That's Okay

Right. Nick drove to the gas station and bought a case of Budweiser. He paid the clerk in exact change, tucked the case under his left arm and exited with his head down. Though he was 23, he always felt as if he were too young to drink. He began to drive back as he opened a beer and started to drink. "My blind indifference to my fellow man," he thought. His thoughts drifted to the life of his father, who died while serving in the Peace Corps. Nick was seven.
He picked up his cell phone and called Heather. She answered immediately, she always did. She was a girl whose phone rarely rang, though to look at her one would think her phone would have rung off the hook since she hit puberty. Without a hello Nick said, "I'm on my way home, you can come over if you want." Heather knew he had been drinking. "Talking on the phone, driving and drinking. Concern for others." Nick hated her. She rarely spoke in complete sentences. "I am tired of calls at three in the morning. If you want to be with me." The phone went silent. "Are you coming?" "Yes."
Nick entered his appartment and had about a half hour before Heather would arrive. He continued drinking. Nick sat on the couch and looked at a picture. The picture was faded yellow in a brown leather frame and showed a well built man with dark hair and high cheek bones digging a water well surrounded by the native peoples of a country Nick never bothered to learn the name of.
Nick thought about how different even his appearance was from the man in the frame. He hated the man in the photograph. Nick looked into the eyes of the man in the photograph and saw hope, excitement and purpose. Heather entered and the light from the hallway illuminated Nick's face in the glass covering the picture. For a second Nick saw an inanition of quality. He hated Heather.
Heather was a woman six years his senior who was a bartender in a bar Nick refused to go to, except on the occasion that her manager wasn't working and he could drink for free. Her brown hair had natural highlights and her body looked as if she had stolen it from a goddess. The only imperfection of her was a small scar on her chin she got when a dog bit her when she was 13.
"Your mom came into the bar tonight and asked for you but I didn't know where you were so I." Nick waited for the thought to finish. "I don't want to talk to her," Nick said after a few seconds. "Well." Nick hated her.
Heather sat on the couch beside Nick and lit a cigarette of his and promptly extinguished it. She looked over at his hand holding a beer and remembered how he came to her crying as a child and asked her where dead people go. She thought of how he would come to her at night and sleep while his mother brought home a date. She started to cry when she thought of the time he came to her bruised and bloody from the hands of the newest man his mom brought home. That was the night he looked at her with tears in his green eyes, making his eyes as fluid and as deep as the ocean and asked her to marry him. He was twelve.
He took opened another beer and asked her if she wanted to move in with him. It was the first serious question he asked her since that night he was eleven. Heather didn't know what to say. She leaned over to him, kissed him and said she would. Nick immediately regreted asking the question. It was drunk talk, but since she wasn't drunk he knew she'd remember it in the morning. He hated her. She always remembered things.
Heather stood up and began to cry. She told him that she was prenant and that this was a sign that Nick was finially ready to let someone in. Visably shaken, Nick looked at her with the first glimmer of feeling in 12 years. He was about to be the one thing the man in the picture never was, a father. Heather walked to the bedroom and Nick poured the rest of his beer into the kitchen sink.
On his way to the bedroom, he looked at the picture once more and noticed he had the same hands as the man in the picture. He looked at the photograph everyday since he was seven and this was the first time he noticed it. He read the inscription on the frame which read, "You'll never be more than alive, You'll never do more than survive."
Nick entered the bedroom, looked at the goddess pregnant with his child and said, "I'm joining the Peace Corps. I'll make sure you get the life insurrance money."