Congratulations on Moving Back In With Your Parents!

When you pull in to the driveway your mom will be waving at you from the front door. It’ll be like something out of a painting or a teen comedy, but instead of being a young man who is learning his place in the world you’ll be a shiftless thirty-two year old who has accomplished nothing and can no longer afford rent for his rat hole apartment.

You'll trudge up the steps and she’ll open her arms and embrace you. She’ll kiss your cheek and you’ll feel the oily stain of her lipstick.

“We missed you so much, honey.” she’ll say, her arm around your shoulders as she shows you inside.

Your dad will be sitting on the couch. He won’t even look up when you come in. He’ll just take a long sip of beer and nod in your general direction.

“Welcome back, shithead.”

“George!” your mother will exclaim.

Your father’s name is George, although you’ve always called him sir. Maybe that’s part of why you turned out the way you did, the lack of an accessible father figure. You thought the only way to be tough was to be mean.

It hasn’t helped you much. Dead end job after dead end job, bad decision after bad decision. You’ve known for months that the only way out of this was to move back in with your parents long enough to get your shit together.

After you’ve entered the room and had a glass of water your dad will mute the TV briefly to stare at you disapprovingly. He’ll keep it up for around twenty minutes before he spits the word “dismissed” out of his mouth and you and your mother file out, the same way you always did after every recital, soccer game and barmitzvah.

She’ll ask you awkward questions you can’t really give good answers to on the way up the stairs, ask if you’ve had any nice girlfriends or any interesting experiences on the road. You could say yes to both questions, but that would get into some messy territory of just what you’d be doing and you don’t want to break your momma’s heart. It was big enough to take you back in, after all.

She’ll tuck you in to bed and kiss you on the forehead, just like you were a little baby again and you’ll feel as good as you have in the last four months, better than when Becki told you she loved you when she came in that motel outside of Tucson.

Of course the feeling won’t last. You’ll lie in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sound of the TV to die downstairs. Then you’ll stare some more and pray for sleep to come which, it won’t.

When you get up, bleary eyed the next morning, you’ll greet your parents awkwardly at breakfast. You’ll tell them that you’re going to stay home and look for job’s on Craiglist, which everyone in the room immediately knows is a terrible idea but won’t comment on. You’ll all just eat your toast and drink your coffee in silence.

Once your dad is off working at the motherfucker factory, which is what you like to call John’s Hopkin’s linguistics department, and your mom is off volunteering at the local co-op you’ll start your real work.

You’ll grab the fire axe from your car’s trunk and head down to the basement. The clown painting will be just where you saw it last, hanging on the southern wall of your dad’s billiard’s room the same way it always has. You realize, as you set upon your task, that you’ve always wanted to do this.

You’ll be through the wall and on to the safe in a matter of minutes. After that the tough work, cracking the safe, will begin. Still, you’ve been planning this for a long long time and it won’t be long before you’re in. Turns out that the combination was the egotistical bastard’s birthday.

Once you’re in you’ll have the diamonds in the duffel and the note you wrote for your mom on the kitchen table. You’ll have left a second one for your dad in the ruins of the safe, you just hope that he finds it before she does. It pretty much spills the beans on the second family he stopped seeing a few years back, as well as a number of unsavory bits about his past that you’ve picked up traveling across America.

The one to your mom will be full of nice lies about you getting a phone call from Becki asking you to come back. Maybe you will see Becki again one day. She said she was heading for Toronto, and that’s where you’re going to fence the diamonds. It might be nice to stay there for a month or two, seeing the sights and hoping that fate reunites the two of you. You’ve heard they have an amazing art scene and some incredible museums. That could be a fun way to kill some time.

The whole thing will pretty much go to plan, which just goes to prove that you really are your father’s son. You’ve inherited his aptitude for crime, his inability to deal with other men and his inability to tell the horrible truth to women he loves.

If it makes you feel any better, he’ll be a hell of a lot nicer to your mom now that he knows you’re pretty much gone for good. Also, if he sees you again he’s going to shoot you.

Congratulations on moving back in with your parents! We’re glad it went so well for you!