Текст книги "The Porcupine of Truth"
Автор книги: Bill Konigsberg
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Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PART I: Not New York
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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PART II: West of Not New York
17
18
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20
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24
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PART III: Yet Farther West of Not New York, i.e., Civilization
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PART IV: Back to Not New York
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41
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
THE BILLINGS ZOO has no animals.
Fewer than twenty-four hours ago, I was standing in Gray’s Papaya on Seventy-Second Street and Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, watching passersby ignore someone who was having what appeared to be an epileptic seizure while eating a chili dog. Taxicabs whirred by, mere mustard stains on the frankfurter that is the Upper West Side. Hordes of humans hustling in every direction, screaming, shouting, howling.
Now, I am in a place so quiet that I can still hear the noises of Manhattan in the back of my skull, like they are working their way out, slowly. And I am at a zoo where I may actually be the wildest life.
I’m here because after we landed and got our rental car for the summer, my mother suggested she take me for “a treat.” We cruised past multiple Arby’s and shops that sell discount mattresses and a Wonder Bread thrift store, whatever that is. She dropped me here, at the zoo, and told me she’d pick me up in a couple hours, after she got us settled in at my dad’s house. She said that the zoo might be a place to “locate and center myself” before seeing him for the first time in fourteen years.
My mom, a therapist slash school counselor, “hears” that I feel like she’s ripped me out of my normal summer, but “what she wants to say to me” is that I need to stop moping. And what better place to drop off a mopey seventeen-year-old boy in a strange new city than at the zoo? Had she just asked me where I wanted to go, I would have been like, I don’t know, a coffee shop. A movie theater. Any place a guy in his summer before senior year might want to hang. But whatever. My mom is down with the kids and how they all just want to stare at monkeys all day.
I do, in fact, feel a little ripped out of my normal summer – such as it is. But it’s possible that I’m milking it a bit. I mean, I was going to be working at a Pinkberry on the Upper West Side, which is the best frozen yogurt place in the city, tied with every other frozen yogurt place in the city, as they are all exactly the same. I won’t actually miss that. So “ripped” may be a little strong.
The zoo is apparently called ZooMontana, as it is the greatest of all the Montana zoos. At the gate, I buy a ticket from an old, tired-looking bald man and walk in. I wind through the trees along roped-off gravel trails. There are some nice trees. But what becomes painfully apparent is that there are basically no animals.
Perhaps because there are no animals, there are also no people at the zoo. Well, a few people. The bald ticket taker. And I come across a wedding procession at one point, with an overly chipper, pregnant bride in an off-white gown, and a goateed dude in a polyester suit by her side, his greasy mullet glistening in the sun.
Matrimony at a zoo with no animals. Wedding bliss fail.
I finally do find one lonely, depressed Siberian tiger. Here he is in the Siberia of America, lazing on the ground, staring into space, a look of what that guy Kierkegaard would call existential despair in his eyes. (Thanks, philosophy class!) I can barely blame him. I am that tiger. Relocated against my will for the summer to the northern tundra of my country, with nothing to do, nothing to look at, nothing but nothing.
So after I decide that sitting and staring at a depressed tiger isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I walk back toward the entrance to the gift shop (plastic eagle sculptures and red-tailed squirrel magnets) to fritter away my final ninety-five minutes here (but who’s counting).
A ridiculously beautiful girl is organizing the greeting card display. In terms of attractiveness, she is in the 99.9th percentile of zoo employees. Her skin is black, almost purple black, and her jeans are dark blue and super tight. Her voluminous hair covers her ears almost entirely. She has sinewy arm muscles like the gymnastics girls back at my high school in the Bronx, and she wears a turquoise tank top that shows off her curves just right. Her face is wow. Soft, clear skin, uberhigh cheekbones that seem to pull her cheeks upward like a slingshot.
I can’t take my eyes off her. I do not believe in God, but in this instance, I wonder if there’s some deity to thank for the miracle of a dazzling girl in an otherwise deserted zoo. And I decide it’s very important to get a closer look at the greeting cards.
As I get within about five feet of her, she turns slightly toward me. I instinctively lower my head and turn away, as if I’m now perusing the almost empty shelf of stuffed animals, which consists of two pink frogs. I want so much to be the kind of guy who knows what to say in this situation. Unfortunately, I’m about 3,000 percent better in my brain than out of it. I’ve tried it before, verbalizing my thoughts to other people. It rarely works well.
She faces me completely now.
“Under what circumstance would you buy a greeting card in which a bear is dancing through a field of sunflowers?” she asks.
She’s taken a half step toward me, and I am now close enough to smell a light trace of her sweat. I try to pretend this has no effect on me. She shows me the card. On it, a cartoon bear pirouettes through a pretty field. Somehow, I manage to say actual words.
“Are you trying to figure out what section to put it in?” I ask.
Her eyebrows are arched like boomerangs in a way that suggests mischief. “Yep.”
“Is there a sympathy section?”
She raises her left eyebrow even higher. “Why?”
“I would put it there. Maybe someone whose bear just got shot might get some comfort from imagining the bear dancing through a field of flowers.”
She purses her lips and nods. “I guess I’ll have to make a sympathy section.”
“Glad I could help,” I say, unable to take my eyes off her. And the crazy thing is, she’s still looking at me too. Is Billings like a magical parallel universe where I am a guy to whom hot girls voluntarily speak? She is waiting for me to say something, and I worry that I might say all the wrong things, and then I think, Screw it, why worry about saying the wrong thing when you surely will anyway? Just do it. So I do.
“So what is there to see here?” I ask.
She puts the card back. In the birthday section, I notice. “What do you want to see?”
I gulp. “Well, animals, for starters. No offense, but this is not quite the Bronx Zoo.”
She looks me over. Up, down, up. “Not from around here,” she says. “Lucky.”
I smile, relieved she isn’t a huge Billings fan. “Just off the plane like two hours ago.”
“And you came to the zoo …”
“My mom …” I say, like it’s obvious what comes next. Then I realize that’s not a sentence that works without finishing the thought. “I’m one of those few, fortunate, proud New Yorkers who gets to spend the summer in Billings.”
“Well, today’s your lucky day. Want a tour?”
“You do tours?”
Her smile starts with her eyes. They open a bit wider, and then her face animates, as if her eyes are part of a pulley system that controls her upper lips, which rise, allowing me to see her perfect, glistening teeth. “Do I do tours? Five bucks will get you the best darn tootin’-est zoo tour you ever done dreamed of,” she says in a cowboy accent.
I grab my wallet, pull out a five, and hand it to her. “Did you just say ‘tootin’-est’?”
She slowly nods. “I sher did,” she says, her voice authoritative. She stuffs the five in her pocket and leads me outside. The sun is out and it’s warm, like bread just out of the oven at a bakery, and the trees are every shade of green possible. In my first walk, I hadn’t actually looked at a lot of the nature stuff. Just like how I was still hearing the noises of New York City, I think the sights were still inside my eyes too. Where I live, life is mostly concrete and brick. We have a park – two, actually, near our apartment – but even when you’re so deep in one of those parks that you can’t see out, it’s hard to forget that the world is skyscrapers and boutiques, bodegas and subway tracks. In a way, those things feel more real to me than this scenery.
We take a footbridge over a creek, and while we walk, she tells me the zoo’s history. Apparently it was built in 1922 as a refuge for wildlife dislocated by the 1921 caldera eruption in Washington State. Volunteers from all over the West hauled as many animals as they could to Billings.
“Wow,” I say. I’ve heard about calderas, which are like extreme volcanos, but I hadn’t realized there had actually been one in the U.S.
“If it seems empty, you have to understand,” she says. “The zoo has a policy of not taking in any other animals. So these are all the descendants of those first arrivals all those years ago. It keeps the place pure.”
At the red-tailed squirrel habitat, she explains that the squirrels used to live in the redwood forests of California. “They’re amazing creatures. Did you know they only mate during a full moon?”
“Really?”
“That’s right,” she says.
We pass a sign that reads WOLF WOODS, and she puts her hands on the mesh enclosure.
“There are four wolves left. There were many more at one time, but one of the wolves was a psychopath.”
I laugh, figuring she is making a joke. She doesn’t laugh back. I catch sight of one of the wolves. He’s white with steely eyes, and he’s staring at me. I feel a shiver run through my veins.
“A psychopath?”
“Well, what would you call it? Wolves were showing up dead. Disemboweled. They couldn’t figure out who had done it, so they brought in a wolf detective. She got right to solving the case. We only lost three more after that, and once she found the killer, they hung him.”
I look out at the area. A wolf detective! I’ve never heard of that. And then I look back at her. “Wait. They hung a wolf?”
She sucks her lips in, rolls her eyes up, and stares at the sky. “Too much?”
“You made that all up, didn’t you?” I ask.
She tilts her head. “I may have.”
“Cool,” I say.
“Is it?”
I think, Yeah. It’s the kind of thing that the improv comedy group at my high school does. I joined this year, because of a girl, of course, and that didn’t work out, of course. But I really like improv. I like coming up with stuff no one’s ever come up with before. “It’s totally cool,” I say.
It feels like she is exploring my face with her eyes. “Interesting,” she says.
I scratch my ear. “Do they know you make stuff up on your tours?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you even work here?”
“I do not.”
I laugh. “Wow.”
“You want your money back?” She takes the crumpled five out of her pocket.
I wave her off. “Nah. It was totally worth it. More than worth it. Why do you do that?”
She shrugs and stuffs the money back into her pocket. “Why does anyone do anything? Why do red-tailed squirrels only mate during a full moon?”
“They don’t, do they?”
She shrugs again. “Beats the shit out of me.”
I grin. “I like that. That’s like something I would do.”
“Well, you know,” she says, demurely kicking up her back foot in a way that doesn’t match her personality at all. I can tell it’s meant to be funny, and it is.
“I’m Carson Smith,” I say.
“Aisha,” she says back. “Aisha Stinson.”
“You made all that shit up? The wolf detective?”
“Most definitely. Especially the part about the wolf detective.”
We start walking again. “So is that a detective who deals with wolf crimes, or a wolf who is a detective? And if it’s the latter, is it exclusively focused on wolf crimes?”
Aisha seems to ponder this. “It can be all of the above.”
AISHA KEEPS THE tour going, making up stories about all the different animals, which is challenging because we see almost none. I join in and tell her that the red panda (which we also do not see) is the actual daughter of the panda used as the model for the Panda Express logo. She tells me that the bighorn sheep got their name because they are the most well-hung of all the sheep, and I wonder how to get from a conversation about large sheep dicks to asking her if she wants to hang out sometime. Like not at the zoo, maybe.
When we reach the Siberian tiger’s cage (he is in therapy and on two antidepressants, she explains), I ask her why such a beautiful tiger is all alone.
“His father kicked him out of the house for being gay,” she says. “He did it in the name of the Jesus. The Jesus said, ‘You straighten out, mister, and go mack on the lady tigers, or you’ll be sleeping at the zoo.’ ”
“Ah yes. The Jesus,” I say. “He’s kind of a judgmental prick, isn’t he?”
She laughs. “That’s the one. Which is funny, ’cause those stories in that book his dad wrote make him sound maybe a little crazy at times, but not judgmental at all.”
I haven’t actually read the Bible, so I can’t say much about it. “Yeah, I always thought he was kind of a hippie guy, what with the Jesus sandals and the scraggly Jesus beard and the ‘love your neighbors’ thing.”
“ ’Round these parts,” Aisha says in that bad cowboy accent, “Jesus kills them hippies.”
I haven’t had a conversation this long with another person in about forever. My mom and I, for instance, just took a five-hour plane ride, and we said maybe twenty words to each other. I love her and all, but she just has weird … ways of showing love and support, maybe. Which is why I’ve been dropped off at a zoo, by myself. Things don’t surprise me anymore. I just go with it, because she pretty much lets me do whatever the hell I want.
So anyway, Mom and I don’t do a lot of talking. Most of my conversations happen in my own mind at school too. I’m not a freak or anything, but I don’t have a lot of friends with whom I can let my brain really hang out, pardon the disgusting image. Here at ZooMontana with Aisha, my brain is out, and so is hers, and I don’t want it to end.
So then, of course, we both go quiet and walk in silence, while I try frantically to find something to keep it all going.
“There are, like, no animals in this zoo,” I finally say.
“I know. Ain’t it the worst?”
“We should free them. Free all the animals.”
“Ha. Just to be real for a moment, we should definitely not do that. That’s about the worst possible idea, because all the animals would wind up dead.”
“Huh. Is that more misinformation?”
“No. That there is real information. Don’t ever free animals from the zoo. It would get real, fast.”
At the bald eagle habitat, I explain that I don’t think it is really fair for ZooMontana to claim it “has” birds. I mean, unless it’s an enclosed dome – which it does not appear to be – it can’t very well claim ownership of anything that happens to fly above it. “ZooMontana is a home to birds in much the same way that the backyard of my dad’s house is a bird sanctuary.”
She grins. “I’m giving you my number,” she says. “We need to do this again.”
Score. “Well, maybe not this exactly.”
“No. Exactly this,” she says.
I feel like I’ve won the lottery. How do you just happen across an awesome girl on your first day in Billings? What are the odds? Is everyone here like Aisha? I’ve only seen a handful of people so far, but I doubt it. “I wanna meet your friends,” I say, and then I feel a little embarrassed that I’ve been too forward.
“Me too,” she says, rolling her eyes.
We walk on. I wonder if that’s true. If, somehow, Aisha is friendless. It makes sense, in a way. I worry sometimes that our world actually values a lack of intelligence. Like we are considered normal if we spend our time thinking about what one of the Kardashians wears to a party, and we are considered strange if we wonder whether a bee’s parents grieve if said bee dives into the Central Park Reservoir and never makes it back to the hive. One of these lines of thought makes me want to carve my eyes out, and I can assure you it has nothing to do with bees.
“So can you be trusted?” Aisha asks me out of the blue as we pass through a particularly densely wooded area.
“Why do I need to be trusted?” I say, and her shoulders rise slightly toward her ears. “I mean, yeah. Sure.”
She looks me over, then clasps my hand and leads me off the path to the right. Her grip is strong, but her fingers are slightly clammy and cold. She walks me through a path of trees, and then, as she passes a particularly thick elm, she turns toward it and we stop. A red knapsack leans against a rolled-up blue sleeping bag at the foot of the tree. Both are hidden from view unless you venture down this particular row of trees.
I look at Aisha and she smiles and bites her lower lip. “I sometimes sleep here,” she says.
“What?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why?”
She looks into my eyes, and I look back, and in the slight crease of her forehead I see pain. Fear. It shocks me, and she sees me see it, and then a veil goes up. The whites of her eyes go cold.
“Never mind,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget I said it. Please.”
“Tell me,” I say, because now I’m worried. But she is already walking back toward the path. I’m thinking, If I told her about my dad and why I’m here, would she tell me her thing?
“My dad,” I say, and she turns around and waits for me to say something else.
My head spins. I am not so good at serious talks.
“Is an alien,” I say.
The joke floats up and around us like a bad smell. It’s strange. It’s not funny. And I can’t take it back.
“Sorry, I’m weird. Tell me why you sleep here,” I say.
She pauses, and for a moment I think perhaps my weirdness was enough to get her to talk. Then she says, “Another time. Long story.”
“I like long stories,” I say.
“Did I tell you about the mainland sika deer?” she asks.
I want to press, but I am afraid if I do, I’ll freak her out. “Tell me,” I say as we start walking, and she proceeds to explain how these particular deer are known for never obeying the DEER CROSSING signs and just crossing roads wherever the hell they want to.
“Tragic,” I say. “So can I have your number?”
She stops walking and tilts her head to the side. She thinks about this for longer than I’m comfortable.
“Give me yours,” she finally says. “I’ll call you.”
Defeated, deflated, and aware that I will never hear from her again, I recite my number and she seemingly enters it into her phone. Probably just faking it. And it especially sucks because in an hour I’ve fallen a little in love with Aisha Stinson, mysterious zoo sleeper. I need to hear more of her weird thoughts. I have to make her laugh.
We keep walking until we have completed the circle. When I see the gift shop, my heart sinks. What started so magically has ended so poorly, and I’m not sure why.
We stand in front of a large, empty field. She turns to face me and sticks her arms out like a legitimate tour guide might. “And this, my friend, is the end of our tour. Behold, the” – and she turns around to glance at a sign behind her – “Optimist Club’s Children’s Play Area.”
I laugh, though my heart is not in it anymore. “Yeah, the Optimist Club,” I say. “They probably see the zoo as half-full.”
Her smile gives me just the faintest bit of hope that I might hear from her. Just maybe. But probably not.
ON THE DRIVE back to my dad’s place, my mom tells me that he doesn’t look well, that the house is a bit of a mess, and that she could use my help cleaning all of it up. I nod and nod, mostly still thinking about Aisha.
She pulls off a main road and up a steep gravel driveway, and she drops me off once again. This time it’s because she needs to get groceries.
“The back door is open,” she says. “Your dad mostly sticks to his room, so don’t be surprised if he doesn’t come out to greet you. It’s not – personal.”
I shrug and undo my seat belt. “Okay.”
“He means well.”
“Fine.”
“Also, don’t be shocked if the place looks a bit underappreciated.”
“Does that mean it’s more than a bit of a mess?”
She shakes her head for a full five seconds and sucks in her cheeks. “It means your father …” she says. She runs her hand through her auburn hair. “My suggestion is to get yourself settled and locate yourself a bit. Pay him a visit in his room.”
My mom is all about self-locating. It’s one of the infuriating things she always says. “Sure,” I say, totally unsure.
I get out of the car, and she pulls away. I pause at the back door and take a look around. I know we are only three minutes or so from what passes as downtown, but it feels rural here. The house has a big backyard full of weeds and a separate garage, outside of which sits an old blue pickup truck. Looming huge behind the garage is a massive rock formation that my mom called the Rim. I walk around to the front yard. The house is dark green, a single story, dwarfed by the yellow two-story house next door and a huge pine tree that pretty much hides the house from the street. A rusty rocking chair sits alone on a dilapidated front porch covered in pine needles.
I walk around back and go in the back door, which opens into a mudroom. There are stairs down to the basement, or, if you turn left, you enter a white-walled kitchen, which looks like something you’d see on Nick at Nite. Yellow window curtains with green stalks of corn on them. A squat white refrigerator with a metal latch that opens it and a yellow Frigidaire logo front and center. Faded blue Formica countertops.
I know I’ve been here before, back when I was three and Grandma lived here. But I don’t remember it at all. My dad moved in to his family’s home when my grandma Phyllis got sick seven years ago. After she died, he stayed, and he’s been here ever since. The place does look a bit “underappreciated,” to use my mom’s word.
I decide to check out the basement. When Mom told me I’d have the basement here to myself, I warmed up to the idea of having an entire floor of a house just for me. It was actually one of the only things I was looking forward to.
That’s before I walk down the rickety stairs and sniff. The air is dank. Like bitter seaweed. Like how I imagine a dry lake would smell. The walls are concrete, and the room feels ten degrees colder than it was upstairs. My mother has set up an air mattress for me on the carpeted floor. In the far corner of the room, next to the door to a bathroom with a little shower, a mess of storage boxes are piled high. They look like they’ve been there since the dawn of time. I walk over to a dark corner and find a billiard table, the kind with mesh pockets to catch the balls. The felt on the table is peeling off in places. Under it is a plastic garbage bag. I peer in, and it’s filled with empty whiskey bottles. It is nice to have my own space, but it’s … I don’t know. Like a remote bunker where people store their afterthoughts.
When I can’t stall anymore, I head upstairs and check out the rest of the house. The living room has a charcoal-colored, scratchy flannel couch and love seat, naked white walls, and, where a television might be, a big old radio. Way to update this place, Dad. I check out the green-carpeted guest room, where my mother’s unpacked suitcase sits empty on the made bed. And then I see the closed door across the hall, and I know it’s my dad’s room.
I stare at the door until it looks and feels a million miles away. Then I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and take the short, long walk down the hall.
I knock. After a few moments, I hear him lumbering slowly toward me.
My dad opens the door, and my impression when I see his face for the first time in fourteen years is that he looks like me if I were put through a meat grinder. His face is raw yet colorless. His hair is ratty. He’s bloated yet skinny. I have to look away, because seeing my dad look so sick is way more intense than I even expected it to be, and I feel bile rise into my throat.
“Carson,” he says, his voice not exactly as I remember it from our annual birthday phone conversations. Softer yet rustier. “Death warmed over. I know.”
He opens his arms and I stand there, frozen. He looks so pathetic, a scrawny death triangle with his arms out to the side and slightly pointed down. A Christmas tree the following April. Finally, I stutter-step over to him and we do a side hug. My chin juts into his bony shoulder. He smells like a mixture of baby powder and pee.
“Good to see you,” I say to his shoulder blade.
“You look wonderful,” he says, though he can’t see me either. “Your mom did a good job with you.”
How do you know? I want to ask. Can you somehow tell just by side-hugging me?
He lets me go and motions me into his room. His bed is a beaten-up gray pullout couch, and it faces a small, old, chubby television with two silver antennae in the shape of a V on top of it. There are no bedside tables, nothing else in the room, except a few old photos on the far wall and, in one dark corner, a maroon chair with holes in the fabric. It feels like the room itself needs antidepressants. He’s lived here alone for seven years, and this is where he sleeps? Not even in a real bed?
I ease into the maroon chair as he sits on the corner of his bed, facing me. The chair farts. “Wow, nice place you have here,” I say.
He laughs. “Bullshit. It’s awful, I know. Needs a woman’s touch.”
“No,” I say, “seriously. You should rent it out as a bed and breakfast.”
He laughs again, and I crack a smile. My face heats up. It’s funny how you can hate someone and wish them dead, and at the same time you just want to curl up in their lap like a baby. Is that deranged? I mean, I’m seventeen. That’s a little deranged, probably.
“I may do that. You have my sense of humor,” Dad says.
“Well, take it back,” I answer. “No one likes it.”
We laugh together for the first time, and the room lightens up a little, which is necessary because it was about to commit suicide. But then there is no follow-up joke. We sit across from each other and stare.
What do you say to your dad whom you haven’t seen in fourteen years? On the phone, our typical conversation went like this:
“Happy birthday, Carson.”
“Thanks.”
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“How’s school?”
“Fine.”
“Okay then. We’ll talk again soon, okay?”
“Okay.”
I’d get off the phone, and Mom would say to me, “You know, it’s okay to be angry with your father,” and I’d say, “Sure.” And she’d say, “What I want you to hear me say is that it’s okay to own those feelings.” And I’d say back, “Great idea.”
I don’t know if I was angry at my dad so much as done with him. When someone disappears from your life when you’re three, you don’t really appreciate his yearly reappearances.
And now he’d reappeared, only this time in the flesh. And maybe Mom would like me to own certain feelings, and locate them like we’re playing a game of feelings hide-and-seek. But frankly, I’m not that sure I want to play. Or maybe I do. I don’t even know anymore.
“So,” he says.
“So,” I say back. “What’s going on?”
“Well, I’m dying. So that’s something,” he says, and even though we do probably share the same sense of humor, him just blurting this out makes me feel like I’m choking. I lean back on the raggedy recliner for support.
“Sorry,” he says, seeing that his words have had an impact on me. “Why am I such an asshole?”
I shake my head. Part of me wants to say, You’re not an asshole, but I can’t say those – or any – words. I count to twenty-five, and then to eighty-four by sevens. It brings me back. One of the good things about having a mom who doesn’t do a lot of mom-ing is that you learn to take care of yourself.
“So Billings is a city,” I say to change the subject.
“Yes,” he says. “It’s a city in Montana.”
“You live here. I used to live here.”
He coughs into his hands. “Yes, I do. You did.”
Why did you stay here? I want to say. This place has such bad family memories for him. His dad disappeared when he was my age; his mom had cancer for seven years and then died. And even though we left because he wouldn’t stop drinking, I guess I still don’t understand why he couldn’t stop drinking and leave himself behind too. Come with us to New York and start a new life.
“Mom said you stopped working.”
“Yup.”
“I don’t even know what you did for work.”
“I was a bartender.”
“Terrific,” I say. He shrugs, and I can tell there’s a part of him that is also looking at this situation and realizing how insane it all is. That he is just as horrified as I am that he allowed himself to become a drunk and then went to work as a bartender. When I was a baby, he was a carpenter. What happened to that? I wonder.
“People do different things,” he says, his voice defensive. “Not everyone’s a school psychologist. Your mom did well for herself.”
I cross my legs, and then I uncross them, as if there’s some weird inborn part of me that wants to make sure my dad knows I’m manly. His eyes keep wandering around the room. There’s not much to look at. A blue-green vase on the floor to the left of his bed, some sort of food basket next to his feet, the old photos on the wall. And yet he doesn’t spend much time looking at me. It’s like he can’t.
“What’s with the food basket?” I ask, pointing.
“The warden,” he says.
“Huh?”
“Pastor John Logan,” he says. “Lives next door. My mom’s – your grandma’s – best friend. Your granddad’s too, I guess. Hasn’t left me alone for half a second since your grandma died. Doesn’t take hints too well. As long as I’ve lived here, he brings me my mail, like I can’t do it myself. And now that I’m sick, he keeps bringin’ me tuna fish. I fuckin’ hate tuna fish. Wish he’d mind his own business and let me die in peace.”
I wince.
He smiles a bit and picks at his scalp with his thumb and forefinger. “Sorry. Gotta work on my tact. Not used to visitors, I guess. I just … The guy’s a relic. My dad – your granddad – he was a piece of shit. I don’t need the pastor man coming around here feeling sorry for me. My father left over thirty years ago. I’m over it. Piece of shit. Gone. Good riddance.”
We have more awkward silence.
“I’m not sure what I’ll do here this summer,” I finally say. “I mean, I’m here to help – I mean, visit, obviously.”
“Well, sure,” he says. “But you have to do other things. Maybe you could run a lemonade stand? Five cents a glass?”
