Not for nothing, but sometimes I think my Dad just doesn't have it all together. Take when he bought the new refrigerator for example. That Sunday Dad had sat down on his La Z Boy with a twenty four pack of Miller Light that wouldn't last three hours, and I really think he couldn't get any happier than he was right there; he had everything he wanted in life at that point.
Of course then Mom came to him to say the fridge was broken and we needed a new one.
“Mary,” he groaned. “the Eagles are playing. I'll get one next weekend.”
“The food will spoil before then!”
“We'll buy more.”
Mom kicked the beers sitting beside the chair. “If we don't have a fridge your beer is going to warm up in a hurry,” she said.
Dad's eyes focused while the pieces came together, and he jumped up and grabbed me. “Let's go!” he shouted. Even though he wanted to have a fridge for his beer Dad still grumbled the first fifteen minutes of the drive. Finding a place that sold refrigerators meant going to Trenton, and going to Trenton meant a forty minute drive. Dad hated the drive, but he stopped talking after the roundabout and just stared out the window like he thought the scenery would be different that it had been the last twenty times we went to Trenton.
Getting the fridge was easy enough. Dad mostly seemed focused on finding something he deemed big enough, and getting back home as fast as he could. When we got the fridge to the car he took some small bungee cords, the kind you find in an automotive or outdoor section of Walmart, and just bungeed the thing to the top of our station wagon.
On the drive home Dad only did eighty five. He went that slow because the under-powered car combined with the fridge wouldn't let him go faster. That changed around Pemberton. All of a sudden we were shooting up to ninety eight, and Dad muttered something about a tail wind and put the gas to the floor. I looked in the rearview mirror to watch the cars disappear behind us and saw a white object like a rectangular prism bounding behind us like a dog. My mouth opened and my vocal cords made the sounds before my brain put two and two together. It just isn't something you see everyday. “Hey, that refrigerator looks just like ours.”
Dad glanced at the rear-view and did the fastest double take I've ever seen. “What refrig- HOLY FUCK!” Dad stood on the brake so hard I think the pedal went through the firewall. When we finally stopped there were skid marks on the highway and several sideswipe wrecks from people dodging us. Dad didn't pay a single one any attention. He got out, walked back to the refrigerator, and stared down at it. It had been a gleaming, pearly white when we bought it. Now it looked more like a dirty snowball. The enamel resembled the surface of the moon. At least it was in one piece.
Dad told me to help lift it, and as we picked it up I asked why we couldn't just go back to the store and get a new one with the warranty. Dad gave me a look I'd never seen from him before, but it shut me up until we got home. We put the fridge in the kitchen, and then I waited for the fireworks. It took about two minutes.
“Let me see the new- what happened?” Mom said.
“You got your damn refrigerator, that's what happened,” Dad said on the way back to his recliner.
Of course after that the argument kicked into high gear. I didn't want to hear it so I left to hang out with my friend Joe for a while. In typical Horace Barr fashion Dad bought the fridge from the sketchiest cheapskate store he could find. It turned out that they refused to honor the manufacturer's warranty unless you also bought their coverage, which Dad had of course not done. Hell, he hadn't even read the fine print on the papers he signed for the thing. It turned out the fridge was made by a Chinese company no one had ever heard of. There weren't any more than three English words on the thing, and the box and manual were still somewhere along the highway, so Dad called the only phone number the (Mandarin) website provided. He didn't get anywhere fast.
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Mom insisted that we still needed something, but Dad wasn't about to spend more money when he knew he could eventually run the manufacturer into the ground and get them to respect the warranty, but his twenty three pack of beer had been sitting out for days and wasn't anywhere near drinkable anymore. He reached what he thought was a compromise.
One day he came back from work with an old 1950s or 60s refrigerator, the kind with a locking latch on the outside. Mom protested that my little brother might lock himself inside and suffocate. Dad walked out of the kitchen, walked back in with a .357 revolver, and shot the refrigerator full of holes. “There, problem solved,” he said, even though Mom probably couldn't hear him at that point. Dad went back to his TV, while Mom Googled for guns larger than .357.
Not long after that a miracle occurred. Dad actually got through to someone who spoke English and helped him out. Then an even bigger miracle occurred: the company offered to send their newest prototype “smart” refrigerator, and cover the shipping. It didn't take long for us to get it. It even met Dad's only criteria: it was big. It turned out to be really big. It was about as tall as a large wardrobe, and deep enough that I was up to my shoulder blades when I leaned in.
The installers had to cut our wall open and move it in with a forklift. It turned out that the company didn't cover those fees. Dad had ignored the fine print again. The only other issue with the refrigerator was that it didn't run off freon or anything like that. It used liquid nitrogen. A two hundred gallon tank was provided for that. We had to pull out the stove and move it to the laundry room to fit the tank in. It wasn't the strongest metal either. When dad tapped on it with his index finger he punched a hole in it, which he fixed with JB Weld and a piece of scrap.
It cost almost $1400 to fill the tank up. Mom said she had no idea who would want such a device in the first place. Dad said some pretty ugly things about Asians. Still, the appliance worked just fine, it kept things as cold you wanted, sometimes too well. When Mom tried to thaw some steak from the freezer side it took her several days, because the meat was over three hundred degrees below zero. It really was a “smart” refrigerator too. It had a panel with internet connection on the outside, so you could update Twitter or something while you made ice, although I've got no idea why anyone would ever actually want to do that. But, in the end, this relief didn't last long.
Dad's JB Weld fix wore out after a while, and one night the nitrogen tank sprung a leak. All the liquid leaked out, froze and weakened the floor, and in the morning the kitchen was in the basement. Mom was in hysterics looking down at it, but Dad didn't say anything, oddly enough. It actually worried me how calm he was.
The new kitchen was really nice, even though you could still see the outline where the hole had been made to move the Chinese refrigerator in, and then remade to drag it out. But we got all new hard wood floors, granite counter-tops, and even a new normal refrigerator, still provided by the Chinese company. Dad actually got an extended warranty on it that time. I asked him afterward how much the kitchen had actually cost, but he just started laughing manically and making threats about what would happen if I ever brought that up again.
Things were as normal after that as they ever got in our house. We got back into our old routines, and it was nice to have a sense of normalcy from coming back home. Nothing good lasts forever, though, and the fridge gave out sooner than expected. I guess they just don't make them like they used to. Dad called the Chinese again and was told his warranty had just run out. He stopped talking to the guy on the other end as soon as he heard that. He hung up, started yanking the phone line out of the wall until the drywall collapsed around it, and finally snapped the cord loose, muttering something the entire time. He grabbed a baseball bat that was propped against the wall, and rushed into the kitchen, where he smashed the phone and the bat against the fridge, then ripped open the doors and yanked the shelves and food out onto the floor. By now he was shouting “Alfred Gaselee didn't go far enough!” over and over. He started hitting the refrigerator with the bat again, and yelled a bunch of words I'd never heard before. Finally, he picked the fridge up and smashed it through a living room window to the backyard. Then he walked out. He slammed the door so hard the wall cracked.
It was almost night time before he came back. The rest of us almost had everything cleaned up, and mom had gotten estimates for fixing the house when Dad came through the front door dragging something. He went straight to the kitchen, and set up an old fashioned icebox.
Breakfast was quiet the next morning. The icebox was a massive contrast to our modern kitchen but it got the job done. Only my brother had an opinion to state about it, but as soon as he opened his mouth he was shut down.