can’t we at least pawn it off on someone else?”
No one will take it. All the families of your friends have stopped drinking pop. “Only on special occasions,” they say before politely declining. The bottles keep showing up every Monday and your father decides to leave them on the curb to see if anyone will take them, and no one does.
The bottles now occupy both the first-floor closet and the basement, covering the pool table and foldout sofa bed. You wish you could play pool. You drive with your father to grocery stores, but their contracts don’t let them buy from anyone besides the corporation. Goodwill won’t take any food or beverages. Convenience stores don’t trust you––a family with hundreds of bottles of unopened Coke.
Your father’s on the phone at all hours of the night begging the corporation that never sleeps to stop sending you Coke, but they never do. He’s on the phone so long that he sees the delivery truck that brings the weekly bottle. Your father opens the door and the delivery man says, “Coke for Life!” with a smile as your father shouts in his face, hoping to scare him away. The delivery man calmly responds, “Now make sure you enjoy it over ice,” before placing the bottle in your father’s hand.
The stains don’t wash out because no one can get to them, and so the house takes on a sickly-sweet balm of stale piquancy and burnt sugar.
Bottle after bottle expires. Before they did, none of you even knew Coke could expire. The bottles leak onto the white shag carpet turned brown down in the basement. The stains don’t wash out because no one can get to them, and so the house takes on a sickly-sweet balm of stale piquancy and burnt sugar. Your mom says, “We need to move.”
Your parents don’t let you tell your friends where you’re moving to. They say you all need a ‘fresh start.’ Your parents find a place in the province over near where your father grew up. It’s a bitter autumn and the streets are paved with maple leaves that remind your mother of the old house’s moldy brown floors. Your father takes the family on a tour of the neighbourhood, smiling and saying, “Things will be different,” while Jim and you weep in the back. The deep wells of your father’s eyes and his willowy chest lift for the first time in months.
When you pull into the new house, you find a bottle waiting.
Your father screams and your mother cries and the moving truck is left without ever moving in. They shouldn’t have signed any paperwork, your parents say. They shouldn’t have used their real names, they yell. Jim continues to cry as your father pulls over and stomps his cellphone to pieces on the curbside. Spit foams in the corners of his mouth as he looks at your mother with desperate eyes. She says nothing.
Your father visits ‘an old friend’ three hours away and comes back to the car with a set of tarnished keys. On the freeway you yell, “Where are we going, Dad? Where are we going?” But he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t respond to anything. He thinks that, somehow, they have bugged the car. He sells the SUV in the next town and moves you into a much older station wagon that smells like stale smoke. He drives away as the attendant yells, “But sir, your license plate!”
You’re in the woods and it’s calm. The car creaks along a gravel path through a darkness more certain than you’ve ever known. The only light comes from the car’s high beams, and when it reflects off the cold fog it illuminates your father’s face formed into a sick rictus. His mouth curls up at the corners, curls you don’t have to see to know. Your mother hasn’t said a word in the 14 hours you’ve been driving. Her neck is so thin and her head so big that you think it could collapse at any moment.
You pull up to the wooden cabin as the teal light from the clock radio tells you it’s the latest you’ve ever been up. The cabin is a single room. You all sleep under the rug on the floor, shivering into each other’s bodies as tears freeze on your tired cheeks.
When you awake, it’s winter. When you left, you were in summer shorts. Three seasons in a single day, what’s felt like ages. Your mother explores the pantry while your father rummages for clothes to wear. He throws you in a wool jacket as big as your height and Jim in a pair of coveralls with a moth-eaten turtleneck underneath. Jim curls it over his face when he cries. Your father leaves the cabin to look for dry wood as your mother hands out slices of apple in silence.
It takes two days before anyone speaks. You curl up on the threadbare rug and eat cans of cooked peaches from the fireplace. Your father tells stories of his childhood you’ve never heard and your mother tells stories of hers. She calmly strokes Jim’s hair as his head lays in the nest of her woven legs. You laugh into the night.
You drink hot chamomile from an orange Thermos and learn more about your father, from your father, than you have your whole life.
Your father takes you hunting with a rifle he calls a ‘Thirty Odd Six.’ You’re swarmed by the silence of nature as your oversized boots lightly crunch the mounding snow. You drink hot chamomile from an orange Thermos and learn more about your father, from your father, than you have your whole life. You don’t walk home empty-handed, your hand tiny in his.
Your mother makes garlands from the surrounding flora and hangs them from the exposed beams. Your father chops down a baby pine and hoists it into the corner with string. The calendar on the wall is eight years old but your mother has turned it to ‘December’ and the scene in the picture matches the snow outside. They tell you there will be no gifts this year, but the gift of life is enough. Jim and you stitch together small scraps of kitchen cloth into ornaments for the tree. Tube stocks hang from the mantel as you all go to sleep to the sound of crackling wood.
You awake to the sound of a knock. Just one, a pause, then another. You jump from your bed. “I knew he wouldn’t forget us!” you say, as your father desperately tries to grab at your foot. You open the door and there he is: Santa—right on the side of the wrapper. “Coke for Life!” says the delivery man, handing you the bottle. There is nothing but whiteness behind him. Your father lurches to his feet, grabbing the man’s collar. “How did you find us? HOW DID YOU?” The man smiles, “Sir, we’re the largest beverage company in the world.” Your mother begs in her nightie. “Why can’t you just leave us ALONE?” The delivery man lets himself inside, “Ma’am, when we promise ‘Coke for Life’ we mean ‘Coke for Life.’ He taps his boots on the front mat and sits at a chair from the kitchen table. “Besides, who doesn’t love the refreshing taste of Coke? No one can say ‘no’ to a Coke.” Your mother crawls to the table’s skirt. “Please, PLEASE, there has to be another way!” she cries, “We can’t go on like this!” The delivery man removes his red baseball cap and strokes his thinning hair. “Well ma’am, I’m afraid I’m only the delivery man, but from what I’ve heard, there’s only one way, and we’ve already told your husband about it numerous times.” You all turn to look at your father as the delivery man flicks a speck of snow from his hat.
The sun is low and the room is silent. Your mother has cleaned away the dishes from dinner and your father smokes a pipe. You’ve never seen your father smoke, but you never really knew him before you came to the woods. You’ve been packing all afternoon and saying, “But we just got here!” like you’ll miss it. Your father doesn’t respond. The smoke in front of his face obscures what he’s thinking as he calmly rocks in an old pine chair.
Christmas dinner still sits heavy in your belly as your mother tells you and Jim to start packing the car. Every time you come back to the house to pick up a new bag, you see your mother sitting next to your father and calmly stroking his hand. “Aren’t you going to help?” you say with exasperated breath, but they just ignore you. By the time you’re done, only a sliver of sun sits on the red horizon, night slowly descending from above. Your mother kneels down to you and Jim. “Your father needs to stay here for a while, okay? Just until everything can get sorted out.” You look to your father and he stares back. He’s the oldest you’ve ever seen him, though you’ve all grown older together. You and Jim run into his lap and squeeze him as hard as his bones will allow. “We’re going to miss you, Daddy!” you say. “Don’t be too long!” before you take Jim to the backseat of the car. From there, you see your mother standing in the doorway, your father in the chair behind, its frame larger than his own. Warm light radiates out onto the snow.
Your mother closes the door and puts the car in reverse as you turn and drive back down the gravel road. The bottle of Coke sits in the seat between you and Jim. Smoke gently fizzes into the night air.
END.
