You Still Exaggerate

Chapter 1: The Call

Spencer Cusack was mid-bite into a fourteen-dollar breakfast sandwich when his phone lit up with a 740 area code and his entire digestive system seized.

He was sitting in the corner booth of a place called Nourish on the Lower East Side, the kind of restaurant where the menu described eggs as "pasture-raised heritage ovum" and the waitstaff wore aprons made from reclaimed sailcloth. His producer, Mitch Delaney, sat across from him, talking at a velocity that suggested either genuine excitement or a third espresso, and given the three empty demitasse cups near his elbow, it was probably both.

"—so the network wants twelve guaranteed episodes, full creative, but they're pushing for a live tour component, which honestly, Spence, is where the real money lives. We're talking theaters. Not clubs. Theaters. You know what that means?"

Spencer did know what that meant. It meant his show, *The Cusack Tapes*, had graduated from a thing he recorded in his underwear to a thing that men in suits discussed over conference calls. Three years of weekly episodes—sharp, funny, occasionally vicious monologues about growing up in Shelton, Ohio, population four thousand and change—had turned Spencer into the kind of famous where strangers recognized his voice at coffee shops but not his face, which was, he'd long maintained, the perfect amount of famous.

"Theaters," Spencer repeated, nodding.

"Theaters," Mitch confirmed. "Real seats. Real curtains. The Paramount people are talking about a development deal too. A scripted version. Like a *Wonder Years* but meaner."

That was when the phone buzzed.

740. Shelton.

Spencer stared at the number. It wasn't saved in his contacts, but he recognized it the way you recognize a scar—not by looking at it directly but by the feeling it produced in your chest. It was the landline at the bar. His father's bar. The bar that, in episode forty-seven, Spencer had described as "a place where ambition goes to get drunk and forget its own name."

That episode had gotten two million downloads.

He let it ring.

"You okay?" Mitch asked, still radiating deal energy.

"Fine. Where were we?"

"Paramount. Scripted. Your childhood but with better lighting."

The phone stopped ringing. Spencer exhaled. Then it started again. Same number.

He picked up.

"Spencer." The voice was flat, controlled, and belonged to his older brother Scott. Scott, who called him approximately never. Scott, who had once responded to a birthday text with a thumbs-up emoji four days late. Scott, who communicated primarily through silence and the occasional grunt that could mean anything from "I agree" to "I'm going to throw this wrench at your head."

"Hey, Scott. What's—"

"Dad had a stroke. He's at Riverside General. He's not responsive."

The restaurant sounds—the clinking, the murmured conversations about oat milk alternatives—became very far away.

"When?"

"This morning. Around six. He was opening the bar. Lyle Moffitt found him on the floor behind the taps."

Spencer's mouth opened, but nothing useful came out. His brain was doing that thing where it tried to process terrible information by generating irrelevant observations: the crack in the ceiling above his booth looked like West Virginia. The waitress had a tattoo of a snail on her wrist. His breakfast sandwich was getting cold.

"Is he—how bad is it?"

"Bad. They're running tests. He's in the ICU." A pause. "I figured you should know."

The phrasing was precise. Not "I need you here." Not "Can you come home." Just: you should know. Information delivered like a package left on a doorstep. Sign here. No further obligation implied.

"I'm coming," Spencer said.

"Okay."

"I'll get on the first flight to Columbus and drive from there. I can be there by—"

"Okay," Scott said again, and hung up.

Spencer set the phone down. Mitch was watching him with the particular expression of a man who sensed both human tragedy and content opportunity arriving simultaneously.

"Everything alright?"

"My dad had a stroke."

"Jesus. Is he—"

"He's in the ICU. I have to go home."

Mitch's face cycled through concern, sympathy, and then—Spencer watched it happen in real time—calculation. "Of course. Of course. Go. Do what you need to do. But listen, Spence, when you're ready, whenever that is, no pressure, but the homecoming angle—"

"Mitch."

"Right. Sorry. Go. I'll handle the network."

Spencer left forty dollars on the table for a sandwich he didn't finish and walked out into a Tuesday morning in Manhattan that was doing its usual impression of a city that didn't care about your problems. He stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, watching a bike messenger weave through traffic with the calm confidence of someone who had accepted death as a reasonable commuting risk.

Nine years. He hadn't been back to Shelton in nine years. He'd built an entire career on the place—its rhythms, its characters, its particular brand of Midwestern melancholy—without ever actually being there. He'd turned his father into a character, his brother into a punchline, and the whole town into a backdrop for his own mythology.

And now his father was lying in a hospital bed, and the only reason Spencer knew about it was because his brother had bothered to pick up a phone.

He booked a flight on his phone while standing on the corner of Rivington and Essex. The earliest departure was at 1:15 PM. He'd be in Columbus by 3:30, in Shelton by 5:00 if traffic cooperated, which it wouldn't, because this was Ohio, where traffic existed primarily to remind you that you weren't in a hurry because there was nowhere important to go.

That was a line from episode twelve. It had killed.

Spencer went home to pack.

His apartment was a one-bedroom in Williamsburg that cost more per month than his father's bar probably grossed in a week. It was tastefully sparse in the way that single men's apartments are when they've been featured in a magazine exactly once and the man has been trying to maintain the illusion ever since. There was a microphone on a boom arm in the corner, surrounded by acoustic foam panels. This was where the show happened. This was where Spencer sat, usually around 10 PM on Wednesdays, and talked into the void about a place he'd left behind.

He pulled a duffel bag from the closet and threw in clothes without thinking about it. Jeans. T-shirts. A hoodie. He paused at the mirror. He was thirty-four, lean in the way that New Yorkers are lean—not from exercise but from walking everywhere and forgetting to eat regular meals. His hair was doing its usual thing, which was existing in a state of vague rebellion against any organizing principle. He looked, he thought, like a guy who told stories for a living. Which is to say, he looked like a guy you wouldn't entirely trust.

On the cab ride to LaGuardia, Mitch texted seven times. The first three were expressions of genuine concern. The fourth was a link to an article about podcasters who'd incorporated personal tragedy into their content with "tasteful results." Spencer didn't open it. The fifth through seventh were logistics about the network deal, which Mitch assured him could be paused but not indefinitely.

Spencer turned his phone to airplane mode before the plane even required it.

The flight was two hours and fifteen minutes of staring at the seat back in front of him and trying to remember the last conversation he'd had with his father. It had been a phone call, maybe eight months ago. Phil Cusack wasn't a phone guy. He was a nodding guy, a shoulder-squeeze guy, a man who expressed love through acts of quiet maintenance—fixing a leaky faucet, shoveling your driveway before you woke up, leaving a can of WD-40 on your workbench without comment. The phone call had been short. Phil had asked about the weather in New York. Spencer had said it was cold. Phil had said it was cold in Shelton too. Then they'd both run out of things to say, which was the Cusack way.

"You doing okay, Dad?"

"Oh, sure."

"The bar okay?"

"Same as always."

"Scott okay?"

"Scott's Scott."

And that had been it. Two men standing on opposite sides of a canyon, shouting pleasantries across the gap.

The plane landed in Columbus. Spencer rented a car—a gray Nissan that smelled like synthetic pine—and drove east on I-70, then south on 33, watching the landscape flatten and simplify. Strip malls gave way to farmland. Billboards for personal injury lawyers gave way to billboards for churches. The sky opened up in that particular Ohio way, enormous and indifferent, the kind of sky that made you feel simultaneously free and trapped.

He passed the Shelton town limit sign at 5:47 PM. The sign read: WELCOME TO SHELTON — PROUD HOME OF THE FIGHTING BADGERS. Someone had spray-painted "and nothing else" underneath it, which was both vandalism and, Spencer had to admit, pretty solid commentary.

Shelton looked the same. This was both comforting and depressing in equal measure. Main Street still had the same row of storefronts, half of them occupied, half of them not, like a mouth missing teeth. The Shelton Diner was still there, with its neon sign that had been missing the "D" for as long as Spencer could remember, so it just read "INNER," which had always struck him as accidentally philosophical. The hardware store was still there. The barbershop was still there. The pharmacy was still there.

Spencer drove past all of it and went straight to Riverside General, which was less a hospital and more a large building with medical ambitions. It had forty beds, one MRI machine that was frequently broken, and a parking lot that was always full because people in Shelton had a lot of things wrong with them and nowhere else to go.

He found the ICU on the second floor. Scott was in the hallway, sitting in a plastic chair with his arms crossed, looking like a man who had been carved from the same wood as the chair and had about the same emotional range. Scott was thirty-seven, built like their father—wide shoulders, thick forearms, the kind of body that came from lifting kegs and never going to a gym. His hair was shorter than Spencer remembered, and there were lines around his eyes that hadn't been there nine years ago.

"Hey," Spencer said.

Scott looked up. His expression was the one he'd been using on Spencer since they were kids: a mixture of recognition and mild exhaustion, like Spencer was a weather pattern he'd learned to endure.

"Hey."

"How is he?"

"Same. They're saying it's ischemic. Right side. They gave him the clot-buster thing, but it's wait and see."

Spencer sat down in the chair next to Scott. The plastic was warm from someone else's recent occupation. "Can I see him?"

"Visiting hours are over. They let family in for fifteen minutes every two hours. Next window is at eight."

"Okay."

They sat in silence. The hallway smelled like industrial cleaner and something Spencer couldn't identify but associated with every hospital he'd ever been in—a smell that was less a smell and more a feeling, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent lighting.

"You need anything?" Spencer asked.

"No."

"Have you eaten?"

"I'm fine."

"Scott—"

"I said I'm fine."

More silence. A nurse walked past, her shoes squeaking on the linoleum in a rhythm that sounded almost musical if you were desperate enough for distraction.

"Thanks for calling me," Spencer said.

Scott turned to look at him. The look lasted about three seconds, which was long enough to communicate several complete thoughts, none of them warm. "He's your dad too."

"I know."

"Do you?"

Spencer didn't answer that. He didn't have a good answer. He had a podcast with 1.4 million subscribers and a network deal and an apartment in Williamsburg and a fourteen-dollar breakfast sandwich he hadn't finished, and none of that was a good answer to the question of whether he knew that Phil Cusack was his father.

At eight o'clock, they went in together. Phil was in bed four, surrounded by machines that beeped and hummed with mechanical indifference. He looked smaller than Spencer remembered. Phil Cusack had always been a big man—not tall, but solid, the kind of man who took up space not through size but through presence. Now he looked diminished, like someone had let the air out of him. His eyes were closed. A tube ran into his nose. His hands lay flat on the blanket, and Spencer noticed, with a pain that surprised him, that his father's fingernails were still stained with the particular grime that came from a lifetime of maintaining a building that was older than he was.

Spencer stood at the foot of the bed and didn't say anything. Scott stood at the side, one hand on the bed rail, and didn't say anything either.

This, Spencer thought, was the Cusack family in its purest form: three men in a room, none of them talking, all of them feeling things they would never admit to feeling.

After fifteen minutes, a nurse came and told them time was up. They went back to the hallway. Scott picked up a jacket from the chair.

"I'm going to check on the bar. Lyle's been covering but he can't close by himself."

"Okay. Should I—"

"There's a motel on Route 7. The Lamplighter. It's not great but it's close."

"I could come to the bar. Help out."

Scott looked at him the way you'd look at someone who'd offered to perform surgery without a medical degree. "Get some sleep. I'll text you the morning visiting schedule."

And then he was gone, and Spencer was standing alone in a hospital hallway in a town he'd spent nine years turning into material, and the material was looking at him from a hospital bed with its eyes closed, and the punchline was nowhere to be found.