MOM GOT home late that night, after working a double in the diner. She found me in the kitchen, standing in the same spot I’d been in when my daddy had walked out the door. Things were different now.
“Ox?” she asked. “What’s going on?” She looked very tired.
“Hey, Mom,” I said.
“Why are you crying?”
“I’m not.” And I wasn’t, because I was a man now.
She touched my face. Her hands smelled like salt and french fries and coffee. Her thumbs brushed against my wet cheeks. “What happened?”
I looked down at her, because she’d always been small and at some point in the last year or so, I’d grown right past her. I wished I could remember the day it happened. It seemed monumental. “I’ll take care of you,” I promised her. “You don’t ever need to worry.”
Her eyes softened. I could see the lines around her eyes. The tired set of her jaw. “You always do. But that’s—” She stopped. Took a breath. “He left?” she asked, and she sounded so small.
“I think so.” I twirled her hair against my finger. Dark, like my own. Like my daddy’s. We were all so dark.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“I’m a man now,” I told her. That’s all she needed to hear.
She laughed until she cracked right down the middle.
HE DIDN’T take the money when he left. Not all of it. Not that there was much there to begin with.
He didn’t take any pictures either. Just some clothes. His razor. His truck. Some of his tools.
If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he never was at all.
I CALLED his phone four days later. It was the middle of the night.
It rang a couple of times before a message picked up saying the phone was no longer in service.
I had to apologize to Mom the next morning. I’d held the handset so hard that it had cracked. She said it was okay, and we didn’t talk about it ever again.
I WAS six when my daddy bought me my own set of tools. Not kid’s stuff. No bright colors and plastic. All cold and metal and real.
He said, “Keep them clean. And god help you if I find them laying outside. They’ll rust and I’ll tan your hide. That ain’t what this shit is for. You got that?”
I touched them reverently because they were a gift. “Okay,” I said, unable to find the words to say just how full my heart felt.
I STOOD in their (her) room one morning a couple of weeks after he left. Mom was at the diner again, picking up another shift. Her ankles would be hurting by the time she got home.
Sunlight fell through a window on the far wall. Little bits of dust caught the light.
It smelled like him in the room. Like her. Like both of them. A thing together. It would be a long time before it stopped. But it would. Eventually.
I slid open the closet door. One side was mostly empty. Things were left, though. Little pieces of a life no longer lived.
Like his work shirt. Four of them, hanging in the back. Gordo’s in cursive.
Curtis, they all said. Curtis, Curtis, Curtis.
I touched each one of them with the tips of my fingers.
I took the last one down from the hanger. Slid it over my shoulders. It was heavy and smelled like man and sweat and work. I said, “Okay, Ox. You can do this.”
So I started to button up the work shirt. My fingers stumbled over them, too big and blunt. Clumsy and foolish, I was. All hands and arms and legs, graceless and dull. I was too big for myself.
The last button finally went through and I closed my eyes. I took a breath. I remembered how Mom had looked this morning. The purple lines under her eyes. The slump of her shoulders. She’d said, “Be good today, Ox. Try to stay out of trouble,” as if trouble was the only thing I knew. As if I was in it constantly.
I opened my eyes. Looked in the mirror that hung on the closet door.
The shirt was too large. Or I was too small. I don’t know which. I looked like a kid playing dress-up. Like I was pretending.
I scowled at my reflection. Lowered my voice and said, “I’m a man.”
I didn’t believe me.
“I’m a man.”
I winced.
“I’m a man.”
Eventually, I took off my father’s work shirt and hung it back up in the closet. I shut the doors behind me, the dust motes still floating in the fading sun.
catalytic converter/dreaming while awake
“GORDO’S.”
“Hey, Gordo.”
A growl. “Yeah? Who’s this?” Like he didn’t know.
“Ox.”
“Oxnard Matheson! I was just thinking about you.”
“Really?”
“No. What the fuck do you want?”
I grinned because I knew. The smile felt strange on my face. “It’s good to hear you too.”
“Yeah, yeah. Haven’t seen you, kiddo.” He was pissed at my absence.
“I know. I had to….” I didn’t know what I had to do.
“How long has it been since the sperm donor fucked off?”
“A couple of months, I guess.” Fifty-seven days. Ten hours. Forty-two minutes.
“Fuck him. You know that, right?”
I did, but he was still my daddy. So maybe I didn’t. “Sure,” I said.
“Your ma doing okay?”
“Yeah.” No. I didn’t think she was.
“Ox.”
“No. I don’t know.”
He inhaled deeply and sighed.
“Smoke break?” I asked him, and it hurt, because that was familiar. I could almost smell the smoke. It burned my lungs. I could see him if I thought about it enough, sitting out behind the shop. Smoking and scowling. Long legs stretched out, ankles crossed. Oil under his fingernails. Those bright and colorful tattoos covering his arms. Ravens and flowers and shapes meant to have meaning that I could never figure out.
“Yeah. Death sticks, man.”
“You could quit.”
“I don’t quit anything, Ox.”
“Old dogs learn new tricks.”
He snorted. “I’m twenty-four.”
“Old.”
“Ox.” He knew.
So I told him. “We’re not doing okay.”
“Bank?” he asked.
“She doesn’t think I see them. The letters.”
“How far behind?”
“I don’t know.” I was embarrassed. I shouldn’t have called. “I gotta go.”
“Ox,” he snapped. Crisp and clear. “How far?”
“Seven months.”
“That fucking bastard,” he said. He was angry.
“He didn’t—”
“Don’t, Ox. Just… don’t.”
“I was thinking.”
“Oh boy.”
“Could I…?” My tongue felt heavy.
“Spit it out.”
“Could I have a job?” I said in a rush. “It’s just we need the money and I can’t let her lose the house. It’s all we have left. I’d do good, Gordo. I would do good work and I’d work for you forever. It was going to happen anyway and can we just do it now? Can we just do it now? I’m sorry. I just need to do it now because I have to be the man now.” My throat hurt. I wished I had something to drink, but I couldn’t get my legs to move.