Good Man

There's a song by the Dixie Chicks from their 1999 album Fly that's called "Some Days You Gotta Dance" and it's times like these where the title just gives the best advice when life has suddenly thrown lemons at you and it's time to break out the glass pitcher and make some lemonade. Some days life gets crazy and sometimes there's not much you can do about it, so why worry? Why not just accept that life is all kinds of stupid at certain points and the best solution is to throw your head back, kick up your heels and just dance.

Of course, this is generally figurative. After all, almost everyone in the world is going through some sort of crazy crap at any given point during every day and you don't see anyone breaking out the tap shoes and jazz hands and dancing in the streets.

Well, unless you happen to be in West Hollywood.

You just gotta suck it up and deal and if there is nothing you can tentatively do to solve the problem at hand or whatever it is, all that you can do is to take a step back and let it work its way out.

And again, some days...well...you know what to do.



Billie Joe was quiet as he drove around his neighborhood. It was the end of first week of March and the weather in the Oakland wasn't as cool as it had been in prior weeks. Spring was just around the corner, the sun was shining and a cool breeze wafted off the bay and up into the area of the Berkeley Hills where Billie Joe and his family, as well as Tre and his, lived.

His Ford Fairlane crested around the road he'd rarely driven down anymore. There wasn't much of a need to come this way, except maybe once a month, since Caroline and her kids were in Buffalo, going on nine months since she left.

Nine months.

Billie Joe grimaced.

He was trying not to think about Caroline and being pregnant but it was like fate kept throwing little innuendos his way so that his mind immediately went to that place. He was forty-two years old now and at moments like this he felt as if he were a kid again, who had done something wrong, and any day now his mom was gonna find out and scold him.

However, in this case, when the shoe dropped, it wouldn't be his mother who would be doing the scolding. It would be his wife, Adrienne. His wife of twenty years in four months' time. And that was if Caroline's child happened to be his.

There were two other possibilities. Gerard and Dave.

For his sake he hoped to God it was one of the other two who were responsible. After all, the younger guys weren't married with two teenagers like he was.

Slowly, he let his mind wander again in the opposite direction, forcing thoughts of grocery lists and what to do about the skunk smell in his backyard, as his car reached the end of a hidden driveway; one he'd driven up so many times in the past he couldn't even count anymore.

He found himself driving up it suddenly, branches from trees almost touching the roof of the Fairlane as he entered through the initial opening to the driveway.

Billie Joe thought about getting a tree trimmer and cutting back some of the unruly branches and clean the place up. He couldn't help but think about doing it. He might not know when or if Caroline was planning on coming back to this home any time soon, if at all, but if she did, he didn't want her to come back to a house worthy of the Addams family.

As he neared the garage, he parked his car and turned off the ignition and just sat there for a minute, looking up at the edifice before him. Turning to his side, he noted the overgrown grass on the lawn, littered with yellow dandelions coming up. Weeds were overtaking the flower beds and the general landscaping looked like shit. He could only imagine what the back of the house as well as the inside must be like.

Opening up the door, he stepped out of the car and cracked his neck before moving around to the back of the house where he saw the weeds were abundant there as well. The in-ground pool had since been drained at the end of last summer, compliments of Billie Joe upon returning back from Buffalo. He didn't want anyone to stumble into the yard for whatever reason and fall into the pool and drown, leaving a lawsuit on Caroline's hands. But now there were some leaves, dirt, water from rain that filled the bottom a little.

And he was pretty sure that was a dead squirrel floating in the small bit of water as well.

Ew.

Beyond him, at the edge of the property, was the most breathtaking view of the entire Bay area. He could see all of Oakland and Berkeley below, and San Francisco further out. Billie Joe always envied Mike for having the better view. His wasn't so bad, Tre's was further below on the hills on a tree lined street, but it was Mike who snatched the better real estate.

And, well, since Mike's death almost two years prior, this all belonged to Caroline now. Just as his share of the royalties from being a part of Green Day was willed to Caroline as well. But Billie Joe was pretty sure he remembered her mentioning at some point, not long after the will reading, that she was going to use that money to place into trust funds for her children to access when they turned twenty-one.

Turning from the view, Billie Joe fumbled with his keys, one of which was a key to the Pritchard residence. He went back around to the front of the house and unlocked the door and as soon as he stepped inside he was met with a smell of stagnant dust.

Wincing a little, he waved his hand in front of his face and moved slowly through the front hall and into the kitchen. He did his best to not make a sound because it almost felt as if he were walking through a cemetery; a mausoleum, if you will.

He opened the fridge door and saw nothing inside but a box of baking soda to keep any odors at bay. The freezer was empty as well and both were warm. It must be unplugged, was Billie Joe's deduction. There was a layer or two of dust over every surface, he took note of, as he ran a finger over the kitchen island, frowned, and then wiped the finger on his leg.

He walked into every room downstairs, making sure everything was fine. He didn't bother going down into the studio in the basement, though. He knew that the moment he stepped inside there he would become too overcome with grief.

Even though he had moved on and accepted Mike was dead and never coming back, it was still hard to think about.

He still wanted to believe that if he walked down into that studio, he would find Mike sitting on the beat up couch, plucking away at his bass only to look up with his goofy smile and tell Billie Joe to grab a guitar so they could jam like old times.

It just wasn't right.

Mike should be here.

He should be here with Caroline, and the baby she's carrying now should be his. And they should be living happily ever after. They should all be living happily ever after.

Once the downstairs was checked on, Billie Joe made the casual trek upstairs to the second level. He poked his head into all the rooms. Chloe and Mikey's rooms were pristine. The extra bedroom was just the same as the previous two. The first thing Billie Joe noticed about Estelle's room was that it was unkempt.

Someone had been in here recently. The bed was disheveled as if it had been slept in not long ago, the window was open a crack, creating a nice, subtle breeze and a fresher scent to the air.

He shut the bedroom door behind him and looked around, noticing a book bag leaning against the dresser. He peered down into the bag which was open and filled with girl's clothes. There were a pair of jeans, a purple shirt with black, diagonal stripes and whatever was underneath those items, Billie Joe didn't bother looking for.

He straightened back up and went to reach for the door when he noticed on the bottom of the wall, to the right of the door, were two, white hand prints, overlapping each other, kinda like wings.

In pencil, just under the hands, was written, Mike & Caroline were here, May '06.

Christ, 2006. That felt like forever ago.

Billie Joe smiled ruefully, remembering Mike telling him back then about Caroline helping him to redecorate Estelle's room and that they left their signature in the room. Mike had never mentioned what the signature was or where it was located, but now, finding it after all this time, made the 42-year-old guitarist feel like he had found a bit of Mike that still existed here.

He took a few more moments to think, then left the room, and turned toward the direction of the master bedroom. And suddenly it felt like being in a dream, where a hallway seemed to get longer as you walked in the direction of the door at the end.

But he reached the door. He turned the knob. He stepped inside.

The bed was disheveled there as well and he thought for a moment on that; two different images in his head. The first was the image of perhaps it was Estelle who was coming back to the house and sleeping here; if not in her own bed than in what had been her father's.

She was grasping at straws to have a part of him near her, especially now with her stepmother and little brother and little sister on the other side of the country; the latter two, extensions of her father she had no access to.

The second image the messy bed caused his brain to think about was the night he shared with Caroline in Buffalo, when he was pretty sure she would've raped him, amid her grief, if he hadn't given into his own as well and had his way with her, and vice versa.

He had hated himself for being so weak then, he wanted to hate Caroline as well, but he knew he never could. And never would. He also hated himself for having enjoyed the moment, as short as it was. Not because it let him forget about the pain and sadness for a few moments, but because in the twenty years he'd been married to Adrienne, he'd never slept with another woman and there had been an ounce of excitement to the experience.

Okay, so there was that one time about fifteen years ago, he let a smoking hot groupie onto his bus during a tour to give him a blow job, but that was when him and Adrienne had been going through a rough patch and...well, that was as far as that particular experience went.

Mainly because Mike had walked in on him and turned away with a mix of embarrassment, disappointment and a suddenly sour stomach.

Shaking his head of those thoughts, Billie Joe took note of the bedside table and his heart beat sped up a few notches and he wanted to fall to his knees and cry.

Next to the bedside lamp was the dark green, marble urn that held Mike's ashes.

How did he not realize that Caroline hadn't taken them with her to Buffalo?

They'd been here the entire time?

Walking slowly over to the urn, he touched his fingers against the marble. It was smooth and cold against his skin and it almost made him shudder. He sank down onto the edge of the bed and just stared at the urn.

Licking his lips, he brought his hand to his mouth for a moment and couldn't help himself any longer.

He just started crying, hunching forward and placing his head in his hands.

"God, Mike..." he blubbered. "Why'd you have to go into the city that night? Why couldn't you and Caroline have had dinner at Rudy's?" Billie Joe pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to blink away his tears and focus on a spot on the carpet under his feet which barely touched the ground. Not because he was that short, but the bed was just that high up. "You'd still be here, you stupid sonofabitch."

Placing his hands on his knees, he cried a bit harder, thinking about his best friend, seeing him in the rented coffin at his funeral, eyes glued shut, hands crossed over his chest, his face unnaturally still...just before the coffin was closed and his body was removed to be put into the incinerator to be cremated.

A sob escaped his lips at that last thought and he wiped his tears away furiously.

"I'm sorry, Mike. I think I might've knocked Caroline up," he muttered quietly to Mike's urn. "I didn't mean for it to happen. We were just so upset and you were gone, Giselle had just died...it was one thing after another and I thought I was doing okay. But then I just...stopped thinking. And now I don't know what to do. I'm so lost. Tre tried calling Caroline's house in Buffalo but only got the answering machine. He called your real mom Lucy who said Caroline wasn't home 'cause she was going out of town. She didn't say if she knew Caroline was pregnant or not, but we know she knows. She's probably just been sworn to this weird secrecy Caroline is keeping in regard to her condition or whatever..."

Billie Joe tried to calm himself down and brought his eyes to scan over the room and then back to the urn. Hesitating for a moment, he reached both hands out and grabbed the urn up. He held it there in front of him, in his hands for a moment, contemplating the strangeness that all that physically remained of Mike, his skin and organs and bones, were all in a sealed bag of ashes, stuffed carefully into this urn.

And then, Billie Joe pulled the urn to his chest and he held it there, like hugging a kitten.

"I love you, man," he whispered. "I miss you so much."